Many readers are submitting stories related to Google Chrome OS. ruphus13 points out a GigaOm opinion piece about how, if users end up rejecting its current cloud-only focus, the nascent OS may succeed as a netbook secondary operating system alongside Windows (in company with secondaries based on other Linux flavors, including Android). Engadget reviews a Chrome OS on a USB key setup that is claimed to offer eye-opening performance compared to running under virtualization. And an anonymous reader notes the 0.1 beta release of ChromeShell, which installs a "Chrome OS-like" environment that boots to the Chrome browser in ~3 seconds; users can switch to Windows later as desired.

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights: Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."

An anonymous reader writes "I was put in charge of an aging IT infrastructure that needs a serious overhaul. Current services include the usual suspects, i.e. www, ftp, email, dns, firewall, DHCP — and some more. In most cases, each service runs on its own hardware, some of them for the last seven years straight. The machines still can (mostly) handle the load that ~150 people in multiple offices put on them, but there's hardly any fallback if any of the services die or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same). Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably-sized machine per office (plus one for testing and a spare) seem to recommend themselves. What's you experience with virtualization of services and implementing fallback/load-balancing schemes? What's Best Practice for an update like this? I'm interested in your success stories and anecdotes, but also pointers and (book) references. Thanks!"

AdamWill writes "The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There's a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan surveys six 'transformational' tech-panacea sales pitches that have left egg on at least some IT department faces. Billed with legendary promises, each of the six technologies — five old, one new — has earned the dubious distinction of being the hype king of its respective era, falling far short of legendary promises. Consultant greed, analyst oversight, dirty vendor tricks — 'the one thing you can count on in the land of IT is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.' Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown." What other horrible hype stories do some of our seasoned vets have?

AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."

An anonymous reader writes "The fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family is released. From the press release — this version includes kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages. Other updates including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This article covers the upgrade procedure for RHEL 5.4 from the previous version."

adeelarshad82 writes "Advanced Micro Devices has launched a low-power version of its six-core Opteron processor in time for VMworld, a key virtualization show that opens on Monday. The six-core AMD Opteron EE consumes 40 watts, and is designed for 2P servers, among the most popular in the virtualized server space."

dan_johns writes "Only one month after Microsoft released Linux code to improve the performance of Linux guests on Windows, Red Hat has done the reverse. Red Hat has quietly released a set of drivers to improve the performance of Windows guests hosted on Linux's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The netkvm driver is a network driver and viostor is a Storport driver to improve the performance of high-end storage. This release includes paravirtual block drivers for Windows. Linux and Windows — virtually coming together at last."

Voyager529 writes "While virtually every Core 2 Duo processor supports the hardware virtualization technology that powers the Windows 7 XP Mode, The Register UK reports that the Core 2 Duo processors in the Sony Vaio Z series laptops had the virtualization features intentionally crippled in the BIOS. Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert stated that the QA engineers did this to make the systems more resilient against malicious code. He also stated that while they are considering enabling VT in some laptop models due to the backlash, the Z series are not among those being retrofitted."

eldavojohn writes "Two blog posts from AMD are causing a stir in the GPU community. AMD has created and released the industry's first OpenCL which allows developers to code against AMD's graphics API (normally only used for their GPUs) and run it on any x86 CPU. Now, as a developer, you can divide the workload between the two as you see fit instead of having to commit to either GPU or CPU. Ars has more details."

ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."

CalTrumpet writes "Our research group recently spoke at Black Hat USA on the topic of cloud computing security. One of the interesting outcomes of our research was the discovery that the combination of virtualization technologies and public system images results in a problem for random number generation on guest operating systems. This is especially true for Linux, since its PRNG uses only a small set of entropy-gathering events, and virtual Linux images often generate SSH host keys within seconds of their initial boot. The slides are available; the PRNG vulnerability material begins at slide 63."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld provides a reality check on the impact cloud computing will have on IT jobs, the overall effects of which will likely resemble those of outsourcing, automation, and utility computing — in other words, a movement away from the nuts and bolts of technology toward the business end of the organization. This shift from 'blue-collar IT to white-collar IT' will be accompanied by greater demand for IT pros experienced with virtualization and Web scale-out deployments, even among midlevel organizations, and greater emphasis on SaaS integration among in-house development teams, analysts say. And though the large-scale impact of 'cloud-sourcing' is likely a decade away, those not versed in vendor contract management, cloud integration, analytics, and RIA and mobile development may find themselves pushed toward the less technical jobs to come, those that will require days full of conference calls and putting out fires caused by doing business in the cloud."

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What's surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: 'Many people tried to prove that BluePill is "detectable" by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are "under" BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.'" Rutkowska says that for her own security, "I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization." She runs three separate virtual machines, designated Red, Yellow, and Green, each running a separate browser and used for increasingly sensitive tasks.

rhathar writes in with news that Oracle is killing off the products of Virtual Iron, a month after purchasing the company. Reports say that all but 10 to 15 staff were let go. The Reg article speculates that Oracle bought VI for its technology and considers its customers and partners expendable. When the Sun purchase finalizes, Oracle will be in possession of three separate virtualization technologies all based on Xen. "In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it 'will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.' One partner said, 'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the s–.'"

rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."

Siker writes in to tell us about the experience of email transfer service YippieMove, which ditched VMware and switched to FreeBSD jails. "We doubled the amount of memory per server, we quadrupled SQLite's internal buffers, we turned off SQLite auto-vacuuming, we turned off synchronization, we added more database indexes. We were confused. Certainly we had expected a performance difference between running our software in a VM compared to running on the metal, but that it could be as much as 10X was a wake-up call."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.'"