314: Bigger. Faster. Harder to Maintain.

It's huge, and it's getting bigger every month. How do you test the Linux Kernel? Major Hayden from Red Hat joins us to discuss their efforts to automate Kernel bug hunting.

Plus our honest conversation about which Linux works best for us.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Ell Marquez, Major Hayden, and Neal Gompa.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Unpatched KDE vulnerability disclosed on Twitter — When a user opens the KDE file viewer to access the directory where these files are stored, the malicious code contained within the .desktop or .directory files executes without user interaction.
• KDE rips out ability for KConfig to run shell code — KDE responded on Wednesday by removing the feature to have shell commands as values in the KConfig files, which was described as an intentional feature that allowed for flexibility.
• First modern coreboot server platform — This platform is the first modern upstream coreboot server platform on the market with an Intel Xeon E3-1200 v6 processor also known as Kabylake-DT.
• Open-source firmware is the future - Blog | Mullvad VPN — This is the first time a modern off-the-shelf server platform gains coreboot support, and it is an integral part of realizing our vision of transparent and independently auditable VPN servers.
• Adder WS - System76
• System76 Preparing To Roll Out Their First Coreboot-Enabled Laptop - Phoronix — Ahead of this year's Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC) being held from 3 to 6 September at the Google and Facebook offices in Mountain View, System76 announced the Darter Pro OSFC Edition that ships with Coreboot.
• System76 Granted A Thunderbolt License To Integrate Into Their Open Firmware - Phoronix — System76 has been granted a Thunderbolt license, meaning that we can now integrate Thunderbolt compatibility into our open firmware.
• Jupiter Extras — New ideas, great interviews, events, and other content you will love. We bring you the Extras.
• Free Courses at Linux Academy — August 2019 – Linux Academy
• major.io — words of wisdom from a systems engineer
• Continuous integration testing for the Linux kernel | Opensource.com — The call for continuous integration (CI) grows for more and more projects, the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) team forges ahead with a single mission: prevent bugs from being merged into the kernel.
• Major's Continuous Kernel Integration Talk at Texas Linuxfe 2019
• CKI Project — Continuous Kernel Integration
• Continuous Kernel Integration project on GitHub
• CKI hackfest agenda for Plumbers
• 0-Day Continuous Integration (CI) Test Service from Intel — With so much code contributed to each release, it’s impossible to avoid potential regressions. To eliminate them, you must first find the bugs that cause them, which can be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. This is what makes the 0-Day Continuous Integration (CI) Test Service so important. 0-Day delivers comprehensive, automated and continuous integration testing that monitors the Linux mainline and 800+ developer trees for regressions, helping find bugs before they reach the Linux kernel so problems can be fixed before they impact users. Simply put, 0-Day helps ensure Linux kernel quality in a highly complex development environment.
• Snowpatch: continuous-integration testing for the kernel — The Linux kernel project lags many others in its use of CI testing for a number of reasons, including a fundamental mismatch with how kernel developers tend to manage their workflows. At linux.conf.au 2019, Russell Currey described a CI system called Snowpatch that, he hopes, will bridge the gap and bring better testing to the kernel development process.
• Kernel CI Dashboard — FAQ
• Linux Test Project — Linux Test Project is a joint project started by SGI, OSDL and Bull developed and maintained by IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu, SUSE, Red Hat, Oracle and others. The project goal is to deliver tests to the open source community that validate the reliability, robustness, and stability of Linux.
• patchwork — Patchwork is a web-based patch tracking system designed to facilitate the contribution and management of contributions to an open-source project.
• Kernel Patch-Evaluated Testing — KPET is a framework which will execute targeted testing based on changes introduced in the patch, e.g. a network driver or similar would trigger network related testing to be invoked, or a filesystem change would invoke filesystem testing.
• Beaker lab automation project — Beaker is open-source software for managing and automating labs of test computers.
• google/syzkaller — syzkaller is an unsupervised, coverage-guided kernel fuzzer
• openQA | Introduction to the heart of openSUSE's automated testing — OpenSUSE is way too versatile for humans to test even the most common configurations. Therefore openQA was introduced and became an indispensable part of the openSUSE development and release processes. openQA is an automated test tool for operating systems. It allows to test the whole installation process of an operating system in a wide range of software and hardware configurations by leveraging qemu. This talk gives an introduction to openQA and explains how openQA works to help understand what it's output means.
• OpenQA - Fedora Project Wiki — Fedora uses the openQA automated testing system as a significant part of the release validation testing process, and for testing updates. On this page you can find more information about openQA, how Fedora uses it, and how to install your own instance of openQA so you can try it out and contribute to test development.
• AppImage by probonopd · Pull Request #72 · JupiterBroadcasting/CasterSoundboard — This PR, when merged, will compile this application on Travis CI upon each git push, and upload an AppImage to your GitHub Releases page.
• TeleCast with popey — An experiment in lean audio delivery via Telegram. TeleCast with popey is an informal short-form audio podcast-like show
• LINUX Unplugged 202: Halls of Endless Linux — Michael Hall from Endless joins us to discuss his new role, Endless’ involvement with Gnome & the unique approach they are taking with EndlessOS.
• End of life - Fedora Project Wiki — Fedora Project maintains each release of Fedora according to the Fedora Release Life Cycle. The following releases have reached End of Life, and are no longer maintained and do not receive any updates.
• quicktile — Adds window-tiling keybindings to any X11-based desktop.