Linux News - Feb 17, 2013

1 Linux

1.1 Releases

• LTK Kernels 3.7.8, 3.4.31 and 3.0.64 released by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Seehttp://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.stable/42890,http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1441677 and http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1441680
• Ubuntu OMAP4 kernel linux-ti-omap4 updated for security fixes -http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.security.announce/2030
• Wayland 1.0.5 Released - http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-February/007435.html
• Ubuntu 12.04.02 released. Mainly bugfixes and security fixes - http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/02/14/ubuntu-12-04-2-lts-released/
• Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alpha 2 is now available - http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/02/14/13-04-raring-ringtail-alpha-2-released/
• XRandR 1.4.0 released - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg.announce/1900.

1.2 Unix History

• http://www.levenez.com/unix/ has a great view of how Unix has evolved from UNICS in 1969. QNX afficianados will appreciate how QNX started as QUNIX in 1980 and hit Beta in 1983. In comparision, the first Android Beta was in 2007 as a fork from 2.6.23. So, why is it important to look at Unix History? That's because most of the code in Linux is long-lived and the linux community takes backward compatibility very seriously!
• There is a simplified version on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.png.  

2 QA and Testing

2.1 Trinity Fuzz Tester

• Make system calls in random - http://codemonkey.org.uk/projects/trinity/. Video from Linux.com.au is athttp://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/Trinity_A_Linux_kernel_fuzz_tester_and_then_some.mp4

2.2 QA on Ubuntu

• Jenkins status - https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/view/Raring/view/AutoPkgTest/
• QA Team Page - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam. IRC - #ubuntu-quality. Mailing List -https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-quality. Launchpad - https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-testing. And yes, you can contribute testcases too - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/ContributingTestcases

2.3 Static Checker for Linux Kernel

• Smatch is a Linux Kernel oriented static checker - http://repo.or.cz/w/smatch.git

2.4 SystemTap

• http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ provides diagnostic info on a running kernel.

2.5 UMockdev

• Mocks hardware devices so that we can test userspace libraries and applications.https://github.com/martinpitt/umockdev

3 Virtualization

3.1 Qemu

• Qemu 1.4.0 released. Claims that a guest os can perform at 95% of native performance.

4 Driverless Car

• Some research out of Oxford - http://mrg.robots.ox.ac.uk/robotcar/. Also see the buzz athttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9871743/British-researchers-on-the-road-to-an-affordable-self-driving-car.html and http://phys.org/news/2013-02-uk-robotcar-video.html