Plus, we try out Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.

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• 5.15 Merge window — 3,440 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.15 development cycle.
• Amazon’s DAMON Merged Into Linux 5.15
• Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions
• AMD Posts New “AMD-PSTATE” CPUFreq Driver — Leveraging CPPC For Better Perf-Per-Watt
• Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
• AMD Finally Releases Overdue Linux CPPC Driver
• OverlayFS On Linux 5.15 Improves Performance
• Linux 5.15’s New “-Werror” Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain — That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build.
• Re: [GIT PULL] ntfs3: new NTFS driver for 5.15 - Linus Torvalds
• Red Hat will officially support EPEL in the future — The new team is being formed and is expected to start work in October.
• History and Philosophy of EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
• Microsoft Releases Its August Update For The CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution — One of the big fundamental changes with CBL-Mariner August 2021 is Microsoft now provides a public ISO to download of this Linux distribution.
• CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

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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Links:

• 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 our reaction to Microsoft's Android subsystem that's in the works.

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Links:

• Prolonged AWS outage takes down a big chunk of the internet — Amazon noted that the issues are only affecting one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. But the problem was significant enough to take out a large number of internet services.
• Geoff Belknap on Twitter — “I… can’t vacuum… because us-east-1 is down.”
• Canonical publishes LTS Docker Image Portfolio on Docker Hub — The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical.
• Vivaldi Integrates Email Client, Feed Reader, and Calendar in a Browser — The Vivaldi team announced that they are bringing an Email client, a Feed Reader, and a Calendar – all of these together in the latest Vivaldi technical preview release.
• Introducing Vivaldi Mail in Technical Preview
• How to use the built-in GPG feature for Thunderbird
• Systemd 247 Released With Experimental Out-of-Memory Daemon, New Credentials Capability — systemd 247 is very heavy on new features, and one big change for udev.
• [systemd-devel] systemd 247 released
• NTFS read-write driver GPL implementation by Paragon Software — The Paragon NTFS kernel driver patch is now on its 13th iteration
• Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10 — This new initiative is called 'Project Latte,' and similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), will create a virtualized Android environment running directly within Windows 10.