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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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• 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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• 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

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

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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Links:

• 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