Intel announced at their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE to provide Intel-optimized Linux distributions, Phoronix reports. This is part of Intel’s push for “optimized performance” in the Linux world.

The collaboration aims to provide Intel-optimized distributions of enterprise software releases, ensuring optimized performance for the latest Intel architectures. This is an extension of previous collaborations, such as Canonical and Intel’s work on Ubuntu optimized for select Intel CPUs.

In addition to the collaboration on Linux distributions, Intel and Red Hat announced an expanded collaboration with Intel contributing to upstream RHEL through CentOS Stream. Intel will also continue contributing performance optimizations to tools and frameworks in the AI space, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.

These collaborations are expected to bring new optimizations for performance and power efficiency. Intel’s Clear Linux platform will continue to be maintained with aggressive performance optimizations. The enterprise Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and SUSE, are exploring raising their baseline requirements and implementing optimized libraries based on the CPU in use.

Phoronix promises to report on the results of these collaborations, including benchmarking.

Source: Phoronix.

The New Stack has posted a guide on how to harden n Ubuntu server. Ubuntu is a popular choice for container deployments, but many admins and DevOps teams overlook the importance of securing the operating system itself. The article provides a guide to hardening Ubuntu to ensure a secure foundation for deployments. The steps include:

1. Schedule regular upgrades to ensure the server is patched against the latest threats.

2. Change sudo and SSH settings.

3. Install and configure fail2ban to automatically ban IP addresses that attempt to compromise the server via SSH.

4. Secure shared memory by mounting /run/shm with certain privileges.

5. Enable and configure the Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) and allow SSH connections.

By following these steps, admins and DevOps teams can significantly enhance the security of their Ubuntu Server deployments. Head over to The New Stack and read the guide!

Source: The New Stack.

This guide will help you set up a Kubernetes cluster, including a service mesh using k3s (at the time of writing at version 0.10.2) and Rio. We’ll deploy the cluster on DigitalOcean. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be the OS during this tutorial. If you sign up to DigitalOcean using this link, you’ll receive $50 to spend on their services over 30 days. If you wish to run your cluster on your own hardware, you could do so on Raspberry Pis (ARM64) or Intel NUCs (x86_64) for example.

This article will show how to compile ZFS on Linux 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 18.04 on ARM64, specifically the FriendlyElec NanoPi M4 single board computer, which has a four-port SATA HAT available. It also works great on other single-board computers, and I’ve successfully compiled and used ZFS on the Raspberry Pi. These instructions will likely work on other architectures supported by ZFS on Linux, such as x86_64. Install ZFS build requirements Use apt to install the packages needed to build ZFS 0.