February 21, 2021

Linux Action News 177

20 minutes

We share some exclusive details about the Linux-powered gear that just landed on Mars, and the open-source frameworks that make it possible.

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

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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 zwplinuxdmabuf_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.

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