Vendors join hands to foster open source NFV

The Linux Foundation wants to make data processing units (DPUs) easier to deploy, with the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project this week.

The program has already garnered support from several leading chipmakers, systems builders, and software vendors – Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, F5, Keysight, Dell Tech, and Red Hat to name a few – and promises to build an open ecosystem of common software frameworks that can run on any DPU or smartNIC.

SmartNICs, DPUs, IPUs – whatever you prefer to call them – have been used in cloud and hyperscale datacenters for years now. The devices typically feature onboard networking in a PCIe card form factor and are designed to offload and accelerate I/O-intensive processes and virtualization functions that would otherwise consume valuable host CPU resources.

Intel announced a move on Wednesday that will inject fresh energy into a Linux kernel project that started close to two decades ago – and was lacking funding and contributors.

The microprocessor giant has made an under-the-radar acquisition of Linutronix, a German developer house that provides services for Linux-powered industrial systems. Intel didn't disclose the amount it paid for Linutronix, which is also an expert in real-time Linux applications. The acquisition comes as real-time industrial applications are set to make increasing use of low-latency communication between controllers, sensors, robots and tooling, and other equipment.

Most interestingly, Linutronix is described by Intel as the architect of the PREEMPT_RT patch set, which when applied and enabled makes the Linux kernel as preemptible as possible. This in turn lowers internal latencies, which is very useful for those scheduling time-sensitive software threads to complete within a given deadline (using the deadline scheduler). This in turn is useful for ensuring, for example, incoming data is processed reliably within a tight time-frame.

The Linux Foundation (LF) will spend over $180m in 2021, 20 per cent up on last year, and highlights the role of its new LFX platform in its just-published annual report.

A non-profit formed in 2000 to support the development of the Linux kernel as well as the wider Linux and open source ecosystem, the LF is the parent foundation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), stewards of Kubernetes and other projects.

In its annual report, the LF states that it will spend over $180M in 2021, up from $148M in 2020. Just 3.4 per cent of that is spent on Linux Kernel support. 56.3 per cent goes towards supporting other projects. Income is forecast to be $177M. In the last five years, the report says, membership has grown by 280 per cent, geographically divided into 48 per cent Americas, 31 per cent EMEAR (Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia), and 21 per cent APAC.

A Chinese Git-as-a-service outfit named “Gitee” claims it has struck a deal with the Linux Foundation to mirror its projects behind the great firewall.

In August 2020 Gitee announced that a consortium of ten companies and Open Source China had chosen it to provide the collaborative and open facilities outlined in China’s 2016-2020 Software and Information Technology Service Industry Development Plan.

Gitee is now considered China’s de facto Git service. While it is not clear why Gitee got the gig over its rivals, it is known that China is not a fan of GitHub and has blocked it more than once on account of the free-wheeling commentary that can be found alongside code.

Facebook has upgraded its Linux Foundation membership and by doing so will assume a seat on the organisation's board.

Facebook's open-source group has been a long-time member of the Foundation, but has now decided a top-tier platinum membership is its best option. Doing so sees it join the likes of Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel.

The social media giant contributes to several well-known open-source projects, including the React JavaScript library, the Open Compute Project, and the cGroup2 container software project.

A new survey of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) contributors, conducted by the Linux Foundation and academic researchers, reported that 91 per cent of respondents are male, the great majority has full-time paid employment, and that they spend on average under 3 per cent of their time on security issues, with little inclination to increase it.

The research is a collaboration between the Core Infrastructure Initiative at the Linux Foundation – now part of The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) formed in August – and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University. There were 1,196 survey respondents, split between invited participants who work for "the most widely used open source projects," and those who responded to an open invitation.

The survey was international, with 35 per cent of respondents based in the Americas, 53 per cent in Europe, Middle East and Asia, and 13 per cent in the Asia Pacific regions. Yes, it was rounded up to 101 per cent.

The Linux Foundation has announced a new Public Health initiative (LFPH) that “builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.”

The new group has seven “Premier members” - Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent, and VMware – and has given itself the job of helping contact-tracing apps that use the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework. Over time the group plans to “support all aspects of PHA’s testing, tracing, and isolation activities.”

That plan has seen the group pick Canada’s COVID Shield app and Ireland’s COVID Green as the first projects it will back.

Open Source Summit Europe LF AI Foundation and Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi), until now two orgs under the Linux Foundation umbrella, are merging to become the LF AI and Data Foundation, a home for projects devoted to AI, machine learning (ML), data, and analytics.

The new foundation was unveiled at the Open Source Summit Europe, which is of course virtual-only (though held in timezones friendly to European folks), and taking place this week.

"We've been having an increasing number of data projects join LF AI," said executive director Dr Ibrahim Haddad in a press briefing. "It's the nature of AI, one is dependent on the other."