GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 26, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux System Roles: System Roles support for image mode (bootc) builds

      Goal

      A bootable container image can be used to install or upgrade a real or virtual machine, similar to container images for applications. This is currently supported for Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux 9/10 and Fedora/CentOS, but also in other projects like universal-blue.

    • Events

      • Linux Foundation

        • LWN ☛ LSFMM+BPF 2025 reporting complete [Ed: "We are grateful to the 'Linux' Foundation for funding our travel to our event and, especially"]

          It took time and the writing of over 60 articles, but LWN's coverage from

          the 2025 GNU/Linux Storage, Filesystem,

          Memory-Management, and BPF Summit is now complete. We have also made

          an EPUB book (13MB) containing

          the full set of coverage available to all readers. This coverage

          constitutes the definitive guide to the challenges that these core-kernel

          communities are facing and their development plans for the coming year.

          Documenting an event of this intensity at such a detailed level is not a

          small undertaking. We are grateful to the 'Linux' Foundation for funding our

          travel to our event and, especially, to LWN's subscribers for making the

          whole thing possible. If you appreciate this type of coverage and have not

          yet subscribed, please sign up today to help make

          more of it possible.

  • Games

    • Nolen Royalty ☛ Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process

      In the 10 days after launch, over 150,000 players made over 15,000,000 moves and hundreds of millions of queries. The game runs out of a single process that I didn’t touch over those 10 days 1.

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Neowin ☛ KDE is getting a "new" OOBE wizard, called KISS

        The KDE Initial System Setup (KISS) project has been revived, promising an improved UI, better integration with Plasma, and more.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Distro Watch ☛ Distribution Release: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP7

      SUSE has announced an update to the company's SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution. The new release, version 15 Service Pack 7, offers over ten years of support and introduces post-quantum cryptography. [...]

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Red Hat ☛ Integrate vLLM inference on macOS/iOS using Proprietary Chaffbot Company APIs

      This post is the third in a series about using vLLM inference in macOS and iOS applications. It will explain how to communicate with vLLM using the Proprietary Chaffbot Company specification as implemented by the SwiftOpenAI and MacPaw/OpenAI open source projects. The first article presented a business case for a vLLM-powered chatbot for macOS and iOS.

    • Red Hat ☛ How Kruize optimizes OpenShift workloads

      Last year, Red Bait announced the availability of resource optimization for Red Bait OpenShift. This article goes deeper into discussing the benefits of Kruize Autotune, the engine that provides container right-sizing recommendations for resource optimization.

      What is Kruize Autotune?

      Kruize provides container right-sizing recommendations in Kubernetes in the form of CPU and memory requests and limits. The request and limit values for both CPU and memory are set to be the same. The recommendations are based on monitoring a data source such as Prometheus where the data source can be local or remote. The recommendations are based on resource usage in the past 24 hours (short term), 7 days (medium term), and 15 days (long term) and provide cost and performance-optimized suggestions for each term on a per-container basis.

      Kruize also provides capacity and utilization data used to represent resource request versus actual resource utilization data (e.g., as a box plot) to better understand the recommendations.

      Performance-optimized recommendations currently use the 98th percentile for CPU usage for the given term. The usage includes any throttling that may have happened in the term.

      Memory recommendations use the max value in the observed term with an added buffer. The buffer represents the minimum of 20% over the max value and the maximum interval spike in the observed term.

      memRecommendation = termMemMaxInterval + min(0.2 * termMemMaxInterval, termSpikeMaxInterval);

      Here, Interval refers to the minimum observable duration of the gathered metrics. The default interval has currently been set to 15 minutes.

      Cost-optimized recommendations uses the 60th percentile for CPU usage for the given term (including throttling), and the memory recommendation is the same as that of performance-optimized recommendations.

      Note that the algorithms used to arrive at these recommendations are subject to change.

      Production cluster example

      Let's look at an example to explain the CPU and memory recommendations. In this example, the container swatch-tally-service on a production cluster has resource utilization over a 15-day term (Figure 1).

    • Red Hat ☛ How to implement developer self-service with Backstage

      Golden path templates (also known as Software Templates) are a core feature of Backstage, a framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs) that offer self-service capabilities to developers. When using Backstage as your IDP, Software Templates enable self-service capabilities, automation of best practices, and standardization of workflows. Codifying these capabilities using Software Templates reduces the cognitive load on developers and minimizes their time wrangling with YAML and underlying infrastructure concerns, thereby increasing their productivity. For example, a developer who creates a new application using a Software Template will start with a project that follows the organization’s best practices and has continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines pre-configured. 

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • PostgreSQL ☛ pgDay Lowlands 2025 - Schedule published, registration open; come find us at the zoo

      pgDay Lowlands 2025 is coming up soon, on September 12, 2025 at the Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

      You can find the whole schedule of presentations & lightning talks, featuring speakers such as Jimmy Angelakos, Cornelia Biacsics, Johannes Paul, and Valeria Alexandra Haro here. We're excited to announce as well that we will be holding debate sessions on the topics of Kubernetes and Autotuning within which everyone can participate.

  • Funding

    • LWN ☛ NLnet announces funding for 62 projects

      The NLnet Foundation has announced a new group of projects receiving funding through the Next Free and open source technologies, open standards, open hardware and open data help to strengthen the open web and the open internet. The projects selected by NLnet all contribute in their own way to this important goal, and will empower end users and the community at large on different layers of the stack. For example, there are people working a browser controlled ad hoc cellular network (Wsdr) which can be used to create small mobile networks where they are needed.