It's been a long road, but Microsoft announced on April 4 a preview of Arm support on Azure virtual machines via its work with Ampere Computing. ZDNet reports: Ampere is a startup that makes server chips. Ampere announced last year it had signed up Microsoft and Tencent Holdings as major customers. "We are now supporting Arm on Azure as well. This has been a long journey to bring up Ampere on Azure with Windows as the Root Host OS! we are also supporting Windows 11 Arm VMs in preview for developers!" tweeted Hari Pulapaka, the director of PM for Azure Host OS and the Windows OS platform. "FYI all Windows developers who have been asking for VM support in Azure, it's here now."

Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors will offer up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs for scale-out workloads, Microsoft officials said. These new VMs are also for Web servers, application servers, open-source databases, gaming servers, media servers, and more, they added. The preview is initially available in the West US 2, West Central US, and West Europe Azure regions. Ampere's announcement of the Azure VM preview is here.

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java."

But there's another reason they're promoting Rust: Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand...

[J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria.

Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages.

There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate....

No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community.
That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C."

And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.")

The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers aligned with the government of Iran are exploiting the critical Log4j vulnerability to infect unpatched VMware users with ransomware, researchers said on Thursday. Security firm SentinelOne has dubbed the group TunnelVision. The name is meant to emphasize TunnelVision's heavy reliance on tunneling tools and the unique way it deploys them. In the past, TunnelVision has exploited so-called 1-day vulnerabilities -- meaning vulnerabilities that have been recently patched -- to hack organizations that have yet to install the fix. Vulnerabilities in Fortinet FortiOS (CVE-2018-13379) and Microsoft Exchange (ProxyShell) are two of the group's better-known targets. [...] The SentinelOne research shows that the targeting continues and that this time the target is organizations running VMware Horizon, a desktop and app virtualization product that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Apache Tomcat is an open source Web server that VMware and other enterprise software use to deploy and serve Java-based Web apps. Once installed, a shell allows the hackers to remotely execute commands of their choice on exploited networks. The PowerShell used here appears to be a variant of this publicly available one. Once it's installed, TunnelVision members use it to: Execute reconnaissance commands; Create a backdoor user and adding it to the network administrators group; Harvest credentials using ProcDump, SAM hive dumps, and comsvcs MiniDump; and Download and run tunneling tools, including Plink and Ngrok, which are used to tunnel remote desktop protocol traffic.

The hackers use multiple legitimate services to achieve and obscure their activities. Those services include: transfer.sh, pastebin.com, webhook.site, ufile.io, and raw.githubusercontent.com. People who are trying to determine if their organization is affected should look for unexplained outgoing connections to these legitimate public services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Here's a fun new feature of Android 13: working virtualization support. Google is building virtualization into Android for its own reasons, but Android developer kdrag0n has commandeered the feature to boot ARM Windows 11 and desktop Linux. The developer even got the Windows version of Doom running, all inside a VM on the Pixel 6. kdrag0n says that Android 13 has "full KVM functionality" at "near-native performance." You need root to enable the functionality, which doesn't support GPU acceleration. The functionality also doesn't support nested virtualization, so while you can now run Android on Windows and Windows on Android, making an infinitely nested OS turducken is out of the question.

This makes for a neat demo that's not at all what Google wants to do with Android's upcoming VM support. Esper's Mishaal Rahman has been meticulously tracking Android's virtualization progress for some time now, and the apparent plan is to someday (maybe in Android 13) use virtual machines as a security and privacy sandbox for various features. Imagine instead of processing sensitive data at the normal app permission level, the data could be processed in a separate OS, so any attackers would have to break through the app security model, then Android, then the hypervisor, then this other, private OS.

Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal is valued at $16.5 billion, representing a near 30 percent premium on Citrix's market capitalization before rumors of a possible deal first started to emerge last month. Founded in 1989, Citrix was originally known for its Windows-based remote access products, but over the past few decades the company has evolved endeavored to move with the times, and now offers myriad technologies spanning cloud computing, servers, networking, and more.

The best part of Windows 11 is Linux, argues Ars Technica: For years now, Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be — and getting graphical apps to work has historically been possible but also a pain in the butt that required some fairly obscure third-party software. Windows 11 finally fixes both of those problems. The Windows Subsystem for Linux isn't perfect on Windows 11, but it's a huge improvement over what came before.

Microsoft has traditionally made installing WSL more of a hassle than it should be, but the company finally got the process right in Windows 10 build 2004. Just open an elevated Command prompt (start --> type cmd --> click Run as Administrator), type wsl --install at the prompt, and you're good to go. Windows 11, thankfully, carries this process forward unchanged. A simple wsl --install with no further arguments gets you Hyper-V and the other underpinnings of WSL, along with the current version of Ubuntu. If you aren't an Ubuntu fan, you can see what other easily installable distributions are available with the command wsl --list --online. If you decide you'd prefer a different distro, you can install it instead with — for example — wsl --install -d openSUSE-42. If you're not sure which distribution you prefer, don't fret. You can install as many as you like, simply by repeating wsl --list --online to enumerate your options and wsl --install -d distroname to install whichever you like. Installing a second distribution doesn't uninstall the first; it creates a separate environment, independent of any others. You can run as many of these installed environments as you like simultaneously, without fear of one messing up another.

In addition to easy installation, WSL on Windows 11 brings support for both graphics and audio in WSL apps. This isn't exactly a first — Microsoft debuted WSLg in April, with Windows 10 Insider Build 21364. But Windows 11 is the first production Windows build with WSLg support. If this is your first time hearing of WSLg, the short version is simple: you can install GUI apps — for example, Firefox — from your Ubuntu (or other distro) command line, and they'll work as expected, including sound. When I installed WSLg on Windows 11 on the Framework laptop, running firefox from the Ubuntu terminal popped up the iconic browser automatically. Heading to YouTube in it worked perfectly, too, with neither frame drops in the video nor glitches in the audio....

[T]here is one obvious "killer app" for WSLg that has us excited — and that's virt-manager, the RedHat-originated virtualization management tool. virt-manager is a simple tool that streamlines the creation, management, and operation of virtual machines using the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine... virt-manager never got a Windows port and seems unlikely to. But it runs under WSLg like a champ.
They reported a few problems, like when running GNOME's Software Center app (and the GNOME shell desktop environment).

But "If you're already a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user, Windows 11 offers an enormously improved experience compared to what you're accustomed to from Windows 10. It installs more easily, makes more functionality available, and offers better desktop integration than older workarounds such as running MobaXTerm's X11 server."

"The expiration of a key digital encryption service on Thursday sent major tech companies nationwide scrambling to deal with internet outages that affected millions of online users," reports the Washington Examiner.

The expiring certificate was issued by Let's Encrypt — though ZDNet notes there's been lots of warnings about its pending expiration: Digital Shadows senior cyber threat analyst Sean Nikkel told ZDNet that Let's Encrypt put everyone on notice back in May about the expiration of the Root CA Thursday and offered alternatives and workarounds to ensure that devices would not be affected during the changeover. They have also kept a running forum thread open on this issue with fairly quick responses, Nikkel added.
Thursday night the Washington Examiner describes what happened when the big day arrived: Tech giants — such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, as well as many smaller tech companies — were still battling with an endless array of issues by the end of the night... At least 2 million people have seen an error message on their phones, computers, or smart gadgets in the past 24 hours detailing some internet connectivity problems due to the certificate issue, according to Scott Helme, an internet security researcher and well-known cybersecurity expert. "So many people have been affected, even if it's only the inconvenience of not being able to visit certain websites or some of their apps not working," Helme said.

"This issue has been going on for many hours, and some companies are only just getting around to fixing it, even big companies with a lot of resources. It's clearly not going smoothly," he added.

There was an expectation before the certificate expired, Helme said, that the problem would be limited to gadgets and devices bought before 2017 that use the Let's Encrypt digital certificate and haven't updated their software. However, many users faced issues on Thursday despite having the most cutting-edge devices and software on hand. Dozens of major tech products and services have been significantly affected by the certificate expiration, such as cloud computing services for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft; IT and cloud security services for Cisco; sellers unable to log in on Shopify; games on RocketLeague; and workflows on Monday.com.
Security researcher Scott Helme also told ZDNet he'd also confirmed issues at many other companies, including Guardian Firewall, Auth0, QuickBooks, and Heroku — but there might be many more beyond that: "For the affected companies, it's not like everything is down, but they're certainly having service issues and have incidents open with staff working to resolve. In many ways, I've been talking about this for over a year since it last happened, but it's a difficult problem to identify. it's like looking for something that could cause a fire: it's really obvious when you can see the smoke...!"

Digital certificates expert Tim Callan added that the popularity of DevOps-friendly architectures like containerization, virtualization and cloud has greatly increased the number of certificates the enterprise needs while radically decreasing their average lifespan. "That means many more expiration events, much more administration time required, and greatly increased risk of a failed renewal," he said.

"Microsoft has joined forces with LF Energy, a Linux Foundation nonprofit working to accelerate the energy transition of the world's grids and transportation systems through open source," reports ZDNet: Microsoft has become a strategic member of the foundation and Audrey Lee, senior director of energy strategy at Microsoft, was elected to serve on the LF Energy Foundation Governing Board. Dr. Shuli Goodman, executive director of LF Energy, told ZDNet that the foundation believes Microsoft will play an important role in helping to advance their mission of decarbonization of the power grid, transportation and the built environment.

"LF Energy Foundation is thrilled to have Microsoft join our organization as a General member. Through Microsoft's commitment to a carbon negative position they are directly encouraging the tech sector to look for more efficient ways to purchase and consume power," Goodman said.

"LF Energy nurtures the most cutting edge of all open source projects focused on improving automation, control, security, virtualization, and interoperability of power systems. Our members contribute valuable code, tooling, resources and expertise to increase the velocity of these projects...."

Goodman called Microsoft a "force multiplier" and said having the company backing LF Energy will help propel their projects forward at a rapid pace.

Microsoft is putting Windows in the cloud. Windows 365 is a new service that will let businesses access Cloud PCs from anywhere, streaming a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 in a web browser. From a report: While virtualization and remote access to PCs has existed for more than a decade, Microsoft is betting on Windows 365 to offer Cloud PCs to businesses just as they shift toward a mix of office and remote work. Windows 365 will work on any modern web browser or through Microsoft's Remote Desktop app, allowing users to access their Cloud PC from a variety of devices.

"Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience," according to Wangui McKelvey, a general manager for Microsoft 365. This instant access lets workers stream their Windows session with all of their same apps, tools, data, and settings across Macs, iPads, Linux machines, and Android devices. "You can pick up right where you left off,âbecause the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices," explains McKelvey.

A few months ago PC Magazine explained eSIMs: You almost certainly have a SIM card: a thumbnail-sized chip that sits in your mobile phone, telling it which carrier and what phone number you use. Now those SIMs are going digital (or "e") and moving your information to a reprogrammable, embedded chip.

A SIM card is a "subscriber identity module." Required in all GSM, LTE, and 5G devices, it's a chip that holds your customer ID and details of how your phone can connect to its mobile network... An eSIM takes the circuitry of a SIM, solders it directly to a device's board, and makes it remotely reprogrammable through software... There are some minor consumer downsides, though. With eSIMs, it's harder to switch one plan between devices — you can't just swap the physical card around — and they can make it harder for you to temporarily remove your SIM if you don't want to be tracked by a carrier.

Google's Pixels have had eSIMs since 2017, and Apple's iPhones have had them since 2018...
Now let's see how long-time Slashdot reader shanen feels about them: Shopping for a new smartphone due to premature battery swelling of a cheapie, but surprised to find out I can't just plug the SIM into a new phone. There ain't no SIM here, but rather the dying phone has an eSIM.... Quick research indicated it's only software, so my obvious question is "How secure can an eSIM be?" (The obvious search results also fail to produce "fresh" results.)

But the black hats have already had a couple of years to work on the problem, and it seems intrinsically difficult to do anything securely if you're only using software. My probably obsolete understanding is that part of the basis of SIM security is that you'd have to destroy the SIM to save its data, but is there an actual security expert in the house?

Related question based on my surprise. How would you even know if you're using an eSIM? Especially since it appears to be possible to use an eSIM on a phone with a SIM.
Share your own thoughts and opinions in the comments.

How secure is an eSIM?

Microsoft awarded $13.6 million to security researchers in the past 12 months, From a report: Microsoft said it awarded more than $13.6 million as monetary rewards to security researchers through its public bug bounty programs over the past 12 months. According to Microsoft:
The funds were awarded for 1,261 bugs reported by 341 security researchers across 17 bug bounty platforms between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

The highest awarded bounty was $200,000 for a vulnerability reported in Hyper-V, Microsoft's OS virtualization technology.
The average bounty was more than $10,000 per valid bug report across all programs.
Most bug reports came from researchers residing in China, the US, and Israel.
The company said it plans to announce the 2021 Most Valuable Security Researcher next month.
The sum awarded this year is identical to what Microsoft reported one year ago when the company said it awarded $13.7 million to 327 security researchers for 1,226 vulnerability reports across 15 bug bounty programs in the previous 12 months (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020).

Dell has announced the long-expected spinoff of VMware, the computing virtualization company it has majority-owned since it bought then-owner EMC Corp. in 2016. From a report: The computing giant said it will spin off its 81% equity ownership in VMware, creating two standalone companies when the move is completed in the fourth quarter of this year. That timing depends on conditions such as a favorable Internal Revenue Service opinion that the transaction qualifies for tax-free status for Dell shareholders. The idea is to simplify the companies' capital structures, since arguably investors have valued both companies' stocks lower than they might have because of the uncertainties related to the complex capital structures. Dell's shares rose about 9% in after-hours trading, while VMware's shares rose about 1.6% in late trading. Under the spinoff, which Dell had signaled last year, VMware will distribute a cash dividend of about $11.5 billion to $12 billion to shareholders, which of course include publicly held Dell itself. Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Dell, along with financial partner Silver Lake Partners, own 60% of Dell shares. Dell will get $9.3 billion to $9.7 billion of that dividend, which the company said will help it get more investment-grade ratings and enable it to pay down debt it has gradually been reducing since buying EMC.

samleecole writes from a report via Motherboard: MacOS is generally intended as a desktop operating system, and while it's a very functional operating system, Apple expects it to run on a single piece of hardware. As any developer or infrastructure architect can tell you, virtualization is an impressive technique that allows programmers and infrastructure pros to expand reach and scale things up far beyond a single user. A Github project that has gotten a bit of attention in recent months aims to make MacOS scalable in ways that it has basically never been.

Its secret weapon is a serial code generator: Docker-OSX has the ability to generate serial codes for unique pieces of MacOS hardware, and its main developer, an open-source developer and security researcher who goes by the pseudonym Sick Codes, recently released a standalone serial code generator that can replicate codes for nonexistent devices by the thousands. Just type in a command, and it will set up a CSV file full of serial codes.

"You can generate hundreds and thousands of serial numbers, just like that," Sick Codes, who used a pseudonym due to the nature of his work, said. "And it just generates a massive list." A valid serial code allows you to use Apple-based tools such as iMessage, iCloud, and the App Store inside of MacOS. It's the confirmation that you're using something seen as valid in the eyes of Apple. "I actually went through, and I've got like 15 iMac Pros in my Apple account now, and it says that they're all valid for iMessage," the creator said.

Earlier this week security experts disclosed details on seven vulnerabilities impacting Dnsmasq, "a popular DNS software package that is commonly deployed in networking equipment, such as routers and access points," reports ZDNet. "The vulnerabilities tracked as DNSpooq, impact Dnsmasq, a DNS forwarding client for *NIX-based operating systems."

Slashdot reader Joe2020 shared Help Net Security's quote from Shlomi Oberman, CEO and researcher at JSOF. "Some of the bigger users of Dnsmasq are Android/Google, Comcast, Cisco, Red Hat, Netgear, and Ubiquiti, but there are many more. All major Linux distributions offer Dnsmasq as a package, but some use it more than others, e.g., in OpenWRT it is used a lot, Red Hat use it as part of their virtualization platforms, Google uses it for Android hotspots (and maybe other things), while, for example Ubuntu just has it as an optional package."

More from ZDNet: Dnsmasq is usually included inside the firmware of various networking devices to provide DNS forwarding capabilities by taking DNS requests made by local users, forwarding the request to an upstream DNS server, and then caching the results once they arrive, making the same results readily available for other clients without needing to make a new DNS query upstream. While their role seems banal and insignificant, they play a crucial role in accelerating internet speeds by avoiding recursive traffic...

Today, the DNSpooq software has made its way in millions of devices sold worldwide [including] all sorts of networking gear like routers, access points, firewalls, and VPNs from companies like ZTE, Aruba, Redhat, Belden, Ubiquiti, D-Link, Huawei, Linksys, Zyxel, Juniper, Netgear, HPE, IBM, Siemens, Xiaomi, and others. The DNSpooq vulnerabilities, disclosed today by security experts from JSOF, are dangerous because they can be combined to poison DNS cache entries recorded by Dnsmasq servers. Poisoning DNS cache records is a big problem for network administrators because it allows attackers to redirect users to clones of legitimate websites...

In total, seven DNSpooq vulnerabilities have been disclosed today. Four are buffer overflows in the Dnsmasq code that can lead to remote code execution scenarios, while the other three bugs allow DNS cache poisoning. On their own, the danger from each is limited, but researchers argue they can be combined to attack any device with older versions of the Dnsmasq software...

The JSOF exec told ZDNet that his company has worked with both the Dnsmasq project author and multiple industry partners to make sure patches were made available to device vendors by Tuesday's public disclosure.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer has shown what Windows 10 on Arm could be like if Microsoft licensed its Arm-based OS to the public rather than just to Windows 10 manufacturers. From a report: With Apple's new M1 Arm-based system on chip, Mac users who need to use Windows 10 can't run Microsoft's Arm-based version of Windows using Apple's Bootcamp. The key obstacle is that Microsoft doesn't license Windows 10 on Arm to any entities other than its own Surface group and Windows 10 on Arm OEMs like HP, Asus and Lenovo. Technically, there's nothing stopping owners of the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13-inch or Mac mini from running Windows 10 on Arm, as Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi recently pointed out. [...]

But Microsoft's reluctance to create a license for Windows 10 on Arm for end users hasn't stopped creative engineers from putting together a working example of what things could be like if it did. AWS principal engineer Alexander Graf did just that, using the open-source QEMU virtualization software for Windows on Arm. QEMU emulates access to hardware such as the CPU and GPU. [...] "Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here," Graf wrote in a tweet. Graf previously worked on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux distribution SUSE for over a decade. Now he's a KVM developer at AWS, which this week announced new Mac instances for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based on Nitro System, an AWS hypervisor for EC2 instances. [...] A developer using the handle @imbushuo on Twitter has posted Geekbench versions 4 and 5 scores that compare Windows 10 on Arm on an M1 computer with the Microsoft-made Surface Pro X. Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 whereas the Surface Pro X's scores were roughly 800 and 3,000 in those respective benchmarks.

Comcast has achieved a 10Gbps "technical milestone" that can deliver gigabit-plus download and upload speeds over existing cable wires, not fiber. ZDNet reports: Comcast has achieved a 10Gbps technical milestone by delivering 1.25Gbps upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) hardware. This is being done with DOCSIS 4. With this cutting-edge cable internet technology, you can expect to see up to 10Gbps speeds downstream and up to 6Gbps upstream capacity over a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network. In its first real-world test, to a home in Jacksonville, Fla., technicians achieved its Gigabit plus speed using upon Comcast's Distributed Access Architecture (DAA). This is an edge-based computing model. This architecture has a suite of software-powered networking technologies, including digital fiber optics, "Remote PHY" digital nodes, and a cloud-based, virtualized cable modem termination system platform (vCMTS). The result? Comcast's team consistently measured speeds of 1.25Gbps upload and 1.2Gbps download over the connection.

According to a study by Dr. Raul Katz of Telecom Advisory Services, 10Gbps internet will generate at least $330 billion in total economic output and create more than 676,000 new jobs over the next seven years. It will do by enabling not just 8K video streams for everyone living in your home, but by enabling 5G access points, virtual reality applications, and telehealth. It's not just hardware that's making this possible. Comcast is a major open-source developer and user. As Comcast notes, "The trial was made possible not by a single technological innovation, but rather by a series of interrelated technologies that Comcast continues to test and deploy in its network, all powered by a DAA ecosystem. These include our increasingly virtualized, cloud-based network model." Comcast is working on the "10G" initiative along with NCTA, CableLabs, and SCTE, and other telecom and cable operators from around the world. In addition, Comcast and Charter Communications have worked closely to align on their approaches to 10Gbps and are driving technology standards and architectures to benefit everyone.

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to the Linux kernel with its aim being "to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor." The Register reports: The patches are designated "RFC" (Request for comments) and are a minimal implementation presented for discussion. The key change is that with the patched kernel, Linux will run as the Hyper-V root partition. In the Hyper-V architecture, the root partition has direct access to hardware and creates child partitions for the VMs it hosts. "Just think of it like Xen's Dom0," said Microsoft principal software engineer Wei Liu. Hyper-V's architecture is more similar to Xen than it is to KVM or to VMware's ESXi, and Liu acknowledged that "we drew inspiration from the Xen code in Linux," specifically for code handing interrupts. Until now, the Hyper-V root partition had to run Windows.

Microsoft has also ported Intel's open-source Cloud Hypervisor, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) written in Rust that normally runs on KVM, the hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel. Cloud Hypervisor itself is currently in "very early pre-alpha stage." Even when Linux is the root partition, it will still run on top of Microsoft's hypervisor, a thin layer running with ring -1 privileges. It will no longer be necessary to run Windows on that hypervisor, though, enabling Microsoft to call the new arrangement "a complete virtualization stack with Linux."

This week saw the release Linux 5.8, which Linus Torvalds called "one of our biggest releases of all time," reports TechRepublic: The new version of the Linux kernel brings a number of updates to Linux 5.7 spanning security, core components, drivers, memory management, networking and improvements to the kernel's design, amongst others. This includes updates for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform, Intel Tiger Lake Thunderbolt support, improvements to Microsoft's exFAT file system, and support for newer Intel and ARM chips.

Torvalds said the kernel had received over 15,000 merge requests and that around 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository had been modified. "That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it is scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development," Torvalds said.

Translated into numbers, Linux 5.8 includes over 800,000 new lines and over 14,000 changed files. It also received one of the biggest number of merge requests during its merge window — over 14,000 non-merge commits and more than 15,000 including merges, according to Torvalds. "5.8 looks big. Really big," he added.

SUSE, a Linux distribution company controlled by private equity firm EQT, has agreed to acquire Rancher Labs, a start-up with technology that helps organizations run software in virtual containers across many servers. From a report: The companies announced the deal Wednesday but didn't disclose the terms. Two people familiar with the deal said SUSE is paying $600 million to $700 million. The transaction suggests that even during a recession, demand remains high for technology that can enable companies to operate more efficiently. Talks between the companies began in the spring, and the process became competitive with additional bids, Ursheet Parikh, a partner at Rancher backer Mayfield Fund, told CNBC on Tuesday. There were "lots of Zoom calls," Parikh said. In the past few years, with the rise of start-ups such as Docker, containers became a trendy alternative to more traditional virtualization technology for running applications on each computer server in a company data center. Amazon, Microsoft and other cloud providers came out with services that developers can use to place code in containers, and in 2017 SUSE introduced its own service for managing containers. The companies haven't finalized integration plans as the deal still faces regulatory approval.