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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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• Red Hat Cutting “Hundreds Of Jobs” — The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.
• Message to Red Hat associates today
• IBM announces layoffs at Red Hat — "Our reductions will focus on general and administrative (G&A) and similar roles across all functions and represent a reduction of just under four percent in total," he said. "We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products."
• Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released — Introduces a new Intel VPU DRM accelerated driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, and native Steam Deck controller support.
• Btrfs Receives A Very Important Last Minute Fix For Linux 6.3 — Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last-minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted
• Linux 6.3 Released With More Meteor Lake Enablement — Zen 4 Auto IBRS & Much More
• Linux 6.3 Features Have A Lot For AMD & Intel — Also Steam Deck, ASUS Motherboards & More
• Intel i219-LM Had Only Been Running At ~60% Of Max
• The new Flathub Website — Welcome to Flathub, the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution.
• Flathub Website Gets a Brand New Look
• Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux. Follow along with the techniques demonstrated in this guide. All you need is a Linux server with Docker installed and running.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Released — Our focus, as always, has been improving quality, performance and enjoyment for all our users, whether that’s more elegant update handling for snaps, improved UI for installation and quick settings or a more accessible gaming experience.
• Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster)
• Ubuntu 23.04 with GNOME 44 and a stable Steam Snap — [The] Snap of Steam [is] being promoted to stable. Canonical said over 150,000 people downloaded the preview version, so there was plenty of interest in it. This Snap bundles a bunch of dependencies needed allowing you to run new and old titles without messing with PPAs.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster scuttles into public view — Lunar Lobster adds support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory — a first for a Linux desktop according to Canonical. The feature will allow users on Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans to authenticate Ubuntu Desktops using a common set of credentials.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Flavors: What’s New — Arriving alongside the Ubuntu 23.04 release are new versions of official community flavors.
• Azure AD authentication comes to Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 — Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 is the first and only Linux distribution to enable native user authentication with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
• aad-auth: Azure AD authentication module for Ubuntu — Azure AD User Authentication will be included as part of an Ubuntu Pro subscription in Ubuntu 23.04 before being backported to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and future LTS releases from 2023.
• microsoft-authentication-library-for-go — The MSAL library for Go is part of the Microsoft identity platform for developers (formerly named Azure AD) v2.0. It enables you to acquire security tokens to call protected APIs. It uses industry-standard OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.
• Next Ubuntu 23.10 Name — The Ubuntu release that will be delivered in October 2023, designated 23.10.

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• Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
• FOSDEM 2023 - Dual presentation: FFmpeg 6 and VLC.js
• Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
• Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with *interrupts disabled*. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
• EXT4 Getting Direct I/O Performance Improvements With 6.3 — Improved performance for ext4
• Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups — Some of the performance work is quite juicy, as outlined in today's pull request.
• Btrfs updates for 6.3 - David Sterba
• Linux 6.3 Scheduler Updates Bring Fixes & Minor Optimizations
• RISC-V With Linux 6.3 Lands Optimized String Functions Via Zbb Extension — RISC-V with Linux 6.3 has improved its extension detection and alternative patching infrastructure for dealing with non spec compliant extensions.

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• Android Gets RISC-Y — Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit promises official, polished support.
• Keynote: The Android Open Source Project and RISC-V - Lars Bergstrom, Google Director of Engineering
• New Google Tool Goes Open — The OSV database is a distributed, open-source database that stores vulnerability information in the OSV format. The OSV-Scanner assesses a project's dependencies against the OSV database showing all vulnerabilities relating to the project.
• Ubuntu’s New Installer Milestone — With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.
• HDR Beginning To Work For Linux Gaming — "New Linux gaming milestone: with the latest work from Josh Ashton, HDR can now be enabled for real games! Tested it tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will still need some time to bake to be useful to most."
• Red Hat Planning HDR Hackfest
• GNOME Shell + Mutter 43 Alpha Released
• VKD3D-Proton 2.7 Released With Eight Months Worth Of Changes
• Google Home speakers allowed hackers to snoop on conversations — A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

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• Announcing KataOS and Sparrow — Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.
• Google launches KataOS
• Google Announces KataOS As Security-Focused OS, Leveraging Rust & seL4 Microkernel
• Some remotely exploitable kernel WiFi vulnerabilities — It would appear that there is a set of memory-related vulnerabilities in the kernel's WiFi stack that can be exploited over the air via malicious packets; five CVE numbers have been assigned to the set.
• Linux Gets Patched For WiFi Vulnerabilities That Can Be Exploited By Malicious Packets - Phoronix
• Firefox 106 Brings Improved WebRTC - Better Screen Sharing On Wayland — Firefox 106 upgrades its WebRTC capabilities to now make use of libwebrtc 103.
• impervious.ai — A Suite of Peer-to-Peer Tools for Communications, Data Transport, and Payments, Built Directly Into the Web Browser
• Impervious Ai GitHub
• You’re invited to the Fedora Linux 37 Release Party! — Please register on Hopin and join us on November 4th and 5th for a short program of informational sessions and social activities.
• Fedora Linux 37 Release Party Registration
• Linus Torvalds to Linux devs: Stop pulling all-nighters — "Let me just say that after I got my machine sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I was somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window"
• Linux 6.1 Features Include Initial Rust Code, MGLRU, New AMD CPU Features, More Security
• Linux 6.1 Will Likely Be This Year’s LTS Kernel Release
• Taming the Beast - LUP 480
• Send a Boost — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost and enjoy other improvements to your podcasts.

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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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• Experimental Kernel Patches — Patches sent out today clean-up the code taken on those architectures for bringing CPU cores down and allow for parallelism. With these patches and an 80-core Arm server, a Kexec reboot can go from taking around 15 seconds to now just around one second.
• ByteDance Working To Make It Faster Kexec Booting The Linux Kernel
• [RFC 00/10] arm64/riscv: Introduce fast kexec reboot - Pingfan Liu
• [PATCH 0/4] faster kexec reboot - Albert Huang
• VisionFive 2 — Kickstarter — High-performance quad-core RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated 3D GPU, 2G/4G/8G LPDDR.
• Linux Foundation TAB election: call for nominees — The 2022 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will be held during the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 12 to 14.
• Webmin 2.0 Released — Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like servers and services with over 1,000,000 installations worldwide.
• Flatpak 1.14.0 Released — Flatpak 1.14 brings a variety of mostly small and lower-level improvements to this Linux app sandboxing tech
• Flatpak 1.14 Released With Improvements For Sandboxed Linux Apps
• Firefox 104.0 — The Firefox UI itself will now be throttled for performance and battery usage when minimized or occluded, in the same way background tabs are.
• Rosenzweig – Clip control on the Apple GPU — After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games.
• Asahi Linux May Have OpenGL 2.1 For Apple M1/M2 By Year’s End — " I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year."

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• Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
• Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
• Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
• No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto
• Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
• SteamOS 3.3 Now Available With Many Improvements For The Steam Deck
• Steam For Linux In July Shows A 1.23% Marketshare — AMD CPUs Now More Common Than Intel On Linux
• DXVK 1.10.3 Released With Shared Fences
• Chris’ Steam Deck Review LINUX Unplugged 467
• Lenovo Expects 30+ Platforms With Linux Support This Year, Both AMD & Intel Systems — Lenovo's Mark Pearson provided an update on Linux for their laptops/PCs, including 30+ platforms for 2022 with Linux support.
• Lenovo Linux 2022 - DebConf 22
• Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
• Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices
• Linux 5.19 Released
• Some 5.19 development statistics
• Linux Kernel 5.19 Released with Major Networking Tweaks
• Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features
• Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
• Asahi Alternative Distros docs

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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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• K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
• K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
• K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
• Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
• Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
• Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
• Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
• 5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
• Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
• Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
• Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
• Photopea | Online Photo Editor

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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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• Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
• Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
• Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
• Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
• Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
• Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
• CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
• Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
• Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
• Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
• Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

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• $66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
• Analysis: Relief and challenges for chipmakers as Nvidia-Arm megadeal collapses
• What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
• The Collapse of the Nvidia Deal Leaves Arm Exposed
• Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
• Engineer hired back in 2018 to work on kernel projects
• Open-Source Firmware Foundation Established For Advancing Open Firmware — The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.
• Open Source Firmware Foundation on Twitter
• FreeCAD Also Gets a Foundtation
• Intel Joins RISC-V International, Will Help With RISC-V Open-Source Software — Intel is joining the RISC-V International organization as a Premier member.
• Intel Promotes RISC-V, Pledges $1B to Help Chip Startups | Tom’s Hardware
• RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch — While all capabilities of this feature have been implemented and all tests so far have been passed, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.
• RAIDZ Expansion Feature Pull Request by ahrens
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Plasma 5.24 - Released — Plasma 5.24 improves in looks, ease of use and consistency.
• KDE Plasma 5.24 Released With Wayland Support In Increasingly Great Shape — KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
• Try a New Podcast App

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• Nvidia is reportedly preparing to abandon its $40 billion takeover of Arm — The deal has faced close scrutiny from regulators around the world, who worry it would give Nvidia an unfair advantage in the semiconductor industry.
• SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
• Linux system service bug gives root on all major distros, exploit released — Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit's pkexec, CVE-2021-4034. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program.
• Major Linux PolicyKit Security Vulnerability Uncovered: Pwnkit
• KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps — Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications.
• Qt Digital Advertising Platform
• Steam Deck launches February 25, weekly purchase invites planned — Valve has today officially announced their Steam Deck handheld will launch officially on February 25.
• Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
• Valve sponsors more work to improve Linux graphics drivers

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• The world’s first RISC-V phone might be just around the corner — The Sipeed Maix Amigo kit from 2020 was among the first RISC-V PDAs
• A $16.90 Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board
• Sipeed’s $17 LycheeRV Board Has Allwinner RISC-V Processor
• LLVM Is Still Working On Relicensing, Needs Help Locating Some Past Contributors — LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base.
• LLVM relicensing - long tail - Google Sheets
• The LLVM Project Blog
• German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.
• Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes — Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora.
• amazon-linux-2022: Amazon Linux 2022
• Announcing preview of Amazon Linux 2022

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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• Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
• What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
• Major Changes in 8.5
• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
• Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible! I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)
• Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
• Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
• On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
• Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
• Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
• Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.

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• Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: “Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop” — With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
• Progress Report: September 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Asahi Linux emits usable basic desktop on Apple’s M1
• Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
• Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
• Ubuntu Frame is a secure display server for embedded systems
• Building graphical applications in embedded devices
• Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
• SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
• DNF Better Counting
• Index of /csv-reports/countme
• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
• SUSE Has been Rebuilding RHEL Packages for Years
• Will Furnass on Twitter — “Interesting that CERN are proposing to adopt @CentOS Steam 8 for new systems"
• PowerPoint Presentation

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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

Plus, why Western Digital might be to thank for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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• Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
• Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
• Debian Live install images
• Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
• Linux Foundation Press Release
• eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
• RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
• Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
• Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
• Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

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 what's new in Fedora 33, and an important youtube-dl update.

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• Fedora 33 is officially here! - Fedora Magazine — Fedora Workstation now uses BTRFS as the default filesystem.
• Fedora 33 Review: What’s New and How to Upgrade | FOSS Linux
• AWS Marketplace: Fedora 33 Cloud Base Images (x86_64) HVM
• Fedora IoT To Be Promoted To An Official Edition With Fedora 33 - Phoronix — Fedora IoT relies on RPM-OSTree for offering atomic updates and focuses on container-based workloads.
• Fedora IoT
• SiFive unveils plan for Linux PCs with RISC-V processors | VentureBeat — Developers can use the boards to test code for real-time operating systems, custom Linux distributions, compilers, libraries, and applications.
• The Heart of RISC-V Development is Unmatched - SiFive
• SiFive Is Launching The Most Compelling RISC-V Development Board Yet - Phoronix
• Check out their Chip Configurator
• James Prior from SiFive on Wendell’s show
• Codeplay joins the RISC-V foundation - SemiAccurate
• New installation options coming for Ubuntu on WSL | Ubuntu — Beginning in Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 20246 users can enable a complete WSL experience with simply: wsl.exe --install.
• Asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over youtube-dl takedown demand - Conservancy Blog - Software Freedom Conservancy — We call on Microsoft to resign from the RIAA and remove their conflict of interest in this matter. This is an important opportunity for Microsoft to stand up for the values of software freedom.
• RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms & Pirate Sites * TorrentFreak
• Tzlil on Twitter — So the CEO of GitHub popped in #youtube-dl a few hours ago, looks like they are trying to get youtube-dl back, I hope this works out.
• New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1

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Plus we say goodbye to Koroa, find a reason to checkout GRUB nightlies, and how Android aims to kill passwords for good.

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• LineageOS 16.0 released — We feel that the 16.0 branch has reached feature parity with 15.1 and is ready for initial release. With 16.0 being the most recent and most actively-developed branch, on March 1st, 2019 it will begin receiving builds nightly and 15.1 will be moved to weekly builds.
• XDA Coverage of LineageOS 16.0
• KaiOS now with 85M feature phones shipped — With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google
• KaiOS is doing well in US too
• RISC-V Support Added To The GRUB Bootloader — As working towards this year's GRUB 2.04 update, we've known they have been on the finishing stretch for merging RISC-V support and as of this morning that milestone has been crossed.
• RISC-V Support in the FreeRTOS Kernel
• Bringing energy efficiency to IoT architecture
• The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance
• Thunderclap and Linux — The authors built a "fake" network card2 and performed various DMA attacks and were able to temper with memory regions that their network card should have no access to whatsoever.
• [announce] Struck by a Thunderbolt
• [official site] Thunderclap
• RIP Korora — "Our @kororaproject website has been redirected to @fedora as we do not have any new releases coming. Thank you for your support over the last 13 odd years."
• We saw this coming

Plus the BSDs rebase their ZFS on the Linux implementation, the EU has bug bounties, and Thunderbird gets set to fly!

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• Raspberry Pi joins RISC-V Foundation — We're excited to have joined the @risc_v Foundation as a silver member. Hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and @debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture.
• Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Driver Finally Being Mainlined — The Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen retails for about $60 USD and with the Linux 4.21 should be playing nicely with the mainline kernel.
• MIPS to be open sourced — The MIPS Open initiative will help greatly expand the existing MIPS ecosystem comprised of thousands of developers and over 100 academic institutions worldwide by offering new opportunities to create innovative solutions from third-party tool vendors, software developers and universities.
• Wave Computing takes funding over $200 million
• EU Offers Bug Bounties For 14 Open Source Projects — As the bug bounty programs begin to roll out in January, security experts worry that the programs miss the mark on truly securing open source projects.
• Mozilla "experimenting" with more ads in Firefox. — “This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner.”
• Thunderbird ready to fly into 2019 — Welcome to 2019, and in this blog post we’ll look at what we got accomplished in 2018 and look forward to what we’re going to be working on this year.
• FreeBSD admits that Linux is better (when it comes to ZFS) — In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL. This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos.

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 Debian joins KDE's council of wizards.

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• Arch Linux AUR Repository Found to Contain Malware
• Minimal Ubuntu released
• Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader
• PEP 572 and decision-making in Python
• Firefox for Android enters maintenance phase as team prepares new browser
• Arm throws shade on RISC-V
• But then backtracks
• HTC's blockchain smartphone
• Debian Joins KDE's Advisory Board

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

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.

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• LineageOS 15.1 is finally here — We’ve been working hard these months to get this new version available; the changes that were done in upstream (AOSP) are huge: Project Treble changed the way hardware is managed in Android, so all the OEM-abandoned platforms that are supported by Lineage had to be adapted for the new platform.
• XDA article
• Unity 8 running on 18.04
• Ubuntu metrics collection will be opt-in when upgrading to 18.04 — ”Upgrading users would need to purposely “opt-in” to this behaviour, as that wasn’t explicitly asked in the past.
• Collecting user data while protecting user privacy — The technique varies a lot in exactly how it’s applied, but the basic concept is that for any question, there’s a random chance that the answerer should lie in their response.
• Signal Foundation is born thanks to $50M from WhatsApp co-founder — Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous.
• First RISC-V board available to pre-order — HiFive Unleashed is the ultimate RISC-V developer board. Featuring the world’s first and only Linux-capable, multi-core, RISC-V processor – the Freedom U540 – the HiFive Unleashed ushers in a brand new era for RISC-V.
• HiFive Unleashed launch FOSDEM 2018 Video
• Tech Talk Today is back — Elon Musk bet the future of SpaceX on the Falcon Heavy launch. On Thursday SpaceX launched a pair of prototype satellites intended to form the basis for Starlink, a constellation of satellites that are designed to beam broadband internet down to Earth.