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• Status of Embedded Linux — In this talk, Tim will give an overview of issues in the Linux in the embedded space that have come about in the past year
• The 2023 State of The Embedded Linux Ecosystem
• LXD Moves to Canonical — While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.
• Ubuntu Maker Canonical Pulls In Control Of LXD
• Nearly 40% of Linux gamers on Steam are on Steam Deck — Overall the Steam Deck has kind of taken over Linux gaming and June 2023's statistic are pretty striking.
• Steam Deck on Twitter — “Hi all, just a quick note to celebrate a big milestone - we’ve just passed 10,000 Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! 🎉🥳🎉 A bunch of these titles are on sale (along with Steam Deck itself) at the Steam Summer Sale!
• ZFS Block Cloning — Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication

Note: Linux Action News will be off next week.

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• Debian 12 “bookworm” released — This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
• Debian 12 is nearly ready, and reassuringly boring
• Debian 12 discussion on Hacker News
• Linux Foundation & RISC-V International Launch RISC-V Fundamentals Course — This course prepares IT professionals to write assembly language code for RISC-V processors and use high-level languages like C to develop applications for RISC-V-based systems.
• RISC-V Fundamentals Training Course — Learn everything you need to know about RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture that is predicted to become ubiquitous as it paves the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.
• Help Us Test Evolution — If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.
• Evolution Email App Wants Flatpak Beta Testers
• Nextcloud Hub 5 — Hub 5 builds on all the improvements we introduced earlier this year, including the Smart Picker and it’s AI integrations, the cool new Nextcloud Tables app and more.
• Nextcloud on Twitter — Announcing Hub 5: Self-hosted AI-powered digital workspace for everyone!

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• CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
• INTEL-SA-00886
• Intel Security Center
• New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
• NVD - CVE-2023-32233
• Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
• Proper support for the Linux platform - Feature Requests
• Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
• Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer
• Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
• AWS open-sources snapshot fuzzing and policy authorization tools
• Schedule - Linux Foundation Events
• The Linux Foundation on Twitter

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• Announcing Fedora Linux 38 — The Fedora Linux 38 release is here! With this release, we’re starting a new on-time streak. In fact, we’re ready a week early!
• What’s new in Fedora Workstation 38
• Rust Foundation apologizes for trademark policy confusion — The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.
• A note on the Trademark Policy Draft
• Rust Foundation - Rust Trademark Policy Draft Revision
• Canonical Livepatch gets even better — Now supporting Hardware Enablement Kernels.
• Proton 8.0-1 Published With More Game Support — Proton 8.0-1 is the much awaited re-base of Proton against the Wine 8.0 state
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — “Proton 8.0 is now available with many changes. Our biggest rebase to date! Note: it requires a GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Experimental-8.0 will follow sometime this week.
• LFNW Call for Papers — We invite you to submit your proposal to speak at LFNW2023! We're seeking both experienced technical presenters, as well as first-timers to present to a hybrid audience.
• LinuxFest Northwest 2023
• In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have ‘chilling effect’ on software development — Penalties for non-compliance may include fines of up to €15 million, or 2.5% of global turnover.
• Cyber Resilience Act

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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• curl 8.0.0 is Here — This a major version number bump but without any ground-breaking changes or fireworks. We decided it was about time to reset the minor number down to more a manageable level and doing it exactly on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun. There is no API nor ABI break in this version.
• Twenty-five Tears of curl — Taking curl this far and being able to work full time on my hobby project is a dream come real. curl is a huge part of my life.
• curl 8.0.0 with Daniel Stenberg [YouTube]
• curl 8.0.1: because I jinxed it
• Amazon Linux 2023 — When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora’s core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux.
• Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux — Today we’re releasing a big update to our GPU drivers for Asahi Linux, so I wanted to talk to you about what we’ve been working on since then, and what’s next!
• Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed
• Canonical joins the confidential computing consortium — Confidential computing is here to give you back control over the security guarantees of your workloads. As the consortium explains, confidential computing aims to “protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment.
• Introduction to Confidential Computing [YouTube]
• Hub 4 pioneers ethical AI integration for a more productive and collaborative future — Today, we are excited to announce a major step forward with Hub 4 – the very first on-premises collaboration platform to integrate intelligent features across its applications.
• Develop for Nextcloud — Write new applications, extend Nextcloud or integrate other software.
• Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating
• Berlin Meet Up — Friday, March 24, 2023

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• DreamWorks’ Renderer Used for ‘Puss in Boots’ is Going Open-Source — DreamWork animation company is making its in-house renderer open-source very soon
• OpenMoonRay.org — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.
• MoonRay Documentation Home
• Systemd 253 — Systemd 253 has been released. As always, the list of changes is extensive. Support for version-1 control groups and separate /usr systems is going away later this year. There is a new tool for working with unified kernel images, a number of new unit-file options have been added, and much more.
• systemd 253: The future of enterprise Linux boot processes.
• Debian Installer Testing Call — Starting with this release, official images include firmware packages from main and non-free-firmware, along with metadata to configure the installed system accordingly.
• Linux 6.2 — Please do give 6.2 a testing. Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too.
• Linux_6.2 - Linux Kernel Newbies — This release includes faster mitigration of the Retbleed vulnerability and a new FineIBT mitigation feature; Btrfs RAID5/6 and performance improvements, sysfs knobs that allow controlling block device writeback, support for TCP Protective Load Balancing, improved Rust support, BPF features like User defined objects, the runtime verification tool, and some optional RCU power savings.
• The Best Linux 6.2 Features From Intel Arc Graphics To Better Performance For Older PCs
• LUP 500 Micro Brewery Meetup — Sat, Mar 4, 2023, 4:00 PM at 192 Brewing Company in Mount Vernon, WA

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• Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
• Sourceware.org
• GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
• Two visions for the future of sourceware.org
• Plasma Mobile Gear Update — The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022.
• The Work-In-Progress Rust-Written Apple DRM Driver Manages To Start Wayland’s Weston — After passing the initial spinning cube milestone this past weekend, Asahi Lina has been working on bringing up more of this reverse-engineered kernel DRM/KMS driver.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — 🚀 Weston/Wayland works!!! 🚀 KDE doesn’t start all the way yet, but on X at least it showed the splash screen ^^
• Upgrade now to address E2EE vulnerabilities in matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 — Two critical severity vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption were found in the SDKs which power Element, Beeper, Cinny, SchildiChat, Circuli, Synod.im and any other clients based on matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk or matrix-android-sdk2.
• Akamai Turns Linode Up Past 11
• Over the weekend, #MarsHelicopter successfully completed Flight 33 — The rotorcraft reached an altitude of 10 meters (33 ft) and traveled 111.24 meters (365 ft) in 55.2 seconds.
• There will be up to five flights in the 31-day test period. — The NASAPersevere rover will attempt to capture video of those flights.
• NASA’s Asteroid-Striking DART Mission Team Has JPL Members — JPL’s navigation section is experienced at getting spacecraft to faraway locations accurately.
• How JPL’s role in NASA’s DART asteroid impact could save the earth one day – Pasadena Star News
• DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

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• Shikitega - AT&T Alien Labs — New stealthy malware targeting Linux
• LINUX Unplugged 474: Linux’s Malware Inevitability
• New Linux malware combines unusual stealth with a full suite of capabilities — "Threat actors continue to search for ways to deliver malware in new ways to stay under the radar and avoid detection," AT&T Alien Labs researcher Ofer Caspi wrote.
• New Linux malware evades detection using multi-stage deployment
• Shape-shifting cryptominer savaging Linux endpoints and IoT — The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each deliver multiple attacks, beginning with an ELF file that's just 370 bytes.
• Next-Gen Linux Malware Takes Over Devices With Unique Tool Set
• OpenWrt 22.03 Released With Updated Firewall, Support For 180+ New Devices - Phoronix
• [OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 22.03.0 - First Stable Release - 6 September 2022
• Linux Foundation Announces Open Wallet Foundation — The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases.
• Linux Foundation announces the OpenWallet Foundation to develop interoperable digital wallets
• Welcoming PyTorch to the Linux Foundation
• Facebook Transfers PyTorch AI Framework to Linux Foundation for Governance — Today we are more than thrilled to welcome PyTorch to the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it’s hard to capture how big a deal this is for us in a single post but I’ll try.
• PyTorch strengthens its governance by joining the Linux Foundation
• Google Pixelbook is no more, proving the world wasn’t ready for premium Chromebooks | TechRadar
• Linux Plumbers Conference - YouTube
• LPC 2022: Rust Linux Drivers Capable Of Achieving Performance Comparable To C Code - Phoronix
• IO_uring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising io_uring_spawn Announced — It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IO_uring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is io_uring_spawn.
• An io_uring-based user-space block driver
• A pair of Rust kernel modules
• Compiling Rust with GCC: an update
• Mesa’s Rust OpenCL Implementation Merged
• Adding rusticl (!15439) · Merge requests · Mesa / mesa · GitLab
• LPC 2022 - Kernel Summit - Lansdowne - YouTube

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• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

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• Linux 5.18 Released With Intel SDSi, New CPU & GPU Features — Linux 5.18 brings the controversial Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) functionality.
• Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
• Statistics from the 5.18 development cycle
• Btrfs Gets Some Buttery Good Improvements With Linux 5.19 — David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
• Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates — This work will be incrementally deployed as each bit is finished. So be patient, and you will notice releases happening faster and faster!
• Google Summer of Code (GSOC 2022) Highlights of FOSS Projects — Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc.
• Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
• Broadcom-VMware Deal Said to Be Ready as Soon as This Week — Broadcom Inc. could announce an agreement to acquire cloud-computing company VMware Inc. as soon as this week
• Broadcom’s Potential VMware Acquisition: 5 Things About Dell, Stock Prices And Hock Tan To Know
• Broadcom in Talks to Pay About $60 Billion for VMware
• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Has Mixed Feelings on a Broadcom-VMware Deal

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• Linux 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security — A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown
• Linux 5.14 Features Aplenty With New AMD GPUs, SmartShift, More Alder Lake, Core Scheduling
• QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes — RISC-V on QEMU has updates around OpenTitan platform support, support for VirtIO VGA, and a variety of other architecture improvements.
• PipeWire 0.3.34 Released — Bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was added.
• CodeWeavers still hiring for a ‘General Wine Developer' — CodeWeavers announced recently they need a bit of help on finding more developers, with a spot still currently open for a 'General Wine Developer' who will work on Wine and Proton.
• Microsoft, Google partner on eBPF — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the new eBPF Foundation, which was unveiled August 12, plans to expand eBPF and extend it beyond Linux.
• eBPF Summit 2021
• The State & Future of eBPF - Thomas Graf
• eBPF for Windows - Dave Thaler (Microsoft)
• Linux On The Apple M1 Can Now Boot To The GNOME Desktop — Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
• ‘Not great, but usable’: GNOME desktop boots on Asahi Linux for Apple M1
• 30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat
• Linux turns 30: ​Linus Torvalds on his “just a hobby” operating system
• Happy birthday – 30 Years of Linux
• Happy Birthday, Linux: From a Bedroom Project To Billions of Devices in 30 Years
• 30th Anniversary of Linux - Linux Foundation
• Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years • The Register
• Linode Joins Jupiter Broadcasting In Denver - YouTube
• Chris remains on the road! Track is trip live: colonytracker.live

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.

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• Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service — The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
• Linux Foundation announces new open-source software signing service
• Introducing sigstore — Installing most open source software today is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.
• rekor: Signature Transparency Log — Rekor's goals are to provide an immutable tamper resistant ledger of metadata generated within a software projects supply chain.
• Fulcio: SigStore WebPKI — fulcio is a free Root-CA for code signing certs - issuing certificates based on an OIDC email address.
• cosign: Container Signing — Container Signing, Verification and Storage in an OCI registry.
• Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
• German software company SUSE targets pre-summer IPO — SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
• SUSE prepares for multi-billion Euro IPO
• VirtIO Sound Driver Coming — The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
• GNOME 40 Introducing Virtual Monitors — This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached.
• GRUB 2.06 Release Candidate Available For Testing — Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.06 are expanded Btrfs RAID support, LUKS2 encrypted disk support, the BootHole patches and other security work,
• Progress Report Asahi Linux — To adapt the Apple world into a devicetree world, we are developing m1n1.
• Current status of the Corellium team's effort — Wifi now works on Linux on the M1.

Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.

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• Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure” — Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy no-cost RHEL for use within their infrastructure for continuous integration, web servers, and more.
• Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
• Red Hat Announcement — Extending no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations
• Red Hat opens the door for both VMs tand containers in its latest OpenShift release
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Blurs The Line Between VMs And Containers — With OpenShift 4.7, Red Hat attempts to simplify the migration of virtual machines to containers.
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Is Now Available
• OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 release notes
• [Video] What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.7
• Introducing the Framework Laptop — We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.
• Framework Laptop
• Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
• Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
• Firefox 86.0 released
• Total Cookie Protection
• Firefox for Enterprise 86 Release Notes.

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• Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
• Remove cipher algorithm and mentions of copyrighted material
• GitHub reinstates youtube-dl library after EFF intervention
• $6 billion Linux deal? SUSE IPO rumored — SUSE, the major European Linux company, may soon be spun out in a $6 billion IPO.
• EQT Said to Plan IPO of $6 Billion Software Developer SUSE
• Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
• Librem 5 Mass Production Phone Has Begun Shipping — Purism has begun shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers.
• Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
• Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
• Starting January 4, 2021, Google will block all sign-ins to Google accounts from embedded browser frameworks — The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
• Guidance to developers affected by our effort to block less secure browsers and applications

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Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.

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• Updates to the Mozilla Web Security Bounty Program — To celebrate the 15 years of the 1.0 release of Firefox, we are making significant enhancements to the web bug bounty program.
• GitLab: We are increasing bounties in our bug bounty program — Since we opened our bug bounty program to the public in December 2018, our community of external security researchers submitted 1,282 reports and we paid out $515,899 in bounties.
• Expanding the Android Security Rewards Program
• Google will pay $1.5 million for the most severe Android exploits
• Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
• Google To Require "Designed For Chromebook" Devices Support Fwupd Firmware Updates
• Debian init systems - what, another GR ? — Sam Hartman, the Debian Project Leader, has proposed a General Resolution (a plebiscite of the whole project) about init systems. In this posting I am going to try to summarise the situation. This will necessarily be a personal view but I will try to be fair. Also, sorry that it's so long but there is a lot of ground to cover.
• General Resolution: Init systems and systemd
• Open Invention Network Teams with IBM, Linux Foundation and Microsoft to Further Protect Open Source from Patent Trolls — Open Invention Network announced today it is partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
• IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme
• Official Monero website is hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware — GetMonero.org delivers Linux and Windows binaries that steal users' funds.

Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.

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• Today, 28 years ago Linus Torvalds announced Linux on comp.os.minix. — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
• System76 announce new firmware updater — We’ve been working on the Firmware Manager project, which we will be shipping to all Pop!_OS users, and System76 hardware customers on other Debian-based distributions. It supports checking and updating firmware from LVFS and system76-firmware services, is Wayland-compatible, and provides both a GTK application and library.
• The Next Step in the OpenPOWER Foundation Journey — The OpenPOWER Foundation will now join projects and organizations like OpenBMC, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHPC and so many others within the Linux Foundation.
• IBM is moving OpenPower Foundation to The Linux Foundation
• Confidential Computing Consortium — Confidential computing focuses on  securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often  address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network)but encrypting data in use is  possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data.
• Confidential Computing Consortium Takes Shape
• The year-long rash of supply chain attacks against open source is getting worse — Backdoors snuck into 12 OSS packages were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
• Android to drop dessert names — So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change. 

Plus Debian's generous gift, Red Hat crosses the $3B mark, and the Open Source Awards are nigh!

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• Firefox Lockbox comes to Android — Today, we are excited to bring Firefox Lockbox to Android users, a secure app that keeps people’s passwords with them wherever they go.
• AMP for email launched — Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences
• Register with Google to send dynamic emails
• Ubuntu 19.04 Beta is Now Available
• Ubuntu MATE 18.04 Beta 1 for Raspberry Pi
• Ubuntu Studio to Remain Officially Recognized Ubuntu Flavour — The release of Ubuntu Studio 19.04 will remain on-course. Beta is scheduled for March 28th, Release Candidate for April 11th, and Final Release scheduled for April 18th.
• Red Hat crosses $3B revenue mark — Red Hat recorded revenue of US$2.9 billion for the last fiscal year which ended in February 2018.
• LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
• Handshake donates $300,000 USD to Debian — This significant financial contribution will help Debian to continue the hardware replacement plan designed by the Debian System Administrators, renewing servers and other hardware components and thus making the development and community infrastructure of the Project more reliable.
• UK Open Source Awards 2019 — The Awards Event will be The Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh and will take place on Wednesday 12 June 2019.

Plus Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!

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• GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
• Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
• Debian project leader candidates emerge
• Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
• New Red Team Project — The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
• CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
• Funded by Github
• Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge” - Conservancy Blog
• NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
• Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
• Jeff Barr – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Android finally getting desktop mode — The AOSP Launcher has a new component that, when launched, brings up a new Android desktop interface.
• Here are the new Android Q features

Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

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• Intel Working On Open-Sourcing The FSP — Firmware support package (FSP) for initializing the Intel silicon - the CPU, memory controller, chipset.
• Intel introduces the deep learning reference stack — The Deep Learning Reference Stack is highly-tuned and built for cloud native environments.
• Uber brings Horovod project for distributed deep learning to Linux Foundation — Uber has used Horovod to support self-driving vehicles, fraud detection, and trip forecasting. Contributors to the project include Amazon, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.
• The x32 subarchitecture may be removed — The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic.
• Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’ — This means that everyone who downloads AOSP, going forward, will download these two Fuchsia related repos.
• FreeBSD 12.0 released — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
• Ho, Ho, Ho - 12.0 | BSD Now 276

Plus AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.

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• Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
• Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.
• Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.
• AMP Project’s new governance model now in effect — Two key features of AMP’s new governance model are the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC).  We have endeavored to ensure that these committees consist of people who bring a wide variety of perspectives, with representatives from different AMP constituencies.  
• Necuno Mobile: An open phone with Plasma Mobile — With a focus on openness, security and privacy, the Necuno Mobile is built around an ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6 Quad and a Vivante GPU. According to Necuno, none of the closed firmware has access to the memory.
• Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation Announce Joint Collaboration — This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
• Firecracker mini VMs tipped to the next big thing — Firecracker can launch user space or application code in less than 125ms and microVMs at a rate of 150 per second per host. It churns out fairly compact microVMs too, with each requiring less than 5MiB of memory overhead, so thousands can co-exist on a single server.

Plus big news for Flatpaks, the blockchain goes to work, and Open Source goes all Hollywood.

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• Android Pie released
• Please welcome Lenovo to the LVFS
• LVFS: Device List
• Flatpaks auto-update in GNOME 3.30
• The birth of a new runtime
• 94 Companies Join IBM and Maersk's Blockchain Supply Chain
• Dropbox Ending Support for non-Ext4 Filesystems
• Open Source goes all Hollywood

Plus we try out AWS' new Linux WorkSpace, RISC-V's Linux first commitment looks a lot stronger this week, and why we think the STARTTLS Everywhere initiative is a great first step.

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• SiFive talks up RISC-V
• RISC-V so far not as open as hoped
• But will be soon
• Announcing STARTTLS Everywhere
• Gentoo’s GitHub compromised
• AWS adds Linux to WorkSpaces
• Google ups its Linux Foundation membership to platinum
• Google invests in KaiOS

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• LG releases webOS Open Source Edition, looks to expand webOS usage — LG wants to expand the adoption of webOS and the company is working with the South Korean government to solicit business proposals from other companies interested in using webOS.
• The Linux Foundation Announces an Open Source Reference Hypervisor Project Designed for IoT Device Development — ACRN is comprised of two main components: the hypervisor and its device model
• Linux Foundation backs new ‘ACRN’ hypervisor for embedded and IoT
• GNOME Shell memory leak — A number of Ubuntu users have reported that GNOME Shell 3.26.2, the version used in Ubuntu 17.10, has a “sneaky leak” that causes GNOME Shell’s memory usage to increase every minute following a Shell animation
• A GNOME performance bug fixed — So, how can something as simple as updating the displayed time cause such a large increase in the time required to draw a frame?
• Firefox Master Password System Has Been Poorly Secured for the Past 9 Years — For at past nine years, Mozilla has been using an insufficiently strong encryption mechanism for the "master password" feature.
• Questionable changes coming to Firefox DNS queries — Nightly build fans' hostname lookups piped to Cloudflare in limited security feature trial
• Firefox plan to start blocking ads — Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.
• Bitcoin blockchain contains more than transaction data — Boffins warn of legal risks from arbitrary data distribution
• CryptoGraffiti - Bitcoin Blockchain Messages as Text