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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

Plus why our long-term view for Mozilla took a turn for the worse this week, and two recent enterprise wins for Desktop Linux.

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• Google starts uploading the Android 11 source code to AOSP — Google has officially released the stable version of Android 11 for its range of Pixel smartphones going back to the Pixel 2.
• Android 11 Update Tracker
• Here are all the hidden changes in Android 11
• Google announces Android 11 Go Edition with support for 2GB RAM devices
• SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia — SoftBank is set to sell the UK’s Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than $40bn
• Introducing the Promoted Add-ons Pilot — This pilot program, which will run between the end of September and the end of November 2020, aims to expand the number of add-ons we can review and verify as compliant with Mozilla policies,
• Access Linux filesystems in Windows and WSL 2 — WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2,
• WSL Mount Limits
• Ubuntu 20.10 Adding Active Directory Support To The Installer — The "Ubiquity" installer used by the Ubuntu desktop is set to feature Active Directory (AD) integration with the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10 release.