Android

Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc. Android was bought by Google in 2005. Android is based upon a modified version of the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated on Android's development and release. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android. Unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked first among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the second and third quarters of 2010, with a third quarter market share of 43.6%.

Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 200,000 apps available for Android. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can be downloaded from third party sites (AT&T only permits third party apps on their Aria phone). Developers write primarily in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.] Python, Ruby and other languages are also available for Android development via the Android Scripting Environment.

The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 79 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.

The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.

2.3 (Gingerbread) Based on Linux Kernel 2.6.35.7

Updated user interface design
Support for extra-large screen sizes and resolutions (WXGA and higher)
Native support for SIP VoIP telephony
Support for WebM/VP8 video playback, and AAC audio encoding
New audio effects such as reverb, equalization, headphone virtualization, and bass boost
Support for Near Field Communication
System-wide copy–paste functionalities
Redesigned multi-touch software keyboard
Enhanced support for native code development
Audio, graphical, and input enhancements for game developers
Concurrent garbage collection for increased performance
Native support for more sensors (such as gyroscopes and barometers)
A download manager for long running downloads
Improved power management and application control
Native support for multiple cameras
Switched from YAFFS to the ext4 filesystem

Community-based firmware

There is a community of open-source enthusiasts that build and share Android-based firmware with a number of customizations and additional features, such as FLAC lossless audio support and the ability to store downloaded applications on the microSD card. This usually involves rooting the device. Rooting allows users root access to the operating system, giving more control over their environment variables. In order to use custom firmwares the devices bootloader must be unlocked. Rooting alone does not allow the flashing of custom firmware. Modified firmwares allow users of older phones to use applications available only on newer releases.

Those firmware packages are updated frequently, incorporate elements of Android functionality that haven't yet been officially released within a carrier-sanctioned firmware, and tend to have fewer limitations. CyanogenMod and VillainROM are two examples of such firmware.

On 24 September 2009, Google issued a cease and desist letter to the modder Cyanogen, citing issues with the re-distribution of Google's closed-source applications within the custom firmware. Even though most of Android OS is open source, phones come packaged with closed-source Google applications for functionality such as the application store and GPS navigation. Google has asserted that these applications can only be provided through approved distribution channels by licensed distributors. Cyanogen has complied with Google's wishes and is continuing to distribute this mod without the proprietary software. He has provided a method to back up licensed Google applications during the mod's install process and restore them when it is complete.

Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel and git revision control system. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator.

Early years

Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he holds the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of a ballistic calculation officer. In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to UNIX for the first time, in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.

His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembly language and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. On January 5, 1991 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a month playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his MINIX copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.

Later years

After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996, he accepted a position at the company in California, where he would work from February 1997 through June 2003. He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work. In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to the OSDL's Beaverton, Oregon-based headquarters.

From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.

Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. In 1999, both companies went public and Torvalds' net worth shot up to roughly $20 million.

His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of the Linux kernel.

Although Torvalds believes "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software. He has been criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel. However, Torvalds has since written a free-software replacement for BitKeeper called Git. Torvalds has commented on official GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of desktop environments, he encourages users to switch to KDE. However, Torvalds thought KDE 4.0 was a "disaster" because of its lack of maturity, so he temporarily switched to GNOME.

About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

LINA

LINA is a thin virtual layer that enables developers to write and compile code using ordinary Linux tools, then run that code on a variety of operating systems. For users, LINA runs invisibly in the background, enabling them to install and run these Linux applications as if they were native to that users' operating system.

LINA enables Linux applications to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems with native look and feel. GUI applications running on LINA are indistinguishable from the other applications on the user's machine because they utilize the native libraries of the underlying operating system. LINA integrates native Linux command line applications directly into the DOS, Mac OS X, or UNIX console. The configuration files of Web applications that run on LINA are fully accessible and editable.

Openfiler

Openfiler is an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage (NAS) and block-based Storage area network (SAN). It was created by Xinit Systems, and is based on the rPath Linux distribution. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Its software stack interfaces with open source third-party software.

Features

Networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI (initiator). Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes), Windows NT 4 domain controller and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, Ext3, JFS and XFS as on-disk native filesystems, point-in-time snapshots with scheduling, quota-based resource allocation, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols easy.

The following are just some of the features currently available in Openfiler:

A. Block-based virtualization
1. Point-in-time snapshot support with scheduling
2. Online volume size expansion (testing)
3. Volume usage reporting
4. Support for multiple volume groups for optimal storage allocation
5. iSCSI initiator (manual currently)
6. Volume migration & replication (manual currently)

B. Accounts management
1. Authentication using Pluggable Authentication Modules, configured from the web-interface
2. NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, Active Directory (native and mixed modes), NT4 domain controller
3. Guest/public account support

C. Quota / resource allocation
1. Per-volume group-quota management for space and files
2. Per-volume user-quota management for space and files
3. Per-volume guest-quota management for space and files
4. User and group templates support for quota allocation

D. Share management
1. Per-volume based share creation
2. Multi-level share directory tree
3. Multi-group based access control on a per-share basis
4. Multi-host/network based access control on a per-share basis
5. Per-share service activation (NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP)
6. Support for auto-created SMB home directories

E. Industry-standard protocol suite
1. CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
2. NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
3. NFSv4 support (testing)
4. FTP support
5. WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support
6. Linux distribution back-end for any other customizations
7. Open source provides you the power to modify and deploy software if you want to do so

Stephen R. Bourne

Stephen Bourne

Steve Bourne is a computer scientist, most famous as the author of the Bourne shell (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command line interfaces to Unix.

Bourne has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from King's College London. He has a Diploma in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. Subsequently he worked on an ALGOL 68 compiler at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.

After Cambridge, Bourne spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system, intended for a general readership.

After Bell Labs, Bourne worked in senior engineering management positions at Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. He is presently chief technology officer at El Dorado Ventures, a Menlo Park-based venture capital group in California. He is also the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for ACM Queue, a magazine he helped found when he was President of the Association for Computing Machinery. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Royal Astronomical Society.

openMosix

openMosix Official

openMosix is a free cluster management system that provides single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e.g. automatic work distribution among nodes. It allows program processes (not threads) to migrate to machines in the node's network that would be able to run that process faster (process migration). It is particularly useful for running parallel and intensive input/output (I/O) applications. It is released as a Linux kernel patch, but is also available on specialized LiveCDs.

openMosix was originally forked from MOSIX by Moshe Bar on February 10, 2002 when MOSIX became proprietary software.

openMosix is considered stable on Linux kernel 2.4.x for the x86 architecture, while porting to Linux 2.6 kernel is still under development. Support for the 64-bit AMD64 architecture only starts with the 2.6 version.

On July 15, 2007, Bar announced that the openMOSIX project will reach its end of life on March 1, 2008, due to the decreasing need for SSI clustering as low-cost multi-core processors increase in availability.

World's Largest Linux System Image

 

SGI

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

SGI® Altix® 4700 blade platform and a beta version of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell, SGI demonstrated a single system image (SSI) running on a world-record 1,024 processors. Until that moment, the largest Linux SSI operated on 512 processors - another SGI record.

The record-breaking Altix 4700 system is now installed in Munich, Germany, at the Leibniz Computing Centre Munich (LRZ). LRZ houses Germany's National Supercomputer System, and the Altix 4700 installation marked the completion of LRZ's Phase I deployment, which incorporates 4,096 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors, 17TB of global shared memory, and a 330TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution.

Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Kernel based Virtual Machine

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. KVM also requires a modified QEMU although work is underway to get the required changes upstream.

Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20.

GuestOS Support Status

RSA Signature Forgery Vulnerability

GNUTLS PKCS RSA Signature Forgery Vulnerability


GnuTLS is prone to a vulnerability that may allow an attacker to forge an RSA signature. The attacker may be able to forge a PKCS #1 v1.5 signature when verifying a X.509 certificate.

An attacker may exploit this issue to sign digital certificates or RSA keys and take advantage of trust relationships that depend on these credentials, possibly posing as a trusted party and signing a certificate or key.

This vulnerability is a variant of the issue discussed in BID 19849 (OpenSSL PKCS Padding RSA Signature Forgery Vulnerability) and affects GnuTLS versions prior to version 1.4.3.