Monday was the first day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.

Watch Monday's wrapup session in the video below

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Monday BoF Wrapup video

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• Community and Events

• XArray Proposed For Merging In The Linux 4.19 Kernel

  Matthew Wilcox who most recently has been employed by Microsoft is looking to get the new XArray data structure added to the Linux 4.19 kernel.

  Earlier this year Wilcox was hoping for XArray in Linux 4.17 but that didn't pan out but he believes it is ready for Linux 4.19. XArray is intended to eventually replace the radix tree data structure in the Linux kernel. XArray's advantages include locking support as part of its design, memory not being pre-loaded, and page cache improvements in using XArray.

• Btrfs Gets Fixes & Low-Level Improvements With Linux 4.19

  David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

  The most noticeable change with Btrfs for Linux 4.19 is that it now supports defragging opened read-only files that have read-write permissions. Btrfs in Linux 4.19 is also carrying some validation improvements, error code handling improvements, tree checker improvements, some fsync fixes, a possible deadlock fix, resetting the on-disk device stats value after replacing a drive, and a variety of other code clean-ups and bug fixes.

• Linux 4.18 Benefits from Energy-Aware Scheduling on ARM

  The fourth major milestone release for the Linux kernel was officially announced by Linus Torvalds on Aug. 12 with the general availability of Linux 4.18.

  Linux 4.18, required a somewhat uncommon eight release candidates and follows the Linux 4.17 release that was announced on June 3.

  "One week late(r) and here we are - 4.18 is out there," Linus Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. "It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates."

  [...]

  Linux 4.18 also integrated a new asynchronous I/O interface that improves system polling performance.

• Linux Kernel 4.18 Keeps Things Solid and Secure

  Linus Torvalds published the 4.18 kernel on Sunday, one week later than expected. This has a been a rocky release... and it’s all Android's fault (more or less).

  You see, Android systems lack tmpfs, the temporary file systems you usually see hanging off your /tmp directory. In regular Linux systems, a tmpfs is stored in memory and holds data that applications may need to retrieve at short notice or share with other programs. Instead, Android allocates a chunk of memory (called ashmem) that does the same thing. However, a change introduced to ashmem in 4.18-rc7 made the open source version of Android crash. Unfortunately, all this came to light the week before the final release of 4.18 was due. Nine patches later and the problem was still not totally resolved, so Linus decided to roll back the whole thing and wait another week for the things to calm down.

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In addition to announcing the Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs with GDDR6 memory, NVIDIA used SIGGRAPH 2018 to announce their open-sourcing of the MDL SDK...

Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure...

• Licensing Edgecases

  While I’m not a lawyer – and I’m definitely not your lawyer – licensing questions are on my plate these days. As I’ve been digging into one, I’ve come across what looks like a strange edge case in GPL licensing compliance that I’ve been trying to understand. Unfortunately it looks like it’s one of those Affero-style, unforeseen edge cases that (as far as I can find…) nobody’s tested legally yet.

  I spent some time trying to understand how the definition of “linking” applies in projects where, say, different parts of the codebase use disparate, potentially conflicting open source licenses, but all the code is interpreted. I’m relatively new to this area, but generally speaking outside of copying and pasting, “linking” appears to be the critical threshold for whether or not the obligations imposed by the GPL kick in and I don’t understand what that means for, say, Javascript or Python.

• TLS 1.3 Published: in Firefox Today

  On friday the IETF published TLS 1.3 as RFC 8446. It’s already shipping in Firefox and you can use it today. This version of TLS incorporates significant improvements in both security and speed.

  Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol that powers every secure transaction on the Web. The version of TLS in widest use, TLS 1.2, is ten years old this month and hasn’t really changed that much from its roots in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, designed back in the mid-1990s. Despite the minor number version bump, this isn’t the minor revision it appears to be. TLS 1.3 is a major revision that represents more than 20 years of experience with communication security protocols, and four years of careful work from the standards, security, implementation, and research communities (see Nick Sullivan’s great post for the cool details).

• Chatting with your website visitors through Chatra

  When I started the blog, I didn’t add a message board below each article because I don’t have the time to deal with spam. Due to broken windows theory, if I leave the spam unattended my blog will soon become a landfill for spammers. But nowadays many e-commerce site or brand sites have a live chatting box, which will solve my problem because I can simply ignore spam, while interested readers can ask questions and provide feedbacks easily. That’s why when my sponsor, Chatra.io, approached me with their great tool, I fell in love with it right away and must share it with everyone.

• Send: Going Bigger

  Send encrypts your files in the browser. This is good for your privacy because it means only you and the people you share the key with can decrypt it. For me, as a software engineer, the challenge with doing it this way is the limited API set available in the browser to “go full circle”. There’s a few things that make it a difficult problem.

  The biggest limitation on Send today is the size of the file. This is because we load the entire thing into memory and encrypt it all at once. It’s a simple and effective way to handle small files but it makes large files prone to failure from running out of memory. What size of file is too big also varies by device. We’d like everyone to be able to send large files securely regardless of what device they use. So how can we do it?

  The first challenge is to not load and encrypt the file all at once. RFC 8188 specifies a standard for an encrypted content encoding over HTTP that is designed for streaming. This ensures we won’t run out of memory during encryption and decryption by breaking the file into smaller chunks. Implementing the RFC as a Stream give us a nice way to represent our encrypted content.

• Never patterns, exhaustive matching, and uninhabited types (oh my!)

  One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an error type for some computation, but this particular computation can never fail, you might use an uninhabited type.

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