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• HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
• Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
• Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
• India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
• Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
• Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

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• Nextcloud’s Big new Customer — After a silent migration of millions of users, Telekom and Nextcloud are now unveiling the first feature of the new MagentaCloud: a free office.
• Last Minute GNOME Awesome — GNOME Shell and Mutter 44 have reached their release candidate milestone ahead of the official release in just two weeks, all is going to plan, and to our surprise, there have been several last-minute additions.
• GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractional_scale_v1 Wayland Support
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Complete Their Migration Away From GTK3
• wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling — This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales when applicable.
• Asahi Linux Rust Drivers — This is my first take on the Rust abstractions for the DRM subsystem.
• Flathub in 2023 — It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year
• Flathub in 2023 - Flathub Discourse

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• Akademy 2022: Full Steam ahead! — In this talk I will share how Plasma fits into the Steamdeck and what aspects of KDE made us the right choice for their new userbase. I will then share some of the projects that contractors Blue Systems have been doing for Valve and how the work there benefits not just the Steamdeck but improves the ecosystem for all Plasma users.
• GamingOnLinux category: Steam Deck
• Anaconda Web UI preview image — Download the Anaconda Web UI preview image and boot it on VM or hardware that contains no important data.
• Fedora 37 Hopes To Have A Preview Of The New Web-Based Install UI
• Libadwaita in the Wild — It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021.
• libadwaita — Building blocks for modern GNOME applications.
• Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
• Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
• Nvidia Scraps ARM Acquisition After Regulatory Pressure, Owner SoftBank Prepares Chipmaker For IPO
• Chips are down: Nvidia abandons $40 billion deal to purchase Arm Holdings

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• GNOME 43 Release Notes — After 6 months of hard work, the GNOME project is proud to present version 43. This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.
• GNOME 43 Released With More Apps Ported To GTK4, Wayland Enhancements
• GNOME 43 Notes for Developers
• System76 Launches Redesigned Thelio Desktop — System76 today is announcing the Thelio, Thelio Mira, and Thelio Major with a full-chassis redesign.
• system76
• Next steps for Rust in the kernel — At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
• Rust Porting Begins For Intel’s “e1000” Linux Network Driver — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• Linux kernel’s eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses
• ASUS & Canonical Partner On The IoT — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• OpenJDK Java 19 Released With RISC-V Linux Port, Foreign Function API — OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features.
• Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition — Today, we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google to create the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. We’ve taken the best parts of the Framework Laptop and merged those with the powerful simplicity of ChromeOS to create a high-performance, upgradeable, repairable, customizable Chromebook.

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• New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
• Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
• Canonical Continues Snap’ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu — Canonical has been indicating they want to improve the Linux gaming experience on Ubuntu (and hiring for it) and ensure its a dominant platform for Linux gaming.
• Pine’ Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer
• Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
• NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
• Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
• Debian Proposes Better Discovery of non-free Firmware Images
• General Resolution: non-free firmware
• Office Hours 11 — We launch our new site LIVE!

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• Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! — Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub.
• Roma, one of the first RISC-V laptops, may ship in September — As for the specs, the Roma laptop will, we're told, come with a quad-core RISC-V processor, an Arm security enclave core, a GPU/NPU accelerator for video and AI workloads, up to 16GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory, and up to 256GB of storage.
• System76 Announces New Alder Lake Laptop With Coreboot Firmware — System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware.
• System76.com
• Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4 — The hope with this change proposal is to provide more "official" support for Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4B / 400 / CM4 hardware.
• Changes/RaspberryPi4 - Fedora Project Wiki
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora 37 Looks To Better Manage Its 175MB+ Of Linux Firmware Blobs
• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved
• New Ubuntu MATE Release — Improved compositor and video playback performance, zswap (lz4) by default & optimised image sizes
• Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and is continuing his focus on systemd development.
• Lennart Poettering - systemd + PulseAudio Creator - Departed Red Hat
• Linode Now Supports Kali Linux
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Has A Change On The Way For Systemd-OOMD Being Kill-Happy With Apps
• ManagedOOMSwap docs
• Discussion: systemd-oomd issues on desktop
• 249.11-0ubuntu3.4 : systemd package : Ubuntu

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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

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• Arch Linux turned 20 years old
• Steam for Chrome OS teased at Google for Games Developer Summit — Steam for Chrome OS was announced as being available "right now" at the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15, 2022.
• Google Finally Announces Steam For Chrome OS
• Valve sent the developer of Lutris a Steam Deck to help development
• Steam Survey Results For February 2022 Put Linux Right Above 1.0%
• Roadtest Proposed As A New Driver Testing Framework For Linux — Roadtest is a device driver testing framework whereby drivers are tested under User-Mode Linux against mocked/modelled hardware.
• GNOME 42 News
• The Best New Features in GNOME 42
• Download Fedora 36 Beta
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Daily Build
• Bump version to 42.0
• Mutter Bump version to 42.0

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.

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

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

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• The Coder: Look and feel comfortable, while kicking ass. Life is better in a robe.

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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.

Plus Firefox has a new sales pitch for you, and how HTC's blockchain future is already fizzling out.

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• Linus back in charge of the kernel — And with that, Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window :)
• Pine64 working on a KDE phone — It’s a confirmed news that Pine64 is considering a budget Linux smartphone running KDE Plasma.
• HTC’s blockchain phone is ready for preorder
• Firefox to suggest paid VPN service — A small, random group of US-based Firefox users will be presented with an offer to purchase a monthly subscription to a VPN service that’s been vetted and approved by Mozilla. After signing up for a subscription (billed securely using payment services Stripe and Recurly) they will be able to download and install the VPN software. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android are all supported.
• IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team

Steam Machines were pronounced dead and then alive this week, we'll try and clear things up, and Mozilla has a new project.

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• Linux kernel to remove several old CPU architectures — The architectures which will become deprecated are Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score and Tile. Although not being deprecated, the Unicore32 and Hexagon architectures are also at risk but their maintainers are working on improving the situation so their support can be continued.
• RISC-V Support Continues Maturing Within The Mainline Linux Kernel — Linux 4.17 kernel include support for dynamic ftrace, clean-ups to their atomic and locking code, module loading support is now enabled by default, and other fixes.
• Save money using RISC-V rather than Arm — According to a report published last week by The Information, more than 80 tech goliaths including Nvidia, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and Tesla are working to adopt RISC-V technology. The main reason behind the push to adopt RISC-V is said to be the processor's open-source design, which will facilitate "a much cheaper way to build chips for new technologies like autonomous vehicles," says the source.
• Debian now supports RISC-V — We've been working in the last few weeks to do a (second) boostrap of Debian for RISC-V, and after a few weeks of hard work it is now bootstrapped and has been imported into the Debian infrastructure,
• Linux-Libre prioritises freedom over security — One of their new changes on top of this deblobbed kernel is dropping error messages that suggest users update their CPU micrcode.
• Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Steam Machines no longer show up under the drop-down menu for "Hardware" on the main Steam store page. Promotional language and images for Steam Machines were also previously featured prominently on a hardware-focused landing page on the store (archived version), but that page now redirects to a simple search results page for the store's "hardware" category.
• Steam Machines aren't dead yet — We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed.
• TOR Messenger discontinued — “The adoption of Tor Messenger was low and the real need is for metadata-free alternatives"
• Mozilla Brings Firefox to Augmented and Virtual Reality — We believe that the future of the web will be heavily intertwined with virtual and augmented reality, and that future will live through browsers. That’s why we’re building Firefox Reality, a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets.

Plus a new magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, several vulnerabilities in Intel's Management Engine, and more!

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• Google collected location data from Android users who didn't know — In a nutshell, the whereabouts of every active Android phone and tablet in the world were tracked even with location services disabled and no carrier SIM card inserted.
• Ubuntu want community input on Mir — However we’re also at the place where we need to reach out to the community and ask what are the aspects of your desktop that you value most, to help us figure out a direction for Mir.
• New magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation - Hackspace — The first issue of HackSpace magazine is here! Join us as we explore thinking machines, build a trebuchet, learn how Arduino changed the world, see how far we can overclock a Raspberry Pi using liquid nitrogen, and much more…
• Linus gets heated about kernel security — Linux Lord fires up over proposal to secure Linux by shutting down wonky processes
• Then calmly explains his position — His long post on the matter suggested to security practitioners that “'Do no harm' should be your mantra for any new hardening work.”
• Others act like children — So on the day of Kees' presentation, where he tried to drop a useless 0day on me and talk up how many upstream developers reviewed his code that did the same limitation *right*, I wrote an exploit of my own.
• Vulnerability in Intel Management Engine — Remote attackers could launch commands on a host of Intel-based computers, including laptops and desktops shipped with Intel Core processors since 2015.