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This week at LWN: Large pages, large blocks, and large problems

Most of the core virtual memory subsystem developers met for a mini-summit just before the 2007 Kernel Summit in Cambridge. They came away feeling that they had resolved a number of VM scalability problems. Subsequent discussions have made it clear that, perhaps, this conclusion was a bit premature. They may well have resolved things, but it is not clear that everybody came to the same resolution.

System Emulation with QEMU on Linux

Today, googling the word virtualization results in around 22 million hits. In this article, learn about QEMU, an interesting virtualization applications not headlining the news today. QEMU is an open source emulator for complete PC systems you can use on a number of settings. Explore QEMU and its architecture and how to emulate a guest operating system on a Linux host.

Sun packs out Solaris developer support

Users running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system are getting something a little extra thrown into their contracts: developer support. Sun is wrapping extended support for its Solaris Express Developer Edition, previously only available to application developers, into existing and new Solaris customers' contracts without charging extra, the company said.

Looking for the next Net business

The Internet most of us experience is not the World of Ends suggested by the end-to-end system design concepts around which the Net was originally architected and built. Instead we have something that is faster-than-dialup, and faster-than-it-used-to-be; but is not The Net. Instead it is the part of the Net that's left in a pipe that's optimized for television, for one-way few-to-many "content delivery" and for locking users into client roles, while servers labor somewhere else.

MMC Flash Memory Card Support

Noting the approaching 2.6.24 merge window which will follow the upcoming release of the 2.6.23 kernel, MultiMedia Card (MMC) subsystem maintainer Pierre Ossman described what he plans to push upstream, "this release will probably be one of the biggest ones for the MMC layer so far. The major pieces are SDIO and SPI support, but there are several small nuggets as well." Regarding the new Secure Digital Input Output (SDIO) stack he noted, "gone are the days of having to rely on proprietary stacks for SDIO support in Linux. So no more spotty support for hosts and possible GPL problems. SDIO will now be a standard feature of Linux." He also described three working drivers already ported to the new stack.

NVIDIA SLI: Linux vs. Windows

  • Phoronix; By Michael Larabel (Posted by phoronix on Sep 27, 2007 5:09 AM EDT)
  • Groups: Linux; Story Type: News Story
It is going on two years since support for Scalable Link Interface (SLI) was introduced into NVIDIA's Linux binary display driver. This support had come a year after it was officially launched and supported by the Windows ForceWare display driver. As we had seen at the end of 2005 with two GeForce 6 graphics cards in SLI, its performance was very sluggish, and there were a number of problems to be found with Linux SLI. While we have routinely tested new NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux SLI internally, there hasn't been much to report on as the experience has been very foul. However, things have changed recently and with the recent NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver release using GeForce 8 hardware -- we finally have some modest numbers to report on in a Linux SLI configuration. Linux SLI is still far from perfect, but in this article we've used two GeForce 8600GT graphics cards in an SLI configuration under both Linux and Windows to compare the single and dual GPU performance under both operating systems.

Don’t read this

Hans ‘The Beez’ Bezemer, a fellow sysadmin and consultant from the Netherlands, came up with a great story. He asked himself why watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ on DVD has to burn additional CPU cycles for decrypting, when the topic and author of what he’s watching are all against wasting energy. And he discovered that the crypto chain of HD-DVD has already been broken!

Women in Technology: Hear Us Roar

O’Reilly is running an interesting series of articles written by a number of different women in tech, about how they got to where they are and their adventures along the way. It’s a good read with a lot of different experiences and viewpoints. http://www.oreillynet.com/womenintech/

The trouble with artwork and free software licenses

Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task. Creative Commons (CC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses each have their advantages, but they are mutually incompatible. The two groups are beginning to move toward simplifying the situation, but in the meantime there are several things you can do to make license compatibility easier.

Linux to Finally Kill Windows in Europe?

In the future, Linux might very well have a fighting chance on European soil, against Windows. Following Microsoft’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Brad Smith did not rush to anticipate a worry free outcome for the Redmond company over the pond. Although the dismissal of the company’s appeal by the Court of First Instance of Luxembourg, was a clear indication of the full support of both the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling against Microsoft, and of the €497 million financial penalty, Smith argued that additional third-party claims could follow.

Autodesk geography tool goes open source

Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another. If you're not a map nut, that's the challenge one might encounter switching, for example, from latitude and longitude to Universal Transverse Mercator--or from geocentric latitude to geodetic latitude, for that matter.

My Fabulous Geek Career

I consider myself to be a born geek. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to do cool geek things: woodworking, auto mechanics, gunsmithing, electronics—you name it; if it involved building things or taking them apart and putting them back together, that was my heart's desire. I drooled over Shopsmiths, Heathkits, and all the neat stuff in Radio Shack. The most fun in the world to me is understanding how things work and then changing or fixing them.

Can open source save the doctor-patient relationship?

Over at my health care blog, I’m asking whether open source is the cure for what ails health care IT. It’s not my question. It’s really the question of Bruce L. Wilder, a 66-year old doctor, lawyer, and music lover who says the real issue here is control of the doctor-patient relationship. Wilder’s article was sent me by Fred Trotter, a consultant on open source health care software who has contributed code to leading projects in the space. Wilder, writing in Advance for Health Information Executives, notes that current Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems can cost $44,000 to install, and $8,500/year to maintain, per doctor. But his argument for open source goes beyond cost.

Monolithic OS upgrades are so over

The days of the monolithic upgrade are over. Five years, $6bn later and what do the ingrates do? Ask for a downgrade to Windows XP. Even Newham Council, which over the past couple of years veered from Linux pilot poster child to Vista case study as one of Microsoft's five key public sector accounts in the UK, has now delayed the upgrade of 1,500 desktops by 12 months. The council is now in the bizarre situation of facing a deployment of 1,500 CP desktops next spring, which will be over a year since Vista's launch. These desktops will then be upgraded to Vista sometime at the end of 2008.

Computer Take Back Campaign places recycling responsibility on manufacturers

What would happen if manufacturers were responsible for the disposal of their used-up products? The Computer Take Back Campaign (CTBC), a coalition of environmental groups across the United States, hopes that the result would be both a national recycling network and the removal of hazardous materials like lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants from products so that companies would not have to worry about them later. The CTBC has been promoting this idea with limited success since 2002, but this year it finally seems on the brink of acceptance.

How worried should Microsoft be about open source?

Very worried. It may well be true, as Paula details today, that desktop Linux is going nowhere fast in the U.S. Microsoft’s willingness to let users back-off upgrades and stick with XP may have stopped the potential rot in its market share. But it is taking enormous effort for Microsoft to hold its server market share against Linux’ inroads in the enterprise. Another important point. The U.S. is not the world, and Microsoft sells more than just Windows.

Latest OS Version a Free Masterpiece?

  • Earthweb; By Sean Michael Kerner (Posted by Sander_Marechal on Sep 26, 2007 8:59 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Reviews
A free Unix-like OS need not be feared as something that isn't accessible or usable on a desktop. At least that's the hope with the latest release of PC-BSD version 1.4. The release includes a long list of fixes and improvements, with a focus on making the desktop BSD OS easier to set up and use. The official codename for the release is da Vinci, but that doesn't necessarily mean the release is a masterpiece.

Red Hat Does Well, But Why Does It Suddently Need Licensing?

It is already quite well established that Novell failed to stop Red Hat’s momentum after it had signed deal with Microsoft. The figures which Red Hat included in last night’s report left little room for doubt. They were very encouraging. It is still curious to find, however, that Red Hat’s desktop endeavors are facing a barrier which is due to Microsoft licensing (for codecs). This was mentioned about a month ago and it was once again mentioned in the press yesterday.

The inevitability of free software

Is software a product or a utility? Free software proponents say it's as critical to economic progress as fresh drinking water. It isn't hard to get Eben Moglen talking. We were eight minutes into our conversation before I got to ask my second question. But that really didn't matter, because Moglen was describing the future of software, and his perspective is fascinating.

Firefox addon makes web development easy

Taking some tentative steps into the world of web development, James Archibald discovers the sleek power and functionality of the Web Developer extension for Firefox. Although aimed at 'real' web developers, the extension proves to be handy for the novice too.

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