Linux Action News Video

NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.

Special Guest: Christian F.K. Schaller.

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• Why is the open source driver release from NVidia so important for Linux? | Christian F.K. Schaller — Today NVidia announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.

New firmware superpowers are coming to a future Linux kernel, why Google is working on encrypted hibernation support, and a sneak peek at SteamOS 3.

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• Google Working On Linux Encrypted Hibernation Support — Google engineers are working on "enabling hibernation in some new scenarios."
• Encrypted Hibernation - Evan Green
• Update on Linux hibernation support when lockdown is enabled
• uswsusp - ArchWiki
• Rewritten Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Posted For Linux — The new patches posted today are a "complete rewrite" of the earlier Apple SoC CPUFreq driver attempt.
• Apple Silicon Exclusively Hit With World-First “Augury” DMP Vulnerability — Apple's DMP can potentially leak the entire memory content even if it's not being actively accessed.
• Linux 5.19 Adding Ability To Initiate Firmware Updates Using Sysfs — Thanks to Intel there is firmware-upload support being added to sysfs that user-space software can use for initiating a firmware update.
• 0.34.0 security release for matrix-appservice-irc — Incorrect handling of a CR character allowed for making part of the message be sent to the IRC server verbatim rather than as a message to the channel.
• Adopting Matrix at the GNOME Foundation
• IRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicks
• holoiso: SteamOS 3 — This project attempts to bring Steam Deck's Holo OS into a generic, installable format and replicate close-to-official SteamOS experience.
• HoloISO brings Valve’s SteamOS 3 from the Steam Deck to everyone

PopOS! 22.04 has a surprise you might not have noticed, we get the details on Ubuntu’s new Real-Time kernel, and the clever idea from the Framework laptop team.

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• Pop!OS 22.04 by System76 — Pop!OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.
• System Updater Nix Support
• Pop System Updater
• Ubuntu Outlines How To Use Its Real-Time Kernel Beta - It Requires Ubuntu Advantage — The RT kernel for x8664 and AArch64 is tailored to meet the low latency needs and other guarantees for the teclo industry, robotics, critical infrastructure, and other industries.
• Concerns Raised Over The “New” NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year — Less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained.
• Steam Deck Client and OS Updates — Today's update includes Steam, OS, and firmware updates, and may take a few minutes to apply after restarting. Please be patient while your Steam Deck updates.
• Order Email Megathread (04/14/2022) : SteamDeck
• Proton 7.0-2 Out — . Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.

Our take on why Fedora's Legacy BIOS plans have stirred up such a strong debate, how NVIDIA's Linux strategy seems to be changing, and a surprising kernel patch from Sony.

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• NVIDIA Posts Open-Source DRM Kernel Driver For NVDLA — NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block.
• Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
• KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes — It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work.
• Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
• Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG — Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support.
• LINUX Unplugged 454: Double Distro Details — Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.

SUSE has a skunkworks distro in development, the transition Debian is struggling with, and some long-awaited improvements to Raspberry Pi OS.

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• openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
• Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
• An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
• PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
• OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
• Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
• New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
• NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
• Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
• Usr move status in various distros
• The Case For The Usr Merge

Docker surprises everyone, new Fedora tools in the works, and an old debate with a fresh take.

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• Docker rebounds with $105m Series C funding and $2.1b value — Troubled container company may escape confines of its doldrums
• LXD 5.0 LTS has been released — This is our 4th LTS release and quite an exciting one for anyone coming from LXD 4.0 as it significantly steps up LXD’s abilities, especially when operating in clustered environments.
• Anaconda is getting a new suit and a wizard — Before starting the redesign work for the Anaconda installer, the team reviewed user feedback and usability study data that we’ve gathered over the years.
• Fedora Workstation Brainstorming A Possible GUI-Based Linux Recovery Environment — This currently hypothetical GUI-driven recovery environment sounds like it could almost be like Apple's macOS recovery mode in that there may be the possibility of even downloading a new system image from this environment.
• Fwupd 1.7.7 Released For Firmware Updating More Logitech Devices On Linux - Phoronix
• Lutris 0.5.10 Released With Steam Deck Support — Lutris 0.5.10 brings proper Steam Deck support thanks to their collaboration with Valve and receiving a Steam Deck developer kit. Lutris' Flatpak version is still being improved upon as the next step in enhancing the Steam Deck support for this game manager.
• Mathieu Comandon on Twitter — We gotta stop this culture of "only install Flatpaks / using root is dangerous" before it extends beyond the Steam Deck. Last thing I want is for desktop Linux to become like Android or ChromeOS.
• meetup.com/jupiterbroadcasting

A new rolling remix of Ubuntu is grabbing attention, AMD has big Linux plans, and why Linux 5.18 looks like another barn burner release.

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• Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
• AMD Recruiting More Linux Engineers For Debug, CXL Enablement & More — Notable with their latest batch of Linux openings is hiring a CXL engineer. This role will focus on AMD's support for Compute Express Link (CXL) hardware enablement under Linux.
• WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
• New Linux kernel patch speeds up server shutdowns — The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down an NVMe drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
• Linux 5.18 Hardens The Kernel For 64-bit Arm With Shadow Call Stack Support — With the Linux 5.18 hardening updates there is support added for ARM64 (AArch64) Shadow Call Stack support when building the Linux kernel with GCC 12 and newer.
• Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
• Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS — The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.
• XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
• Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".

A significant follow-up to one of the biggest Linux stories, the Pandora's box the MIT Technology Review claims open-source devs just opened, and Linux on the M1 finally ships.

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• Documentation/process: Add Researcher Guidelines — This document seeks to clarify what the Linux kernel community considers acceptable and non-acceptable practices when conducting such research. At the very least, such research and related activities should follow standard research ethics rules.
• Guidelines for research on the kernel community [LWN.net]
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware" — At least one open-source software project has had malicious code added which aimed to wipe computers located in Russia and Belarus.
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware"
• SiFive bags $175m to further challenge Arm with RISC-V — The Silicon Valley-based chip designer said Wednesday it had raised a $175m Series F financing round at a more than $2.5bn valuation
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Default To Wayland With NVIDIA — Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
• The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
• Hector Martin on Twitter — We've been getting a steady trickle of users with the installation failing because the APFS resizer does a fsck and finds corruption.

This confirms my personal experience that Apple's APFS code is just buggy... it seems a lot of people have latent filesystem corruption :(

Steam comes to ChromeOS, our thoughts on Arch turning 20, and our first look at GNOME 42.

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• Arch Linux turned 20 years old
• Steam for Chrome OS teased at Google for Games Developer Summit — Steam for Chrome OS was announced as being available "right now" at the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15, 2022.
• Google Finally Announces Steam For Chrome OS
• Valve sent the developer of Lutris a Steam Deck to help development
• Steam Survey Results For February 2022 Put Linux Right Above 1.0%
• Roadtest Proposed As A New Driver Testing Framework For Linux — Roadtest is a device driver testing framework whereby drivers are tested under User-Mode Linux against mocked/modelled hardware.
• GNOME 42 News
• The Best New Features in GNOME 42
• Download Fedora 36 Beta
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Daily Build

Why Dirty Pipe is a dirty dog, the explosive adoption of Linux at AMD, and an important update on elementary OS.

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• Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years — Dirty Pipe has the potential to smudge people using Linux and Linux derivitives.
• Catalin Cimpanu on Twitter — “DirtyPipe (CVE-2022-0847) is a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation. It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — “By my count, Dirty Pipe affects only brand-new Android 12 devices like the Pixel 6 and S22. Linux 5.8 and above has only been an Android option for five months."
• Canonical Patches “Dirty Pipe” Vulnerability in Ubuntu 21.10 and 20.04 LTS
• BLASTY on Twitter: “Hacked up a quick Dirty Pipe PoC that spawns a shell by hijacking (and restoring) the contents of a setuid binary.”
• The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability — The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability documentation
• AMD Posts Some New Linux Job Openings From Client CPU To Server — AMD would need a lot more Linux engineers to achieve the same level of timely Linux support and low-level kernel enhancements that Intel has been focused on for years, especially when it comes to Intel's open-source work beyond just the actual hardware device enablement.
• Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! — What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going. You can run it against your existing Matrix homeserver to provide complete self-sovereignty… while still being able to talk to anyone else anywhere on the wider Matrix network! We will also be able to automatically use Matrix’s end-to-end encryption to secure all Element Call conferences
• call.element.io
• https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues
• Extending Matrix’s E2EE calls to multiparty
• Danielle Foré on Twitter — Okay it’s been a full month and this situation still isn’t resolved, and it sucks for you to just be completely in the dark and it’s pretty obvious something is up and people are asking what’s going on, so here is my side of the story 🧵
• Danielle gives an update on elementary Reddit Thread
• Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup