16 posts tagged “linux”
<stolen from PCWorld>
With Vista hacked Friday, a Linux laptop remained uncompromised at the CanSecWest PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.
Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.
On day two, Independent Security Evaluators' Charlie Miller took the Mac after hitting it with a still-undisclosed exploit that targeted the Safari Web browser. After about two minutes work, Thursday, Miller took home $10,000, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, in addition to his new laptop.
It took two days of work, but Shane Macaulay, finally cracked the Vista box on Friday, with a little help from his friends.
Macaulay, who was a co-winner of last year's hacking contest, needed a few hacking tricks courtesy of VMware researcher Alexander Sotirov to make his bug work. That's because Macaulay hadn't been expecting to attack the Service Pack 1 version of Vista, which comes with additional security measures. He also got a little help from co-worker Derek Callaway.
Under contest rules, Macaulay and Miller aren't allowed to divulge specific details about their bugs until they are patched, but Macaulay said the flaw that he exploited was a cross-platform bug that took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista's security.
"The flaw is in something else, but the inherent nature of Java allowed us to get around the protections that Microsoft had in place," he said in an interview shortly after he claimed his prize Friday. "This could affect Linux or Mac OS X."
Macaulay said he chose to work on Vista because he had done contract work for Microsoft in the past and was more familiar with its products.
Although several attendees tried to crack the Linux box, nobody could pull it off, said Terri Forslof, a manager of security response with TippingPoint. "I was surprised that it didn't go," she said.
Some of the show's 400 attendees had found bugs in the Linux operating system, she said, but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest.
Earlier, Miller said that he chose to hack the Mac because he thought it would be easiest target. Vista hacker Macaulay didn't dispute that assertion: "I think it might be," he said.
Read the entire article at Information Week:
...
AN ENDANGERED OS?
Applications will always need an operating system
to run, right? Not with BEA's WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, or
WLS-VE. It replaces the conventional OS with LiquidVM, a
microkernel-based Java virtual machine. In turn, the Java VM runs
directly on a VMware hypervisor, without the need for Windows or Linux.
"We realized the hypervisor had eaten into a lot of what an application
needs from an OS," says Guy Churchward, VP and product manager of
WebLogic products at BEA.
...
Not only will this architecture eliminate OS management costs, Vaughn
says, but he also expects to increase the number of virtual machines
per physical server because of the reduced overhead of a microkernel
vs. a full operating system. In addition, WLS-VE supports several of
VMware's most popular features, including VMotion, which lets managers
move applications from one physical machine to another without
disruption.
...
In 2006, IDC predicted that factory installations of preconfigured
operating systems on servers would decline as customers instead chose
server hardware with a hypervisor preinstalled.
VMware's latest release aims to make that prediction a reality. Last month, it introduced ESX Server 3i, a 32-Mbyte hypervisor that comes integrated with hardware shipped by server vendors, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Fujitsu. These servers will boot directly into a hypervisor. XenSource also announced XenExpress OEM Edition, which will let server vendors install the Xen hypervisor. Xen, which is being acquired by Citrix Systems, says it will announce OEM partners later this year.
...
In many enterprises, the default assumption is that new applications will be deployed in virtualized environments. "Customers are saying they have to justify not virtualizing new apps," says Rich Fomin, lead product manager for BMC Performance Manager.
...
THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING
It's too early to declare a winner in the battle between Microsoft and
VMware. But the upstart has done an admirable job of preparing the
ground in its favor. Every day that Microsoft's hypervisor is absent is
another day VMware's hypervisor gains easy market share. VMware has
assembled a large and growing ecosystem of big and small vendors that
are increasingly making VMware the linchpin of a virtualized data
center.
Most important, the transition to a virtualized environment, in which the operating system is no longer the software foundation of a server infrastructure--and in some cases isn't even required to run applications--robs Microsoft of a core power base.
Virtualization won't kill the operating system, but it does shift the balance of power. The ground is too unstable to declare a new king, but one thing is clear: The throne will be a hypervisor.
Today marks the release of GPL version 3.0, the first update to the free software license in 15 years. The GPL is the license Linux operating systems are released under and focuses on freely available code you can modify. Every TiVo has been built on a basic Linux kernel but the new version of the license may be at odds with how TiVo uses Linux.
The new version of the GPL includes a provision to prevent "TiVoization" which means you can download TiVo's open source code and modify at will, but you can't run it on your TiVo due to security keys and digital rights software.
Back in April, TiVo filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission warning that the upcoming GPL v3 could harm their business. With the new version out today, it's still too early to tell if TiVo can continue releasing their software under the v2.0 license or if they will be forced to move to the new version and provide a way for developers to circumvent any security or copy-protection limits.
Stolen from PVRblog.The presentation provided a detailed overview of the company and several new insights. Most notably Palm is developing new devices with Palm OS Garnet and Linux operating systems, and the company is increasingly focusing its marketing efforts overseas and to the female segment of the US market.
With respect to device platform roll out strategy, Palm said they are continuing to develop devices relying on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. But the company views Microsoft as both a partner and a competitor because Windows Mobile has been licensed to a number of smartphone manufacturers.
Therefore, Palm is also bringing new devices to market with operating systems that it controls. They are innovating on top of the existing Palm OS Garnet operating system, which it has licensed perpetually from code owner, PalmSource ACCESS Co.. Palm is also rolling out a new device this year with a Linux operating system.
Read the rest at mytreo.net.
I've actually been a fan of Novell since Netware 3.1.2 - I believe it was. However, it seems that they could never actually, um, sell the products they had. That's why I was surprised when a buddy of mine sent me this link.
Here's the first installment:
Quotes from the Infoworld article:
Perhaps most interesting for readers of this blog, however, is who employs these developers. Keep in mind that some people don't use their corporate email address when working on the kernel, so LWN filled in this information when they knew it, and reached out to developers when they didn't. So, this list is imperfect, but probably as good as
anything else one could put together.
The list gives Red Hat a lot of support in its claims to be innovating in the kernel space. With nearly 15% of the heavy lifting being done by its developers (nearly double that of any other company, and triple its nearest competitor), it also means that Red Hat (as well as Novell,
which does a fair amount of kernel work, too) can legitimately offer superior support on Linux. Support that Oracle's PR fluff just can't match. (Oracle contributed less than 1% of the kernel work.)
Keep in mind this is from Red Hat Magazine, but hey... ;-)
While many people are aware of SPEC benchmarks, they may be unfamiliar with the SPECompM and SPECompL series of benchmarks. These are used for characterizing the OpenMP shared memory performance in medium and large systems. OpenMP itself is a specification for compilers and libraries to make use of parallel directives. The types of problems this benchmark models are largely scientific in nature, covering everything from automobile crash simulation to ocean modeling to computational chemistry to genetics.
Many of these problems cannot be solved efficiently in a grid and still require shared memory multiprocessing resources. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been hugely successful in grid computing, its success in Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) has not been publicized as much.
SPEC OMP is of interest to High-performance computing (HPC) users, providing an objective and representative benchmark suite for measuring the performance of SMP systems. The focus is to deliver systems performance results appropriate for real scientific and engineering applications, so the benchmark places heavy demands on the processor, shared memory architecture, compiler and the OpenMP implementation. There are two OPM variants: OMPM2001 for 1-32 processor systems, and OMPL2001 for larger systems.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 SPECompM2001 result is the world record for a 16-way SMP configuration, and used an IBM POWER system that delivered a result of 45,895 - an incredible 78% faster than the previous Linux record holder. It is also a whole lot faster than the competing Unix results: 210% over Sun Solaris, 132% over HP/UX.
Many people are unaware of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s ability to optimize large memory configurations, schedule across large numbers of CPU’s, and offer the compilers and libraries tuned to this problem space. So this benchmark is a terrific proof point for people who were waiting for Linux to mature in SMP space.
While commodity multiprocessors and server designs are cost optimized for the best price performance, large SMP systems are designed with performance as the prime goal. The ability to simulate an automobile crash in a computer, rather than building an actual model allows engineers to design a lightweight, yet strong car and iterate the design many times. This gives maximum safety and yet the light weight allows great fuel efficiency. Likewise the ability to model chemical properties in a computer allows tests for strength, toxicity, and cost of manufacture saves many times the costs of the computing systems.
This great result, beating all previous Linux results, shows the power and suitability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the scientific environment.
The company formerly known as PalmSource (now ACCESS), showed off version 1.0 of its new ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) operating system
at this week's 3GSM event in Barcelona. ACCESS has also begun
distributing the product development kit to licensees, meaning that
mobile phones running the new OS are one step closer to a reality.
While ALP is a Linux-based OS, representing a complete break from earlier versions of PalmOS, users will be able to run Palm software via a compatibility layer known as ALP ACCESS Garnet VM. This means you can upgrade to a newer device without fear of losing access to the thousands of free and commercial programs available for PalmOS.
In addition, ALP includes native applications such as phone, contact, calender, memo, email, web browser, SMS, music, video, photo, camera, and office document software.
ALP will run on smartphones with a Marvell PX3xx processor or Texas OMAP processors.
Seriously, isn't it sad that the only positive I can think of for it is the running man that falls down when something fails in smit (GUI for sys admin work)? It's a tremendous PITA compared to Linux, Solaris and even (eek) Windows.
With the ascent of Sun's ZFS, this could be a further blow to ReiserFS:
DUBLIN, California -- Hans Reiser, the prominent Bay Area Linux programmer charged with murdering his wife, says he's seeking to sell off his open-source file system company, Namesys, to help pay mounting legal costs.
In the first interview since his arrest, Reiser spoke this week about the future of his company and his legal travails from within the walls of Santa Rita Jail, where he is being held without bail.
"I just keep thinking that I'm stuck in George Orwell's 1984," he said while shackled, dressed in a red prison-issue jumpsuit, and locked in a cement room. "The government has taken away my kids, invaded my house, held me in solitary confinement and caused me all sorts of financial problems."
William DuBois, Reiser's attorney, says Reiser is running out of money to pay for his defense. "This is a unique opportunity for someone to buy the company for pennies on the dollar," DuBois said. "We welcome all vultures."
Read the rest on Wired.
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