Plus our favorite features from Fedora 32, and why Wes loves DNF.

Links:

• What's new in Fedora 32 Workstation
• Fedora 32 ChangeSet
• Linux distro review: Fedora Workstation 32
• TechSNAP 428: RAID Reality Check
• ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner
• Understanding RAID: How performance scales from one disk to eight
• Find Jim on 2.5 Admins
• Find Wes on LINUX Unplugged
• TechSNAP 1: First episode of TechSNAP (in 2011!)
• TechSNAP 300: End of the Allan and Chris era (2017)
• TechSNAP 301: Enter Dan and Wes
• TechSNAP 347: A Farewell to Dan
• TechSNAP 348: Chris is back!
• TechSNAP 389: Jim's first time as a guest
• TechSNAP 390: Jim's second guest appearance
• TechSNAP 393: Chris says goodbye
• TechSNAP 395: Jim joins the show

Plus Cloudflare steps up its campaign to secure BGP, and why you might want to trade in cron for systemd timers.

Links:

• AMD Claims World’s Fastest Per-Core Performance with New EPYC Rome 7Fx2 CPUs
• AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux Performance - AMD 7FX2 CPUs Further Increasing The Fight Against Intel Xeon Review
• Understanding RAID: How performance scales from one disk to eight
• New Cloudflare tool can tell you if your ISP has deployed BGP fixes
• Is BGP safe yet?
• RPKI - The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing
• Why I Prefer systemd Timers Over Cron – Thomas Stringer
• systemd/Timers - ArchWiki
• systemd.time (Time format docs)
• systemd.timer (Unit docs)

Plus we celebrate WireGuard's inclusion in the Linux 5.6 kernel, and fight some exFAT FUD.

Links:

• WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0—and into the next Linux kernel — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
• Linux 5.6 Is The Most Exciting Kernel In Years With So Many New Features
• fs: New zonefs file system — zonefs is a very simple file system exposing each zone of a zoned block device as a file. This is intended to simplify implementation of application zoned block device raw access support by allowing switching to the well known POSIX file API rather than relying on direct block device file ioctls and read/write.
• Ama-ZNS! Zonefs File-System Will Land with Linux® 5.6
• What is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative? — Zoned Storage is a new paradigm in storage motivated by the incredible explosion of data. Our data-driven society is increasingly dependent on data for every-day life and extreme scale data management is becoming a necessity.
• Linux Kernel Support - ZonedStorage.io
• dm-zoned — The dm-zoned device mapper target exposes a zoned block device as a regular block device.
• Device Mapper - ZonedStorage.io
• What are PMR and SMR hard disk drives?
• Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing — WD and Seagate are both submarining Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives into channels, disguised as "normal" drives.
• Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing [Reddit]
• The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux—Paragon software’s not happy about it — When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it.
• The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
• Speeding up Linux disk encryption - The Cloudflare Blog — Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers.
• Add inline dm-crypt patch and xtsproxy Crypto API patch

Plus the basics of solid state disks and how to evaluate which model is right for you.

Links:

• History of hard disk drives — Wikipedia
• How to Buy the Right SSD: A Guide for 2019 — Tom's Hardware
• The Development and History of Solid State Drives (SSDs)
• Understanding IOPS, latency and storage performance
• FIO cheat sheet — Jim's Blog

Plus when not to use ZFS, the surprising way your disks are lying to you, and more!

Links:

• ZFS - Ubuntu Wiki — ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed and implemented by a team at Sun Microsystems led by Jeff Bonwick and Matthew Ahrens.
• Performance tuning - OpenZFS — Make sure that you create your pools such that the vdevs have the correct alignment shift for your storage device's size. if dealing with flash media, this is going to be either 12 (4K sectors) or 13 (8K sectors).

Plus the nitty-gritty details of vectorized optimizations and kernel preemption, and our thoughts on the future of the relationship between ZFS and Linux.

Special Guest: Richard Yao.

Links:

• LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — Join a bunch of JB hosts and community celebrating the 20th anniversary!
• Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
• Linux 5.0: _kernel_fpu{begin,end} no longer exported — The latest kernels removed the old compatibility headers.
• ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — So while these symbols are important for SIMD vectorized checksums for ZFS in the name of performance, with Linux 5.0+ they are not going to be exported for use by non-GPL modules. ZFS On Linux developer Tony Hutter has now staged a change that would disable vector instructions on Linux 5.0+ kernels.
• Re: x86/fpu: Don't export __kernel_fpu_{begin,end}() — My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?
• The future of ZFS in FreeBSD — This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly so that we might all have a singleshared code base.
• Dephix: Kickoff to The Future — OpenZFS has grown over the last decade, and delivering our application on Linux provides great OpenZFS support while enabling higher velocity adoption of new environments.
• The future of ZFS on Linux [zfs-discuss] — Do you realize that we don’t actually need the symbols that the kernel removed. It All they do is save/restore of register state while turning off/on preemption. Nothing stops us from doing that ourselves. It is possible to implement our own substitutes using code from either Illumos or FreeBSD or even write our own. Honestly, I am beginning to think that my attempt to compromise with mainline gave the wrong impression. I am simply tired of this behavior by them and felt like reaching out to put an end to it. In a few weeks, we will likely be running on Linux 5.0 as if those symbols had never been removed because we will almost certainly have our own substitutes for them. Having to bloat our code because mainline won’t give us access to trivial functionality is annoying, but it is not the end of the world.
• LINUX Unplugged Episode 284: Free as in Get Out
• BSD Now 279: Future of ZFS
• BSD Now 157: ZFS, The “Universal” File-system

Plus some good news for OpenBGP and the wider internet community, and a handy tool for inspecting docker images.

Links:

• Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
• Firecracker — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
• Firecracker Design Docs
• Firecracker Roadmap
• QEMU — QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.
• Qemu : Security vulnerabilities
• VENOM Vulnerability — VENOM, CVE-2015-3456, is a security vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive code used by many computer virtualization platforms. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to escape from the confines of an affected virtual machine (VM) guest and potentially obtain code-execution access to the host.
• s2n — s2n is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that is designed to be simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority.
• OpenBGPD - Adding Diversity to the Route Server Landscape — Thanks to the RIPE NCC Community Project Fund we were able to revive the OpenBGPD daemon and bring more diversity to the Route Server landscape.
• OpenBGPD — OpenBGPD is a FREE implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4. It allows ordinary machines to be used as routers exchanging routes with other systems speaking the BGP protocol.
• LSI Questions from Anton
• ServeTheHome
• Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-in-the-Middle SSL Attacks — When users have been installing Sennheiser's HeadSetup software, little did they know that the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store.  To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate's private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought.
• evilginx2: Standalone man-in-the-middle attack framework used for phishing login credentials along with session cookies, allowing for the bypass of 2-factor authentication
• dive: A tool for exploring each layer in a docker image