Linux Action News

Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production.

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• Status of Embedded Linux — In this talk, Tim will give an overview of issues in the Linux in the embedded space that have come about in the past year
• The 2023 State of The Embedded Linux Ecosystem
• LXD Moves to Canonical — While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.
• Ubuntu Maker Canonical Pulls In Control Of LXD
• Nearly 40% of Linux gamers on Steam are on Steam Deck — Overall the Steam Deck has kind of taken over Linux gaming and June 2023's statistic are pretty striking.
• Steam Deck on Twitter — “Hi all, just a quick note to celebrate a big milestone - we’ve just passed 10,000 Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! 🎉🥳🎉 A bunch of these titles are on sale (along with Steam Deck itself) at the Steam Summer Sale!
• ZFS Block Cloning — Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication

Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.

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• Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode
• Linux 6.4 Released, focus on 6.5 — Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release without making any comment at all on the state of the kernel, or the efforts that led to the release of this version. Indeed, he had little to say about the progress of version 6.4
• Btrfs In Linux 6.5 May Bring A Cumulative Performance Improvement
• Linux Kernel 6.4 Released with Interesting Mix of Changes
• Bcachefs File-System Pull Request Submitted For Linux 6.5
• Early access to the LXD graphical user interface — While we don’t yet advise you to use the LXD UI in a production setting, we made it available as an experimental feature and would like to invite you to take it out for a spin and share your feedback.
• Early look at the LXD web UI - YouTube
• Google Pixel 8 could debut Desktop Mode — The Pixel 8 series is expected to leverage DisplayPort alternate mode, although specific details are not yet available. Through code analysis, it is possible to speculate on Google’s intentions for this feature. One obvious use would be to transform a Pixel 8 phone into a desktop replacement.

What we really like in Debian 12, the big players backing RISC-V, and the improvements in NextCloud Hub 5.

Note: Linux Action News will be off next week.

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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!

Ubuntu gets serious about the immutable desktop, red flags from Red Hat, and the little tricks Apple used to patch Wine.

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• Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base — In this blog post we discuss the architecture of immutable operating systems, their benefits and drawbacks, and the role of Ubuntu Core in the immutable Linux landscape.
• Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement — However, the "tradeoff" to focusing on that is they will be pivoting away from less desktop application work and "cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHE version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
• LibreOffice to be cut out of RHEL installs
• Asahi: Big Updates — Get your updater ready!
• OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux
• Wine comes to macOS: Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit powered by CrossOver source code — We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit.
• Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is Wine
• Apple Home Brew Repo — Using the game-porting-toolkit formula requires downloading the Game Porting Toolkit from developer.apple.com.
• Game Porting Toolkit — Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12. Games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX CPUs also do not work e.g. Last of Us.

How the recent XFS bug was squashed, insights into why Microsoft built their own Linux from scratch, and recent attacks on Archive.org.

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• Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
• XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch — This is a bug fix that we thought just fixed a livelock on stripe aligned filesystems. I'm guessing that in certain circumstances instead of livelocking on repeated failed allocations, it results in a broken mapping being returned to the writeback code and hence misdirecting the writeback IO.
• Linux 6.3.5 Released With XFS Metadata Corruption Fix — Making Linux 6.3.5 a notable point release is that it has back-ported the fix for the XFS metadata corruption bug that was plaguing the Linux 6.3 point releases.
• Azure Linux - Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora — Why did Microsoft create Azure Linux? “We needed a Linux distribution internally,” Perrin said. “We wanted a consistent platform for ourselves.” Now there is “one vendor to support the full AKS stack”.
• Plasma 6 is Wayland only - No X11 for Plasma 6 — With Fedora KDE and Kinoite being fully Wayland by default from login (since F38) to desktop (since F34), it's now time to work toward eliminating our dependency on the Xorg server for Plasma 6.0.
• Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
• Fedora 36 Changes: Replace the fbdev drivers with simpledrm and the DRM fbdev emulation layer — This change replaces the legacy Linux frame buffer device (fbdev) drivers that are still used in Fedora, with the latest simpledrm driver and the DRM fbdev emulation layer.

Microsoft's new Linux server distro, Red Hat Summit 2023 highlights, big changes at CodeWeavers, and Podman catches up to Docker Desktop.

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• Podman Desktop 1.0 Annouced — Podman Desktop offers a user-friendly interface for handling containers and integrating with Kubernetes from a local workstation.
• Podman.io
• Podman
• Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
• Podman Desktop 1.0 Released As An Alternative To Docker Desktop
• Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
• Introducing Azure Linux — This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview.
• Introduction to the Azure Linux Container Host for AKS | Microsoft Learn
• CodeWeavers An Employee Ownership Trust — As of April 12th, the the company has a new shareholder - the CodeWeavers Purpose Trust. This Trust will become the primary owner of CodeWeavers.
• CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust
• Red Hat Summit 2023 — Highlights — The Red Hat Summit 2023 witnessed the launch of OpenShift AI and Red Hat Ansible software, security cloud services, and Linux management features.
• The moment for AI
• Automation and the AI revolution — Generative AI is everywhere. But I cannot overstate how different our approach to all this has been.
• Red Hat Summit 2023: Adolfo Rodriguez, Advance Auto Parts - YouTube — Adolfo Rodriguez, SVP of Technology Transformation at Advance Auto Parts joins theCUBE hosts John Furrier & Rob Strechay for our continuing coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023

Bcachefs hits a major milestone, how the Red Hat cuts impact Fedora, Plasma 6 plans, and the software update bricking EV batteries.

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• bcachefs out for review — I'm submitting the bcachefs filesystem for review and inclusion.
• bcachefs TestServerSetup
• Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Aims For Mainline
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off — On 24 April 2023, Red Hat announced a 4% reduction in global staff. As a member of that 4%, today is my last day at Red Hat.
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off As Part Of Red Hat Cuts
• KDE Developers Planning For Plasma 6.0 — This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019!
• KDE Developers In Germany Planning For Plasma 6.0
• KDE Plasma 6 to Ship with Floating Panel by Default, Double-Click for Opening Files
• Tesla sued over battery-busting OTA patch in Model S, X — The named plaintiffs claim that, despite Tesla saying their batteries are supposed to last the life of the vehicle, the Musk-owned automaker "deliberately and significantly interfere[d] with the car's performance through software updates that reduce operating capacity."

We get you up to speed on two serious flaws, Linux's recent gaming loss, Ubuntu doubling down on RISC-V, and news from the Open Source Summit North America.

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• CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
• INTEL-SA-00886
• Intel Security Center
• New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
• NVD - CVE-2023-32233
• Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
• Proper support for the Linux platform - Feature Requests
• Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
• Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer
• Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
• AWS open-sources snapshot fuzzing and policy authorization tools
• Schedule - Linux Foundation Events
• The Linux Foundation on Twitter

The results from the recent HDR Hackfest, Mozilla's new acquisition, and the concerning crack down on free software encryption.

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• HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
• Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
• Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
• India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
• Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
• Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

What we know about the Red Hat layoffs, highlights of Linux 6.3, and Canonical's bold claim in Ubuntu 23.04.

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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.