Linux Action News Video

The controversial change for the GNU Toolchain, critical vulnerabilities in popular Matrix clients, and the significant milestone for the Ingenuity LinuxCopter this week.

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• Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
• Sourceware.org
• GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
• Two visions for the future of sourceware.org
• Plasma Mobile Gear Update — The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022.
• The Work-In-Progress Rust-Written Apple DRM Driver Manages To Start Wayland’s Weston — After passing the initial spinning cube milestone this past weekend, Asahi Lina has been working on bringing up more of this reverse-engineered kernel DRM/KMS driver.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — 🚀 Weston/Wayland works!!! 🚀 KDE doesn’t start all the way yet, but on X at least it showed the splash screen ^^
• Upgrade now to address E2EE vulnerabilities in matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 — Two critical severity vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption were found in the SDKs which power Element, Beeper, Cinny, SchildiChat, Circuli, Synod.im and any other clients based on matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk or matrix-android-sdk2.
• Akamai Turns Linode Up Past 11
• Over the weekend, #MarsHelicopter successfully completed Flight 33 — The rotorcraft reached an altitude of 10 meters (33 ft) and traveled 111.24 meters (365 ft) in 55.2 seconds.
• There will be up to five flights in the 31-day test period. — The NASAPersevere rover will attempt to capture video of those flights.
• NASA’s Asteroid-Striking DART Mission Team Has JPL Members — JPL’s navigation section is experienced at getting spacecraft to faraway locations accurately.
• How JPL’s role in NASA’s DART asteroid impact could save the earth one day – Pasadena Star News
• DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

GNOME 43 highlights, Canonical's new hardware partner, and why we're disappointed in the Framework Chromebook.

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• GNOME 43 Release Notes — After 6 months of hard work, the GNOME project is proud to present version 43. This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.
• GNOME 43 Released With More Apps Ported To GTK4, Wayland Enhancements
• GNOME 43 Notes for Developers
• System76 Launches Redesigned Thelio Desktop — System76 today is announcing the Thelio, Thelio Mira, and Thelio Major with a full-chassis redesign.
• system76
• Next steps for Rust in the kernel — At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
• Rust Porting Begins For Intel’s “e1000” Linux Network Driver — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• Linux kernel’s eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses
• ASUS & Canonical Partner On The IoT — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• OpenJDK Java 19 Released With RISC-V Linux Port, Foreign Function API — OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features.
• Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition — Today, we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google to create the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. We’ve taken the best parts of the Framework Laptop and merged those with the powerful simplicity of ChromeOS to create a high-performance, upgradeable, repairable, customizable Chromebook.

The Linux Foundation takes a victory lap, Google kills another community-loved project, and key moments from the Linux Plumbers Conference.

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• Shikitega - AT&T Alien Labs — New stealthy malware targeting Linux
• LINUX Unplugged 474: Linux’s Malware Inevitability
• New Linux malware combines unusual stealth with a full suite of capabilities — "Threat actors continue to search for ways to deliver malware in new ways to stay under the radar and avoid detection," AT&T Alien Labs researcher Ofer Caspi wrote.
• New Linux malware evades detection using multi-stage deployment
• Shape-shifting cryptominer savaging Linux endpoints and IoT — The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each deliver multiple attacks, beginning with an ELF file that's just 370 bytes.
• Next-Gen Linux Malware Takes Over Devices With Unique Tool Set
• OpenWrt 22.03 Released With Updated Firewall, Support For 180+ New Devices - Phoronix
• [OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 22.03.0 - First Stable Release - 6 September 2022
• Linux Foundation Announces Open Wallet Foundation — The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases.
• Linux Foundation announces the OpenWallet Foundation to develop interoperable digital wallets
• Welcoming PyTorch to the Linux Foundation
• Facebook Transfers PyTorch AI Framework to Linux Foundation for Governance — Today we are more than thrilled to welcome PyTorch to the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it’s hard to capture how big a deal this is for us in a single post but I’ll try.
• PyTorch strengthens its governance by joining the Linux Foundation
• Google Pixelbook is no more, proving the world wasn’t ready for premium Chromebooks | TechRadar
• Linux Plumbers Conference - YouTube
• LPC 2022: Rust Linux Drivers Capable Of Achieving Performance Comparable To C Code - Phoronix
• IOuring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising iouringspawn Announced — It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IOuring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is iouringspawn.
• An io_uring-based user-space block driver
• A pair of Rust kernel modules
• Compiling Rust with GCC: an update
• Mesa’s Rust OpenCL Implementation Merged
• Adding rusticl (!15439) · Merge requests · Mesa / mesa · GitLab
• LPC 2022 - Kernel Summit - Lansdowne - YouTube

Linux goes underwater, Microsoft kills the Teams' Linux app, and the nasty GRUB bug some of us could not avoid.

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• Mircosoft Teams desktop client on Linux is being retired — We are updating this message to indicate we will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days
• Rish Tandon on Twitter — “With this change, we are taking a major step in #MicrosoftTeams Teams architecture. We are moving away from Electron to Edge Webview2. Teams will continue to remain a hybrid app but now it will be powered by #MicrosoftEdge. Also Angular is gone. We are now 100% on reactjs”
• Teams 2.0 Moves Away from Electron to Embrace Edge WebView2
• Full transparency on the Grub issue — After updating to grub 2.06.r322 many users reported that their machines could fail to boot or booted directly into the BIOS or another OS.
• Problem with booting after last upgrade to Grub 2.06.r322
• Grub bootloader upgrade and configuration incompatibilities - Arch News
• Latest Grub update - Testing Repo - couldnt boot
• grub.git - GNU GRUB
• Possible Fix for those Impacted
• PipeWire 0.3.57 Released — An AAC decoder was added so that PipeWire can now also function as an A2DP AAC receiver.
• PipeWire 0.3.57 Adds AAC Decoder, Opus For Bluetooth
• Nmap 7.93 the 25th anniversary edition has been released — Twenty five years ago, I released the first version of Nmap in a Phrack article named The Art of Port Scanning.
• SUSE turns 30 — From our start in Nuremberg on September 2, 1992 to our record-breaking IPO in 2021 and continued growth, SUSE has always put community first, including our employee community.
• Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year — The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.
• Subsea Cloud announces three underwater data center projects - DCD
• Underwater data centres are coming. Can they slash CO2 emissions and make the Internet faster? | Euronews

Debian’s firmware future is up for debate, Pine64 teases a RISC-V SBC, and some of your favorite tools just got new tricks.

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• New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
• Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
• Canonical Continues Snap’ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu — Canonical has been indicating they want to improve the Linux gaming experience on Ubuntu (and hiring for it) and ensure its a dominant platform for Linux gaming.
• Pine’ Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer
• Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
• NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
• Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
• Debian Proposes Better Discovery of non-free Firmware Images
• General Resolution: non-free firmware
• Office Hours 11 — We launch our new site LIVE!

Details on two new efforts in the Linux kernel, the Pi-like RISC-V board that just hit its funding goal, and a significant milestone for Asahi GPU driver development.

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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."

A Linux jailbreak that's a win for Right to Repair, our favorite things in Android 13, and the major features that just missed the Linux 6.0 window.

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• Android 13 is in AOSP — Today we’re pushing the Android 13 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android.
• Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
• Glibc 2.36 Dropping DTHASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games — The breakage stems from the DTHASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DTGNUHASH.
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DTHASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.
• Carlos O’Donell on Twitter — How far should Linux ELF follow the generic ELF standard (gABI)? We recently let distributions drop DTHASH from glibc builds (mandatory under the gABI). This broke EPIC's Easy Anti-Cheat. We should ask the gABI for DTHASH to be optional.
• GLIBC update broke EAC for most games that use it — Issue #6051 · ValveSoftware/Proton
• Should we make DTHASH dynamic section for glibc?
• gapi discussion: Making DTHASH optional?
• Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits — Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.
• Linux 6.0 arrives with performance improvements and more Rust coming
• Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations
• Real-Time “PREEMPTRT” Not in 6.0-rc1 — Of the 50 patches, it's not too bad either as there are five patches for example that are rather trivial for just enabling real-time (RT) support in the Kconfig files for ARM / ARM64 / POWER / x86 / x86_64. There are also a handful of patches each specific to POWER and the i915 graphics driver code.
• Debian turns 29! — Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
• LocalGroups - Debian Wiki
• A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave — An exploit that provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.
• mu on Twitter — Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
• How a version of Doom running on a John Deere tractor champions the right-to-repair movement — Sick Codes achieved this by working with different tractor control touchscreen consoles, narrowing it down to a select few models, and finding a way to exploit these devices.
• Right to repair movement goes Deere hunting
• The debate over right to repair in 2022 | Successful Farming
• Deere Hit with Class Action Lawsuit Over Right to Repair
• Late Night Linux – Episode 190

GitHub steps in it this week, Microsoft's Linux distribution now runs on bare metal, FFmpeg gets IPFS support, and the odd thing going on with the kernel.

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• Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
• CBL-Mariner GitHub
• GitHub Moves to Guard Open Source Against Supply Chain Attacks — The popular Microsoft-owned code repository plans to roll out code signing, which will help beef up the security of open source projects.

The real story behind the "Massive GitHub Malware attack," significant updates for the Steam Deck, and the inside scoop on Lenovo's big Linux ambitions.

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• Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
• Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
• Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
• No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto
• Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
• SteamOS 3.3 Now Available With Many Improvements For The Steam Deck
• Steam For Linux In July Shows A 1.23% Marketshare — AMD CPUs Now More Common Than Intel On Linux
• DXVK 1.10.3 Released With Shared Fences
• Chris’ Steam Deck Review LINUX Unplugged 467
• Lenovo Expects 30+ Platforms With Linux Support This Year, Both AMD & Intel Systems — Lenovo's Mark Pearson provided an update on Linux for their laptops/PCs, including 30+ platforms for 2022 with Linux support.
• Lenovo Linux 2022 - DebConf 22
• Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
• Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices
• Linux 5.19 Released
• Some 5.19 development statistics
• Linux Kernel 5.19 Released with Major Networking Tweaks
• Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features
• Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
• Asahi Alternative Distros docs

Red Hat hints at its future direction, why realtime might finally come to Linux after all these years, and our reaction to Google's ambitious new programing language.

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• Red Hat’s next steps, according to its new CEO — "We expect to see an 800% increase in edge applications built by 2024. We want those applications to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We think we have a unique position to connect end devices back to the assets that you have in your data centers and cloud that you use to run your company today."
• PREEMPT_RT Might Be Ready To Finally Land In Linux 5.20 — The Linux real-time patch series has been getting smaller with time and quite close to crossing the finish line with just around 50 patches to be merged.
• Google Engineers Go Big on Carbon - A Hopeful Successor To C++ — The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward.
• ByteDance Working To Make Kernel Booting Faster — This patch series touching around 100 lines of Linux kernel code is what they are now hoping to upstreamed.
• Happy Birthday This Week in GNOME — I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary!
• This Week in GNOME
• This Week in KDE
• #53 GUADEC 2022 · This Week in GNOME
• Btrfs Native Encryption Being Worked On — My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this.