tag: linux

At the end of March, the source code to StackRox was released, following the 2021 acquisition by Red Hat. StackRox is a Kubernetes security tool which is now badged as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (RHACS), offering features such as vulnerability management, validating cluster configurations against CIS benchmarks, and some runtime behaviour analysis. In fact, it’s such a diverse range of features that I have trouble getting my head round it from the product page or even the documentation....

Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project - companies could get Linux drivers written for their hardware free of charge, if they provided specifications (possibly under NDA). There is now an April 2008 Status Report for the project - they are short of companies and hardware to write drivers for. This is probably because Linux hardware support is excellent in all but a few specific areas - there is some interesting discussion of the efforts being made to support wireless devices and graphics cards later on in the thread....

My laptop has a Broadcom 4311 rev 01 wireless chipset. The drivers from the latest Linux git releases are vastly superior to the old bcm43xx driver... so as of yesterday, I'm back to running the latest wireless-2.6 code. The former upstream maintainer claims that he gets better throughput with the reverse-engineered Linux driver than he does on Windows XP. While I was at it, I compiled in dynamic tick (tickless) support....

This weekend, I'm at the annual Debian BBQ in Cambridge, and it's very nice weather. All the cool people are sitting outside with their laptops, a good 10-20 meters from the indoor wireless access point, happily using the internet. The problem is, by default, my wireless card just doesn't work at that range. So, today I had a look at the Broadcom bcm43xx driver code, to see what was going on....