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• Documentation/process: Add Researcher Guidelines — This document seeks to clarify what the Linux kernel community considers acceptable and non-acceptable practices when conducting such research. At the very least, such research and related activities should follow standard research ethics rules.
• Guidelines for research on the kernel community [LWN.net]
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware" — At least one open-source software project has had malicious code added which aimed to wipe computers located in Russia and Belarus.
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware"
• SiFive bags $175m to further challenge Arm with RISC-V — The Silicon Valley-based chip designer said Wednesday it had raised a $175m Series F financing round at a more than $2.5bn valuation
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Default To Wayland With NVIDIA — Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
• The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
• Hector Martin on Twitter — We've been getting a steady trickle of users with the installation failing because the APFS resizer does a fsck and finds corruption. This confirms my personal experience that Apple's APFS code is just buggy... it seems a lot of people have latent filesystem corruption :(
• Apple M1 Performance On Linux: Benchmarks Better Than Expected For Its Alpha State — I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state.
• Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup — Let's hang out at the park across the street from Prime BBQ.
• Howto Install NixOS on Apple Silicon Macs

Plus the new Firefox security features in beta, great news for F-Droid, and Apple transfers CUPS to a new home.

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• Chrome OS’s Linux app support is leaving beta — Google announced at I/O that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91.
• Android 12 will finally let alternative app stores update apps on their own — In Google's official blog post announcing Android 12 the company confirmed that it’s "delivering on [its] promise to make third-party app stores easier to use on Android 12."
• Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
• Senior Software Engineer - GPU Hardware Enablement
• Software Engineer - GPU, Input and Multimedia
• Principal Engineer - Hardware Enablement for Infotainment/Automotive
• New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team — Christian F.K. Schaller — We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us.
• OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out — Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.
• Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
• Linux 5.13 Reverts + Fixes The Problematic University of Minnesota Patches — Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
• Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner "seizes" control of network — Founded 26 years ago and home to some 80,000 users over 40,000 channels, the freenode is reportedly the largest IRC network and has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster history.
• Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
• Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
• Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
• [HN comments] Welcome to Libera Chat
• CentOS IRC channels moving to irc.libera.chat
• Freenode IRC and Gentoo
• Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
• [FOSDEM 202] Building massive virtual communities in Matrix — In this talk, we'll explain all the features we've been adding to let Matrix scale to support massive virtual communities such as FOSDEM itself, Mozilla, KDE and others.
• JB Matrix Server

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• Linux 5.10 LTS Will Be Maintained Through End Of Year 2026 — Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
• Visual Studio Code April 2021
• Native wayland support with newest electron — Use `--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland`.
• VMware Prepares Linux Driver For Next-Gen Virtual GPU — With SVGA v3 also comes the ability to enjoy 3D guest acceleration on 64-bit ARM.
• Audacity ‘scared and excited’ to be bought and brought under Muse Group’s roof, promises to stay free and open source — Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.
• ‘A massive middle finger’: Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture
• Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy – Purism — The ultimate reason that free software means better privacy is the fact that users can remove any code that violates their privacy and use the rest.
• The Audacity Pull Request
• Policies/Telemetry Policy - KDE Community Wiki
• [pdf] IEEE Statement — One of the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
• LKML: Kees Cook: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident — This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward.

Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.

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• FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates — CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.
• Fedora Linux 34 is officially here! — Following the introduction of BTRFS as the default filesystem on desktop variants in Fedora Linux 33, we’ve introduced transparent compression on BTRFS filesystems.
• Fedora 34 Changes
• Gnome40
• DefaultPipeWire
• XwaylandStandalone
• WaylandByDefaultForPlasma
• BtrfsTransparentCompression
• EnableSystemdOomd
• Remove Support For SELinux Runtime Disable
• UnifyGrubConfig
• An update on the UMN affair — None of the three patches that contained real bugs were accepted by maintainers, though the reasons for rejection were not always the bugs in question. The paper itself has been withdrawn and will not be presented in May as was planned.
• Owncast Streaming Application | Linode Marketplace | Linode
• “Full disclosure” from the University of Minnesota — The researchers at the University of Minnesota have posted a description of the work they did as part of their "hypocrite commits" project. It includes a list of the buggy commits they posted and how they were handled.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives — The latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system is designed to be deployed on the computing edge.
• Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 Released For This New RHEL Alternative — The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
• Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 — The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.
• CentOS replacement distro AlmaLinux gets commercial support options — CloudLinux Inc has announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.
• Commercial Support for AlmaLinux OS from CloudLinux — CloudLinux Inc will start providing multiple support options for AlmaLinux OS in May 2021.
• 8.4 Beta of AlmaLinux Released — This is a BETA release and should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines, unless you don't mind if something breaks. 😉
• Ubuntu Bug Breaks EFI on 21.04 Update With Older Machines — The exact nature of the hardware likely to fail is still unclear. Canonical software engineer Dave Jones suggested modern machines would be unaffected but older machines such as a ThinkPad 420 from 2011 and a MacBook Air from 2012 were affected by the bug.
• elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year.
• New Spectre Exploits Beat All Mitigations: Fixes to Severely Degrade Performance — Researchers from two universities have discovered several new variants of Spectre exploits that affect all modern processors from AMD and Intel with micro-op caches. Existing Spectre mitigations do not protect the CPUs against potential attacks that use these vulnerabilities.
• PDF: I See Dead ﾂｵops: Leaking Secrets
• M1 Mesa Driver Upstreamed — I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open-source stack. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
• mesa - Add asahi Gallium driver

We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.

Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app support.

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• Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
• An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
• Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg - Greg KH
• University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired • The Register
• Greg Kroah-Hartman bans University of Minnesota from Linux development for deliberately buggy patches | ZDNet
• Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits - Kees Cook
• Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota | Tom’s Hardware
• Statement from CS&E on Linux Kernel research - April 21, 2021 | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | College of Science and Engineering
• Security Research Ethics Review. What’s the subject, Kenneth? | by Dave Dittrich | Apr, 2021 | Medium
• Paper: Stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software via hypocrite commits
• Ubuntu 21.04 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu 21.04 has been released and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
• Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
• LINUX Unplugged 402: Our Worst Idea Yet
• (Re)introducing the Community Team
• Fedora 34 To Release Next Week As A Very Exciting Update - Phoronix — After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.
• Red Hat Summit 2021 | About — Virtual again: April 27-28, 2021
• Microsoft enables Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 for developers - The Verge — Microsoft is starting to allow Windows 10 testers to access Linux GUI apps.
• Microsoft Posts WSLg Preview - GUI App Support With Windows Subsystem For Linux - Phoronix
• GitHub - microsoft/wslg: Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
• GitHub - microsoft/CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
• Introducing Linux GUI apps running on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
• Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars​ Perseverance​ has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
• Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
• Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter · The ReadME Project · GitHub — Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
• Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars - NASA Mars
• We’re Getting Ready for Ingenuity’s Second Flight - NASA Mars
• We Are Prepping for Ingenuity’s Third Flight Test - NASA Mars
• Mars helicopter shares first aerial color photo and preps for Sunday flight - CNN
• NASA’s Mars helicopter completes second, higher flight – Spaceflight Now
• Ingenuity: Nasa's Mars helicopter makes it three from three — On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.