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Better safe than sorry!

In Have You Driven an SELinux Lately? – An Update on the Security Enhanced Linux Project, Red Hat developer James Morris describes some of the background and latest developments of SELinux, which is supported in the Linux kernel. He discusses new approaches to provide a better user interface for the security framework which has a reputation for being difficult to operate. The lecture also presents some information about new fields of use for SELinux – for example the X.org X-Server, the PostgreSQL database or the Xen virtualisation technology. In addition, there is information about current and future developments around SELinux.

Two employees of Hitachisoft further elaborate on the security framework in SELinux for Consumer Electronics Devices, focussing on the use of SELinux with consumer devices operating under Linux. Smack (Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel), the SELinux alternative integrated with Linux 2.6.25, is the topic discussed by Smack developer Casey Schaufler in his presentation Smack in Embedded Computing. In Linux Capabilities: making them work, Andrew Morton and Serge E. Hallyn (IBM) describe how they polished up the incomplete support for restricting root users' privileges which has been part of the kernel for years (see also the LWN.net article Restricting root with per-process securebits).

Miscellaneous Linux kernel topics

All aspects of the Linux kernel's documentation are discussed by Rob Landley in his presentation Where Linux Kernel Documentation Hides. The presenter already looked into this topic while doing a fellowship with the Linux Foundation and collected a bit of information about the Linux kernel at Kernel.org. However, the Linux Foundation stopped financing Landley a few months into the project as the purpose of the whole project was not clear enough. Landley does not seem to hold any grudges about this and concludes his presentation - which provides a good impression of the topic's complexity - by saying "It was fun, but I was tired".

In On submitting kernel patches, long-term kernel developer Andi Kleen, who has been an Intel employee for the last few months, discusses how to best submit and present improvements to the Linux kernel. Developers with little knowledge of the kernel environment should especially heed his advice so their submitted patches can be integrated into the official kernel via the subsystem maintainers as quickly as possible. Those who are interested in the subject and would like to use the Git source code management system preferred by Linus Torvalds and many other kernel developers can also find Torvalds' tips for the practical use of Git in kernel development in a recent discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

That many data errors happen when data is written and which techniques and tricks can be used to prevent this from happening in the future is described by Oracle developer Martin K. Petersen in Linux Data Integrity Extensions. Linux version 2.6.27 is the first to provide the block layer data integrity support (commit, documentation) described in his presentation. Several NEC employees explain how to trigger SCSI faults with a test tool in order to test drivers and kernel for their fault handling in the presentation titled SCSI Fault Injection Test.

In Around the Linux File System World in 45 minutes, CIFS developer Steve French (IBM) provides an overview of the various file systems used on local storage media and in networks. His presentation not only describes existing file systems but also discusses several new systems under development, for example SMB2 and Btrfs. Ext4 block and inode allocator improvements, which was written using the contributions of IBM and Sun employees, discusses some of the improvements to the still maturing Ext3 successor Ext4.

Userlands

Some of the presentations revolve around userspace and distribution-related topics. In Augeas – a configuration API, Red Hat developer David Lutterkort describes a framework called Augeas which tries to provide a uniform programming interface for read and write access to the configuration files and configuration memory systems used by various programs.

Similar to the Windows registry editor, the Augeas configuration editor can be used to access and modify the configuration parameters of various programs from one central location. Unlike the Windows registry, however, Augeas doesn't store the configuration data itself in a central database which programs access to retrieve their parameters, but instead modifies the programs' known configuration files. Any manual changes to the files by the user are said to remain intact.

The presentation x86 Network Booting: Integrating gPXE and PXELINUX does not only deal with the extended functionality for booting systems via networks but also extensively looks at the questions and problems arising from the close co-operation between the two open source projects Syslinux and EtherBoot. The infrastructure of Fedora is the particular focus of Getting the Bits Out: Fedora MirrorManager by Dell employee Matt Domsch and Secondary Arches, enabling Fedora to run everywhere by Dennis Gilmore.

Still more

The OLS presentations mentioned are those most likely to be of interest to heise open readers. A list of all the presentations at the OLS 2008 sorted by topic can be found in the appendix. The PDFs also contain several other informative contributions about various open source topics. Some of these may at first seem slightly outlandish, for example Tux meets Radar O’Reilly – Linux in military telecom. All in all the presentations provide a good amount of reading material for a (rainy) weekend or a long train or plane journey for users interested in open source and Linux.

(thl/c't)

Next: Appendix – Appendix - OLS 2008 presentations by catagory

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