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Kernel: Grub vs. Systemd-boot, OSL, and Technical Articles From LWN (Outside Paywall Today)

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 4th of April 2019 06:17:39 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
  • Grub vs. Systemd-boot: Which One Should You Use as the Bootloader

    Systemd-boot, sometimes called “systemd” and previously called “gummiboot,” is Grub’s newer competitor. On compatible EFI systems, systemd-boot can be used in place of Grub to boot the system’s operating system. From a high-level perspective, systemd-boot links to the bootloader already in UEFI, offering the most basic feature set for selecting an operating system. Grub, on the other hand, loads what is sometimes described as “an entire OS” to manage booting the user’s operating system, providing far greater capability.

  • The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

    OSL acts as a FOSS hosting company, providing free or low-cost hosting to a variety of projects. It offers colocation or virtual machines (VMs) in a private cloud. It can also provide access to a wide array of different CPU architectures. Beyond that, the lab is a distribution and mirroring site for multiple projects.

    [...]

    Its initial funding came from OSU, based on the cost saving by the university from switching to FOSS. Google and RealNetworks were early sponsors. OSL moved to the college of engineering in 2013. Its ongoing funding model is to get corporate donations; IBM, Google, and Facebook are big donors. It also has hosting contracts with the Linux Foundation, Drupal, and the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Other companies donate hardware or bandwidth and there are individual donors as well. At this point, OSL gets no direct funding from OSU or the state of Oregon, which makes fundraising a yearly challenge.

    The role of the lab is to be a neutral hosting facility and to foster relationships between FOSS projects and companies, Albertson said. It provides a stable, physical home for core FOSS projects that is flexible to the needs of each project. It gives access to less-common hardware and CPU architectures, including OpenPOWER and, soon, RISC-V, along with compute and storage resources, such as software mirroring and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). The lab also helps projects with their systems engineering needs and helps train the next generation of open-source leaders.

  • The congestion-notification conflict

    Most of the time, the dreary work of writing protocol standards at organizations like the IETF and beyond happens in the background, with most of us being blissfully unaware of what is happening. Recently, though, a disagreement over protocols for congestion notification and latency reduction has come to a head in a somewhat messy conflict. The outcome of this discussion may well affect how well the Internet of the future works — and whether Linux systems can remain first-class citizens of that net.

    Network congestion is a fact of life; when it occurs, the only useful response is to get senders of traffic to slow down. Many governments place traffic signals on the on-ramps to major highways in congestion-prone areas in an attempt to limit traffic entering and to keep things flowing. Network traffic can benefit from similar controls, but the placement of traffic signals at every entry point to the net is impractical. So network protocols must rely on other types of signals to learn when they should reduce their transmission rate.

  • Building header files into the kernel

    Kernel developers learn, one way or another, to be careful about memory use; any memory taken by the kernel is not available for use by the actual applications that people keep the computer around to run. So it is unsurprising that eyebrows went up when Joel Fernandes proposed building the source for all of the kernel's headers files into the kernel itself, at a cost of nearly 4MB of unswappable, kernel-space memory. The discussion is ongoing, but it has already highlighted some pain points felt by Android developers in particular.
    Fernandes first posted this work in January; version 5 was posted on March 20. As part of the build process, it gathers up all of the kernel's headers (the ".h" files) and a few other artifacts into a compressed tar file; that file is then built into a kernel module. If that module is loaded into the running kernel, the tar file containing the headers can be read from /proc/kheaders.tgz. This is, thus, a way of allowing applications to access the header files that were used to build whatever kernel is running at the moment.

    The purpose of this mechanism is to make those header files available in situations where they are otherwise unavailable. In particular, developers building kernel modules need access to this information, as do those who are building BPF programs to analyze a system's behavior. In some systems, notably Android-based devices, those header files are almost certainly not easily available. Fernandes has tried other solutions to this problem, such as BPFd, in the past, but all have fallen short. Providing headers with the kernel itself is the solution he has settled on.

  • Case-insensitive ext4

    Handling file names in a case-insensitive way for Linux filesystems has been an ongoing discussion topic for many years. It is a (dubious) feature of filesystems for other operating systems (e.g. Android, Windows, macOS), but Linux has limited support for it. Over the last year or more, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi has been working on the problem for ext4, but it is a messy one to solve. He recently posted his latest patch set, which reflects some changes made at the behest of Linus Torvalds.

    At the 2018 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Krisman presented his plan for allowing ext4 filesystems to be case-insensitive. That plan would have enhanced the kernel's Native Language Support (NLS) subsystem to better support multi-byte encodings and expand the case-folding to handle UTF-8. NLS exists to handle filesystems, such as FAT, that support file names with different encodings, which are specified at mount time. Krisman posted his patch set to make those changes in December shortly after LPC, but Torvalds objected to the whole idea:

    Why do people want to do this? We know it's a crazy and stupid thing to do. And we know that, exactly because people have done it, and it has always been a mistake.

    [...]

    Ts'o suggested moving the Unicode handling code to fs/unicode rather than changing the NLS code. He also described the current state of play with regard to case-sensitivity in filesystems for macOS and Windows, as well as for network filesystems like Samba and NFS. Over time, Ts'o said, the inconsistencies in handling file names between different filesystems have mostly been eliminated. In January, Krisman posted version 5 of his patch set, which reflects the switch to the fs/unicode directory.

»

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