today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 17, 2023

• A brief history of MicroStack

  OpenStack is no doubt a wonderful and successful piece of software. It allows you to create your own cloud infrastructure, and thanks to its open-source nature, it’s free to use for everyone. But as with many giant software projects, all that power comes with a challenge: it is reasonably complex to install and configure. A number of OpenStack distributions do exist that intend to make engineers’ life a lot easier, but those also tend to be more complex than a non-experienced user would like them to be.

  To solve this problem once and for all, Canonical created a simplified and easy-to-install distribution of OpenStack called MicroStack.

• Debian Installer Bookworm RC 3 release

  The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the third release
  candidate of the installer for Debian 12 "Bookworm".
  
  
  Improvements in this release
  ============================
  
  
   * finish-install:
      - Adjust APT cache cleaning to avoid breaking bash completion
        (#1034650).
   * grub-installer:
      - Detect EFI boot variables with hexadecimal digits, not only
        decimal digits.
   * hw-detect:
      - Restore support for firmware license prompts (#1033921).
   * linux:
      - Build against updated dwarves, reducing its size and memory
        footprint (#1033301).
   * partman-base:
      - Add support for input submitted using power-of-two units: kiB,
        MiB, GiB, etc. (#913431). Note that sizes are still output using
        power-of-ten units: kB, MB, GB, etc.
      - Add support for bigger prefixes: petabyte (PB), pebibyte (PiB),
        exabyte (EB), and exbibyte (EiB).
      - With many thanks to Vincent Danjean!
   * preseed:
      - Make sure netcfg considers DHCP-provided hostnames, only using
        the hostname parameter on the kernel command line as a fallback
        (#1035349).
  
  
  Hardware support changes
  ========================
  
  
   * debian-installer:
      - Ship dedicated DRM modules for bochs and cirrus to avoid broken
        graphics under UEFI/Secure Boot (#1036019).
   * linux:
      - Work around black screen on ppc64el (#1033058).
   * xorg-server:
      - Ship modesetting_drv.so in the udeb again, fixing graphical
        installer support on UTM (#1035014).
  
  
  Localization status
  ===================
  
  
   * 78 languages are supported in this release.
   * Full translation for 41 of them.
  
  
  Known bugs in this release
  ==========================
  
  
   * There seems to be no known major bug as of yet.
  
  
  See the errata[2] for details and a full list of known issues.
  
  
  Feedback for this release
  =========================
  
  
  We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so
  please try it. Installation images, and everything else you will need
  are available at our web site[3].
  
  
  

• Confidential computing use cases [Ed: IBM/Red Hat pushing data breach (outsourcing) as privacy or "confidential computing"]

  This article is the third in a six-part series (see our previous blog), where we present various usage models for confidential computing, a set of technologies designed to protect data in use—for example using memory encryption—and the requirements to get the expected security and trust benefits from t​​he technology.

  In this third article, we consider the four most important use cases for confidential computing: confidential virtual machines, confidential workloads, confidential containers and confidential clusters. This will allow us to better understand the trade-offs between the various approaches, and how this impacts the implementation of attestation.