The idea I believe is more that userspace is responsible for handling which device(s) are used for transmission and notifying the kernel, rather than being responsible for the sending of packets themselves. If you've got an active/backup bonding setup, it makes sense to perform connectivity checks from userspace which can be flexible and complex, then notify the kernel to switch or remove devices that have lost connectivity.

The libteam daemon that's in development seems to have a round robin mode planned and I'd hope 802.3ad, but I guess we'll have to wait and see how that works. I'm sure it'll still need kernel support for the bonding implementations, it's just the monitoring and management functions that are being extracted.

I didn't see a recommendation? Did I miss something?

Xen has been around for quite a long time, but due to the different kernel was hard to use casually. Nowadays KVM with the libvirt + layered tooling is an excellent choice and it's in the stock Linux kernel. KVM will rely on hardware virt support, but that's pretty standard now and because of it, can get very close to baremetal for performance. GUIs such as virt-manager are pretty good for desktop use - akin to VirtualBox. If you find it limiting, the underlying libvirt API and "virsh" type tools are solid.

NetApp aren't disputing that Sun developed ZFS or have a trademark on the name. This is a patent case that alleges Sun, in developing the ZFS implementation have violated patents that NetApp holds on technologies. Sure, don't RTFA, but try getting to the end of the summary.

It would be the latter. The AWS EC2 instances aren't marketed or intended to be high availability individually. They're designed to be cheap and Amazon do say instances will fail. They provide a good number of data centres and specifically say that systems within the same zone may fail - different data centres are entirely independent. They provide a number of extra services that can also tolerate the loss of one data centre.

Anybody who believes they're getting highly available instances hasn't done a basic level of research about the platform they're using and deserves to be bitten by this. Anybody who does know the basics of the platform will know the risks and will be able to recover from a failure, possibly even seamlessly.

While they're not your every day laptop, there are some people out there who have a use for them. Once, while working in a computer repair shop back in 2002, a customer came in with a very battered old Toughbook. As it turned out, it really had been through a warzone, as he'd been a journalist in Afghanistan during the invasion and it'd been his companion for the last year or two.

Despite its appearance, the hardware was working perfectly - more than can be said for the Windows install on it.