The Open-Source / Linux Highlights From OSTS 2019

We've had a number of articles covering the interesting news out of Intel's 2019 Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) held at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Here's a look back at the news out of the open-source event as well as some other smaller bits of information shared during the event.

Some of the interesting news and insights from OSTS 2019 included:

- Intel announced a new hypervisor based on Rust-VMM that is already seeing industry support from multiple key players.

- There's now a Cloud Linux Developer Edition that includes the new GUI installer and store.

- Clear Linux is seeing industry adoption ranging from Alibaba to deployments in Microsoft's Azure cloud to MontaVista now offering commercial support for Clear Linux.

- Clear Linux is looking very aggressively at even better boot times down to 50~100ms issues.

- ModernFW is a new modular firmware implementation doing away with the legacy cruft and hopefully we'll begin seeing it used on new servers starting next year.

- Open Sound Firmware is becoming a huge success and is already being used by new Intel Chromebooks.

- Intel has been ramping up their FreeBSD support.

- KVMGT is performing much better than VirtIO-GPU.

- Rust is becoming very applicable for systems programming and a new FFI working group is aiming to ensure parity with C.

- Maturing ACPI HMAT support is helping Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory support.

Raja: "A majority of this is #opensource" pic.twitter.com/eney37TDp6

— Phoronix (@phoronix) May 14, 2019

- Raja was there briefly to further talk up open-source software at Intel.

- There was an open-source panel discussion about driving more inclusivity in open-source software projects rather than just diversity. An analogy used was diversity is like inviting someone to a dance while inclusivity is asking someone to dance. There was also a call for removing terms like whitelist/blacklist and master/slave, among other steps, to help with inclusivity and making open-source more welcoming.

- Around 50% of the VMs on Azure are Linux-based and around 60% of the images on Azure marketplace are Linux-based. Microsoft also acknowledged that Linux can outperform Windows on Hyper-V. Any new Azure features are also now supported both on Windows and Linux at the same time.

- CrOS VM used for running Linux applications on Chromebook will also be used by Android devices and also in the data center (perhaps as part of Stadia?)

- Intel is increasing their investment in various infrastructure projects and other high priority yet often overlooked projects.

Overall, OSTS 2019 was a very interesting/fun/technical event. Thanks to Intel for having us out there.