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• Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
• AMD Recruiting More Linux Engineers For Debug, CXL Enablement & More — Notable with their latest batch of Linux openings is hiring a CXL engineer. This role will focus on AMD's support for Compute Express Link (CXL) hardware enablement under Linux.
• WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
• New Linux kernel patch speeds up server shutdowns — The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down an NVMe drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
• Linux 5.18 Hardens The Kernel For 64-bit Arm With Shadow Call Stack Support — With the Linux 5.18 hardening updates there is support added for ARM64 (AArch64) Shadow Call Stack support when building the Linux kernel with GCC 12 and newer.
• Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
• Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS — The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.
• XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
• Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".

Plus a major new feature coming to a Linux distro near you.

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• How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars — This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.
• The Perseverance Mars rover just took Linux to another planet
• Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) on Wikipedia
• Mars Helicopter on YouTube
• Ingenuity helicopter phones home from Mars
• SparkFun Electronics
• Linaro Projects
• Linaro on Wikipedia
• Ivan Čukić on Twitter — Another @kdecommunity #KDE Mars landing a success!
• Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm — While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.
• There Are Big Changes On The Horizon With Linux 5.12
• Btrfs With Linux 5.12 Gets More Performance Improvements, Working Zoned Mode
• XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has “A Lot Going On This Time”
• IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed - Phoronix — This patch series introduces idmapped mounts which has been in the making for some time. Simply put, different mounts can expose the same file or directory with different ownership.
• NVIDIA continues tweaking their work for hardware accelerated Xwayland support — Performance should be fine in full-screen games, as long as the compositor supports the required zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 interface.
• Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working — With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode.
• Apple M1 teaser — So OpenBSD boots multi-user on the new Apple M1 hardware. This still has some hacks in it that need to be fixed, so don't expect support for this in the tree right now. But a big thank you to those that contributed to the pool for getting us some hardware.