Today we are announcing the general availability of Authd, a new authentication daemon for Ubuntu that allows direct integration with cloud-based identity providers for both Ubuntu Desktop and Server. Authd is available free of charge on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. At launch, Authd supports Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) identity provider, with additional providers, […]
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 6.11, which is the kernel version Ubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS will offer. Fittingly, this update arrives a few days before the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit takes place in Vienna, Austria. In his message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List to sign-off on the release Torvalds' writes: "I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out", and asks kernel devs to "give the latest release a try" before getting stuck in with the 6.12 merge window, […]
You don't need to own a Raspberry Pi to make use of the Raspberry Pi Imager. This nifty image writer makes flashing ISO, IMG, and similar files to USB drives and SD cards mighty easy. A new update, Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9, was released this week with some big changes. For one, this open-source and cross-platform image writing tool now uses Qt 6. This framework uplift offers a stack of underlying improvements in terms of stability, plus visual changes too. Raspberry Pi say the Qt 6 port provides "a lightly refreshed UI throughout on all platforms." Comparing the Qt 6 […]
Ubuntu 24.10 features a clutch of headline-worth changes, but also plenty of less obvious fixes for "paper cuts" - including a decades-long issue with thumbnails in the GTK file picker. Feeling deja-vu? GNOME 44 (shipped in Ubuntu 23.04) included a thumbnail grid in the GTK file picker to make it quicker and easier to select the right files to upload, or open in an app, and so on. A feature long overdue, resolving a "bug" which had been open for 20 years! Only, there is a bit of a problem with how it works - some of you may have […]
Report by Omdia and Canonical finds network cloudification a key priority, shows CSPs embracing open source technologies London, UK. 12 September 2024. Today, Omdia and Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, released a new research report which indicates that communications service providers (CSPs) in the US, UK and Germany increasingly view networked edge computing not just […]
The State of ES5 on the Web - Some of the earlier JavaScript build tools focused on allowing developers to write modern JavaScript code that could still run on the browsers of the time by compiling code down to ES5. Time has moved on, but have the tools or popular libraries? Philip investigates, and shares some recommendations.
Philip Walton
📊The Top 5000 npm Packages by Size, Downloads, and Traffic - An interesting Google Sheets spreadsheet listing the top 5000 npm packages by package size, weekly downloads, and weekly traffic. One package is responsible for 278 terabytes of traffic per week, but the top 5000 add up to several petabytes.
Google Sheets / danhorus
Run GitHub Actions Up to 2x Faster at Half the Cost - Blacksmith runs your GitHub Actions substantially faster by running them on modern gaming CPUs. Integrating Blacksmith is a one-line code change. 100+ companies like Ashby, Superblocks, and Slope use Blacksmith to help developers merge code faster.
Blacksmith sponsor
Announcing TypeScript 5.6 - The latest TypeScript has landed with full support for iterator helpers, support for arbitrary module identifiers, --noUncheckedSideEffectImports to import modules without importing any values, and more - all covered in the always thorough release post.
Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)
Is PHP the New JavaScript? - I'm no real fan of PHP, but there's been a lot of discussion on social media around increased interest in PHP by developers who'd usually steer clear of it, largely thanks to Laravel. This post tells the basic story and explains what Laravel brings to the table.
Building the Same App Using Various Web Frameworks - A scientist at Amazon who usually works in Python with a minimum of JavaScript on the frontend wondered if a more modern web framework would suit him better in 2024. To try this out, he tried Next.js, SvelteKit, and the Python-flavored FastHTML.
Eugene Yan
Brand New Performance Features in Chrome DevTools - A helpful look into Chrome's updated Performance Panel and all the different metrics it shows off to help you improve the performance of your site.
Umar Hansa (DebugBear)
React and FormData - FormData is ironically both the 'newest and yet oldest' standard for accessing form data. Here are some practical ways for using it with TypeScript.
Violentmonkey: A Way to Run Userscripts in the Browser - There have been many extensions to run your own custom JavaScript automatically on certain Web pages over the years, but Violentmonkey seems to currently be one of the better and well maintained open source ones. GitHub repo.
Violentmonkey Team
🔎 Orama 2.1 - Dependency-free, full-text and vector search engine for all JS runtimes, with typo tolerance, filters, facets, stemming, and more.
create-fastify 5.0 - Rapidly generate a Fastify project. It just takes npm init fastify app_name to get started.
file-type 19.5 - Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data. Now with WebVTT support.
TWGL.js 6.1 - Helpers for working with low-level WebGL from JS.
🎨 Chroma.js 3.1 - JavaScript color manipulation library.
Canonical is thrilled to be joining forces with Dell Technologies at the upcoming Dell Technologies Forum - Bangalore, taking place on 12 September. This premier event brings together industry leaders and technology enthusiasts to explore the latest advancements and solutions shaping the digital landscape. Register to Dell Technologies Forum - Bangalore A spotlight on powerful […]
An SSR Performance Showdown - Fastify's Matteo Collina set out to find the current state of server-side rendering performance across today's most popular libraries. The first attempt faced negative feedback due to implementation issues, but the showdown has been improved and re-run.
Matteo Collina
Announcing Vue 3.5 - While v3.5 is a minor release, it's one Vue users will love, with big performance and memory usage improvements in its reactivity system. With no breaking changes, upgrade and watch memory consumption drop.
Evan You
WorkOS: The Modern Identity Platform for B2B SaaS - WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible and easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes instead of months. It's trusted by hundreds of high-growth startups such as Perplexity, Vercel, Drata, and Webflow.
Inside ECMAScript: JavaScript Standards Get an Extra Stage - After nine years of annual updates, TC39 has tweaked the process to make rolling out new features faster and smoother. The so-called 'Stage 2.7' has been around for a while, but this is a neat primer to what it represents.
Bye NgModules, the future of Angular is standalone! Angular v19 will make standalone: true the default for components, directives, and pipes. This is already the recommended best practice, however.
Node.js v22.8.0 (Current) - Adds a new API for enabling on-disk code caching at runtime, as well as options to set thresholds for code coverage success.
Astro 4.15 - The popular content site framework stabilizes Astro Actions, a solution for fully type-safe backend functions.
Jimp 1.3 - Pure JS image processing library for Node.
▶ Behind the Scenes: The Making of VS Code - A detailed conversation with two of the popular editor's principal engineers on what makes it tick. VS Code is surely one of the world's most widely distributed JavaScript-powered apps.
How to Use React Compiler - The compiler feature in React 19 is generating a lot of buzz - this "complete guide", as described by this author, covers much of what you'll need to get started.
📄 A Complete Guide to Beginning with JavaScript - A rather epic article packed with background knowledge, context, and third party resources for starting a modern JavaScript learning journey. Cody Lindley
Redwood v8.0 Released - A long standing, opinionated React & GraphQL (and/or RSC) full-stack framework that covers all the bases for professional dev teams with best-in-class tool support. v8.0 introduces a background jobs system, Docker support, and easier SSR and RSC setup.
Redwood Team
Tests Are Dead. Meticulous Is Here - Automatically creates & maintains E2E UI tests. Zero flakes. Backed by YC, CTO of GitHub, CPO of Adobe, CEO of Vercel.
Typist 7.0: Tiptap-Based Rich Text Editor Component - Simple and opinionated. You can try several examples in the sidebar. Well suited for basic rich text situations like writing comments or messages and has a single-line mode.
Doist
Belt: A New Tool for Starting React Native Apps - A CLI tool for starting a new React Native app that takes various mundane decisions away from you and uses tooling and conventions established by a productive app development team.
Thoughtbot
Tinybase 5.2 - Powerful reactive data store for local‑first apps. Now with Postgres support (which can even work in-browser!)
Rspack 1.0: The Rust-Powered JavaScript Bundler - Far from being 'yet another bundler' with its own approach and terminology to learn, Rspack prides itself on being webpack API and ecosystem compatible, while offering many times the performance. The team now considers it production ready and encourages you to try your webpack-based projects on it.
Rspack Contributors
💡 Rspack also has a family of ancillary tools worth checking out, such as Rsdoctor, a tool for analyzing and visualizing your build process (for both Rspack and webpack!)
Front-End System Design - Learn to create scalable, efficient user interfaces in this extensive video course by Evgennii Ray. Explore the box model, browser rendering, DOM manipulation, state management, performance and much more.
Frontend Masters sponsor
How to Create an NPM Package in 2024 - Sounds simple, but there are a lot of steps involved if you want to follow best practices, introduce useful tools, and get things just right. Matt Pocock walks through the process here, and there's a 14-minute screencast too, if you'd prefer to watch along.
Matt Pocock
IN BRIEF:
🤖 v0 is an AI-powered tool from Vercel for, originally, generating shadcn/ui-powered React components based upon prompts you supply. Now, however, it has basic Vue.js support too.
📊 IEEE has published its latest annual list of top programming languages. JavaScript takes third place, but TypeScript has leapt up several places to fourth.
RELEASES:
Prisma 5.19 - The popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript adds 'TypedSQL', a way to write raw SQL queries in a type-safe way.
JavaScript Generators Explained - Jan was frustrated by the quality of documentation and articles explaining generators in JavaScript, and set out to explain things in a way that a more advanced developer could appreciate.
Jan Hesters
Implementing a React-a-Like from Scratch - While it's unlikely you'll actually want to do this, at least thinking about it can prove instructive as to what's going on in React's engine room.
TypeScript 5.6 Release Candidate - As always, Daniel presents an epic roundup of what's new. We'll focus more on it next week though, as the final release is anticipated to land next Tuesday (September 3).
✅ Bye Bye Bugs - Get 80% automated E2E test coverage for mobile and web apps in under 4 months with QA Wolf. With QA cycles complete in minutes (not days), bugs don't stand a chance. Schedule a demo.
Calendar.js: A Calendar Control with Drag and Drop - A responsive calendar with no dependencies, full drag and drop support (even between calendars), and many ways to manage events with recurring events, exporting, holidays, and more.
William Troup
📊 Perspective 3.0 - Data visualization and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly where it can be used from JavaScript. Their homepage shows it off well with a live example.
json-viewer 3.5 - Display JSON data in a readable, user-friendly way.
As part of the Kubernetes v1.31 release, kubeadm is adopting a new (v1beta4) version of its configuration file format. Configuration in the previous v1beta3 format is now formally deprecated, which means it's supported but you should migrate to v1beta4 and stop using the deprecated format. Support for v1beta3 configuration will be removed after a minimum of 3 Kubernetes minor releases.
In this article, I'll walk you through key changes; I'll explain about the kubeadm v1beta4 configuration format, and how to migrate from v1beta3 to v1beta4.
This version improves on the v1beta3 format by fixing some minor issues and adding a few new fields.
To put it simply,
Two new configuration elements: ResetConfiguration and UpgradeConfiguration
For InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration, dryRun mode and nodeRegistration.imagePullSerial are supported
For ClusterConfiguration, there are new fields including certificateValidityPeriod, caCertificateValidityPeriod, encryptionAlgorithm, dns.disabled and proxy.disabled.
Support extraEnvs for all control plan components
extraArgs changed from a map to structured extra arguments for duplicates
Add a timeouts structure for init, join, upgrade and reset.
Support custom environment variables in control plane components under ClusterConfiguration. Use apiServer.extraEnvs, controllerManager.extraEnvs, scheduler.extraEnvs, etcd.local.extraEnvs.
The ResetConfiguration API type is now supported in v1beta4. Users are able to reset a node by passing a --config file to kubeadm reset.
dryRun mode is now configurable in InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration.
Replace the existing string/string extra argument maps with structured extra arguments that support duplicates. The change applies to ClusterConfiguration - apiServer.extraArgs, controllerManager.extraArgs, scheduler.extraArgs, etcd.local.extraArgs. Also to nodeRegistrationOptions.kubeletExtraArgs.
Added ClusterConfiguration.encryptionAlgorithm that can be used to set the asymmetric encryption algorithm used for this cluster's keys and certificates. Can be one of "RSA-2048" (default), "RSA-3072", "RSA-4096" or "ECDSA-P256".
Added ClusterConfiguration.dns.disabled and ClusterConfiguration.proxy.disabled that can be used to disable the CoreDNS and kube-proxy addons during cluster initialization. Skipping the related addons phases, during cluster creation will set the same fields to true.
Added the nodeRegistration.imagePullSerial field in InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration, which can be used to control if kubeadm pulls images serially or in parallel.
The UpgradeConfiguration kubeadm API is now supported in v1beta4 when passing --config to kubeadm upgrade subcommands. For upgrade subcommands, the usage of component configuration for kubelet and kube-proxy, as well as InitConfiguration and ClusterConfiguration, is now deprecated and will be ignored when passing --config.
Added a timeouts structure to InitConfiguration, JoinConfiguration, ResetConfiguration and UpgradeConfiguration that can be used to configure various timeouts. The ClusterConfiguration.timeoutForControlPlane field is replaced by timeouts.controlPlaneComponentHealthCheck. The JoinConfiguration.discovery.timeout is replaced by timeouts.discovery.
Added a certificateValidityPeriod and caCertificateValidityPeriod fields to ClusterConfiguration. These fields can be used to control the validity period of certificates generated by kubeadm during sub-commands such as init, join, upgrade and certs. Default values continue to be 1 year for non-CA certificates and 10 years for CA certificates. Also note that only non-CA certificates are renewable by kubeadm certs renew.
These changes simplify the configuration of tools that use kubeadm and improve the extensibility of kubeadm itself.
How to migrate v1beta3 configuration to v1beta4?
If your configuration is not using the latest version, it is recommended that you migrate using the kubeadm config migrate command.
This command reads an existing configuration file that uses the old format, and writes a new file that uses the current format.
Example
Using kubeadm v1.31, run kubeadm config migrate --old-config old-v1beta3.yaml --new-config new-v1beta4.yaml
How do I get involved?
Huge thanks to all the contributors who helped with the design, implementation, and review of this feature:
For those interested in getting involved in future discussions on kubeadm configuration, you can reach out kubeadm or SIG-cluster-lifecycle by several means:
In Kubernetes v1.31, we are excited to introduce a significant enhancement to CPU management capabilities: the distribute-cpus-across-cores option for the CPUManager static policy. This feature is currently in alpha and hidden by default, marking a strategic shift aimed at optimizing CPU utilization and improving system performance across multi-core processors.
Understanding the feature
Traditionally, Kubernetes' CPUManager tends to allocate CPUs as compactly as possible, typically packing them onto the fewest number of physical cores. However, allocation strategy matters, CPUs on the same physical host still share some resources of the physical core, such as the cache and execution units, etc.
While default approach minimizes inter-core communication and can be beneficial under certain scenarios, it also poses a challenge. CPUs sharing a physical core can lead to resource contention, which in turn may cause performance bottlenecks, particularly noticeable in CPU-intensive applications.
The new distribute-cpus-across-cores feature addresses this issue by modifying the allocation strategy. When enabled, this policy option instructs the CPUManager to spread out the CPUs (hardware threads) across as many physical cores as possible. This distribution is designed to minimize contention among CPUs sharing the same physical core, potentially enhancing the performance of applications by providing them dedicated core resources.
Technically, within this static policy, the free CPU list is reordered in the manner depicted in the diagram, aiming to allocate CPUs from separate physical cores.
Enabling the feature
To enable this feature, users firstly need to add --cpu-manager-policy=static kubelet flag or the cpuManagerPolicy: static field in KubeletConfiuration. Then user can add --cpu-manager-policy-options distribute-cpus-across-cores=true or distribute-cpus-across-cores=true to their CPUManager policy options in the Kubernetes configuration or. This setting directs the CPUManager to adopt the new distribution strategy. It is important to note that this policy option cannot currently be used in conjunction with full-pcpus-only or distribute-cpus-across-numa options.
Current limitations and future directions
As with any new feature, especially one in alpha, there are limitations and areas for future improvement. One significant current limitation is that distribute-cpus-across-cores cannot be combined with other policy options that might conflict in terms of CPU allocation strategies. This restriction can affect compatibility with certain workloads and deployment scenarios that rely on more specialized resource management.
Looking forward, we are committed to enhancing the compatibility and functionality of the distribute-cpus-across-cores option. Future updates will focus on resolving these compatibility issues, allowing this policy to be combined with other CPUManager policies seamlessly. Our goal is to provide a more flexible and robust CPU allocation framework that can adapt to a variety of workloads and performance demands.
Conclusion
The introduction of the distribute-cpus-across-cores policy in Kubernetes CPUManager is a step forward in our ongoing efforts to refine resource management and improve application performance. By reducing the contention on physical cores, this feature offers a more balanced approach to CPU resource allocation, particularly beneficial for environments running heterogeneous workloads. We encourage Kubernetes users to test this new feature and provide feedback, which will be invaluable in shaping its future development.
This draft aims to clearly explain the new feature while setting expectations for its current stage and future improvements.
Further reading
Please check out the Control CPU Management Policies on the Node task page to learn more about the CPU Manager, and how it fits in relation to the other node-level resource managers.
Getting involved
This feature is driven by the SIG Node. If you are interested in helping develop this feature, sharing feedback, or participating in any other ongoing SIG Node projects, please attend the SIG Node meeting for more details.
There are many ways of troubleshooting the pods and nodes in the cluster. However, kubectl debug is one of the easiest, highly used and most prominent ones. It provides a set of static profiles and each profile serves for a different kind of role. For instance, from the network administrator's point of view, debugging the node should be as easy as this:
On the other hand, static profiles also bring about inherent rigidity, which has some implications for some pods contrary to their ease of use. Because there are various kinds of pods (or nodes) that all have their specific necessities, and unfortunately, some can't be debugged by only using the static profiles.
Take an instance of a simple pod consisting of a container whose healthiness relies on an environment variable:
Currently, copying the pod is the sole mechanism that supports debugging this pod in kubectl debug. Furthermore, what if user needs to modify the REQUIRED_ENV_VAR to something different for advanced troubleshooting?. There is no mechanism to achieve this.
Custom Profiling
Custom profiling is a new functionality available under --custom flag, introduced in kubectl debug to provide extensibility. It expects partial Container spec in either YAML or JSON format. In order to debug the example-container above by creating an ephemeral container, we simply have to define this YAML:
Uncontrolled extensibility hurts the usability. So that, custom profiling is not allowed for certain fields such as command, image, lifecycle, volume devices and container name. In the future, more fields can be added to the disallowed list if required.
Limitations
The kubectl debug command has 3 aspects: Debugging with ephemeral containers, pod copying, and node debugging. The largest intersection set of these aspects is the container spec within a Pod That's why, custom profiling only supports the modification of the fields that are defined with containers. This leads to a limitation that if user needs to modify the other fields in the Pod spec, it is not supported.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to all the contributors who reviewed and commented on this feature, from the initial conception to its actual implementation (alphabetical order):
Hacker News
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 6.11, which is the kernel version Ubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS will offer. Fittingly, this update arrives a few days before the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit takes place in Vienna, Austria. In his message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List to sign-off on the release Torvalds' writes: "I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out", and asks kernel devs to "give the latest release a try" before getting stuck in with the 6.12 merge window, […]
You don't need to own a Raspberry Pi to make use of the Raspberry Pi Imager. This nifty image writer makes flashing ISO, IMG, and similar files to USB drives and SD cards mighty easy. A new update, Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9, was released this week with some big changes. For one, this open-source and cross-platform image writing tool now uses Qt 6. This framework uplift offers a stack of underlying improvements in terms of stability, plus visual changes too. Raspberry Pi say the Qt 6 port provides "a lightly refreshed UI throughout on all platforms." Comparing the Qt 6 […]
Ubuntu 24.10 features a clutch of headline-worth changes, but also plenty of less obvious fixes for "paper cuts" - including a decades-long issue with thumbnails in the GTK file picker. Feeling deja-vu? GNOME 44 (shipped in Ubuntu 23.04) included a thumbnail grid in the GTK file picker to make it quicker and easier to select the right files to upload, or open in an app, and so on. A feature long overdue, resolving a "bug" which had been open for 20 years! Only, there is a bit of a problem with how it works - some of you may have […]
