Linux Action News Video

Why it might be time to lower your RISC-V expectations, Intel's moves to close up CPU firmware, and a quick state of the Deck.

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• Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
• Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
• Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
• Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
• Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
• Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
• CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
• Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
• Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
• Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
• Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

The Linux secret behind the new TrueNAS release, Intel acquires a major Kernel contributor and our thoughts on Podman 4.0.

Plus why the Simula One VR Linux computer could be worth a serious look.

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• TrueNAS Scale 22.02 Released and Resetting the NAS Paradigm — First off, let us start with what is TrueNAS Scale, and where are we in the process. TrueNAS Scale is based on Linux instead of FreeBSD like TrueNAS. We get all of the storage features we would expect in a modern solution like snapshotting, replication, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• TrueCharts.org
• SCALE 22.02.0
• Intel Acquires Team behind PREMPTRT patches — Linutronix is comprised of a team of highly qualified and motivated employees with a wealth of experience and involvement in the ongoing development of Linux. Led by CEO Heinz Egger and CTO Thomas Gleixner, Linutronix is the architect of PREEMPTRT (Real Time) and the leading technology provider for industrial Linux. Gleixner has been the principal maintainer of x86 architecture in the Linux kernel since 2008.
• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=newsitem&px=PREEMPTRT-Lack-Of-Funds
• Podman 4.0 | Hacker News
• Release v4.0.0 · containers/podman
• Neil McGovern Stepping down in 6 Months — Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader.
• Linux Action News 182
• GNOME 42 Beta Released
• Steam for Chrome OS gets minimum hardware specs — If you follow Chrome Unboxed or Chrome OS development in general, the name ‘Borealis‘ may provoke some feelings of excitement and anticipation.
• Here’s which Chromebooks should support gaming w/ Steam
• HP and Lenovo Chromebooks expected to support Steam
• SimulaVR
• https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula
• Show HN: Simula One – Portable Linux VR Computer
• Hacking on Simula (in Simula): Implementing proper window resizing - YouTube

Canonical has a big week, why bcachefs looks like it's taking another step forward, and ChromeOS Flex for PCs is released.

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• Proton 7.0 out with Easy Anti-Cheat improvements — Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter
• Proton 7.0-1: A Major Milestone for Linux Gaming
• Canonical Will Begin Certifying Gigabyte Servers For Ubuntu Linux — Moving forward Gigabyte's server platforms are expected to obtain Ubuntu Server certification.
• GIGABYTE Partners with Canonical to Certify Servers for Ubuntu
• Canonical at MWC 2022
• Bcachefs Might Be Ready For Upstreaming In Linux This Year — The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel.

A last-minute kernel patch for the Steam Deck, why Intel is supporting RISC-V development, and we go hands-on with Plasma 5.24.

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• $66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
• Analysis: Relief and challenges for chipmakers as Nvidia-Arm megadeal collapses
• What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
• The Collapse of the Nvidia Deal Leaves Arm Exposed
• Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
• Engineer hired back in 2018 to work on kernel projects
• Open-Source Firmware Foundation Established For Advancing Open Firmware — The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.
• Open Source Firmware Foundation on Twitter
• FreeCAD Also Gets a Foundtation
• Intel Joins RISC-V International, Will Help With RISC-V Open-Source Software — Intel is joining the RISC-V International organization as a Premier member.
• Intel Promotes RISC-V, Pledges $1B to Help Chip Startups | Tom’s Hardware
• RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch — While all capabilities of this feature have been implemented and all tests so far have been passed, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.
• RAIDZ Expansion Feature Pull Request by ahrens
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Plasma 5.24 - Released — Plasma 5.24 improves in looks, ease of use and consistency.
• KDE Plasma 5.24 Released With Wayland Support In Increasingly Great Shape — KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
• Try a New Podcast App

System76 reveals a new tool to make Pop's desktop faster than the rest, and we break down that recent Btrfs defrag infinite loop bug.

Plus, a batch of essential project updates.

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• system76-scheduler — Auto-configure CFS and process priorities for improved desktop responsiveness
• System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness
• Improve desktop application and game performance with system76-scheduler
• Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit — Over the past year, we’ve been trialling a beta of Raspberry Pi OS in glorious 64-bit. Now it’s time to open it up to a wider audience.
• Framework’s Series A and the Years Ahead — We’ve just raised an $18M Series A round to pull in the future of consumer electronics, with Spark Capital as our lead investor.
• Framework Laptop Now Enjoys Open-Source EC Firmware
• Docker Desktop for Linux (Tech Preview) — Docker Desktop is an easy-to-install application that enables you to build and share containerized applications and microservices
• Docker makes comeback with over $50M in ARR two years into restructuring
• SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC
• Trio of Rust Core Team members hit the road — This week has kicked off with three of Core Team taking their leave.
• Mod team resigns back in Nov 2021
• Redis 7.0 Is Near With “Significant Performance Optimizations” — Redis 7.0-rc1 comes with performance optimizations and more but as well a number of changes that break backwards compatibility support for this popular open-source project.
• Release 7.0-rc1 · GitHub
• MariaDB Corporation Ab to Become a Publicly Traded Company — In the transaction, Angel Pond will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mangomill plc, an Irish public limited company (which will be renamed MariaDB plc), through a domestication merger with a wholly owned subsidiary of MariaDB plc. Immediately following such domestication merger, the current MariaDB will merge with and into MariaDB plc. Angel Pond will then be liquidated.
• MariaDB announces intent to go public
• Linux 5.16.5 Released To Fix Up Btrfs’ Botched Up Defragging — Btrfs up to now on Linux 5.16 was consuming high amounts of I/O and causing performance degradation of the
• Btrfs Extent Tree v2 Work Progressing For Improving The File-System’s On-Disk Format

The big disruption that looks like a bust, a security issue you need to pay attention to, and some great news for the Steam Deck.

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• Nvidia is reportedly preparing to abandon its $40 billion takeover of Arm — The deal has faced close scrutiny from regulators around the world, who worry it would give Nvidia an unfair advantage in the semiconductor industry.
• SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
• Linux system service bug gives root on all major distros, exploit released — Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit's pkexec, CVE-2021-4034. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program.
• Major Linux PolicyKit Security Vulnerability Uncovered: Pwnkit
• KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps — Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications.
• Qt Digital Advertising Platform
• Steam Deck launches February 25, weekly purchase invites planned — Valve has today officially announced their Steam Deck handheld will launch officially on February 25.
• Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
• Valve sponsors more work to improve Linux graphics drivers

We explain SUSE Liberty Linux and contemplate why the community seems to be selecting distributions with newer kernels.

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• LVFS Activity Going Wild Ahead Of New Security Disclosure Requiring Firmware Update — Last summer LVFS shot up with activity and when that huge uptick in LVFS activity occurred it ended up being due to Dell BIOS/UEFI updates due to new security vulnerabilities.
• Fwupd 1.7.4 Supports More Hardware For Firmware Updating On Linux — The Fwupd 1.7.4 release adds firmware branch support for ModemManager devices, support for firmware engineers to be able to patch files at known offsets, and a variety of bug fixes.
• GNOME 42 Desktop Environment Is Now Available for Public Testing — The next development release in the GNOME 42 cycle will be the beta version, currently scheduled for release on mid-February. The final release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is expected on March 23rd, 2022.
• GNOME 42.alpha released — The gnome-desktop module can be built against GTK 4 now and the internals

Fedora and Red Hat users are getting a web-based installer, and a new legal situation for Bitcoin smells like retro SCO FUD.

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• Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda Installer Shifting To A Web Based UI — Anaconda has long been GTK-based but as part of modernizing it they are now looking at rewriting the UI to be a web browser-based UI that makes use of Red Hat's Cockpit project.
• Anaconda is getting a new suit – Fedora Community Blog
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Alpha With Exciting Improvements
• Linux Mint 20.3 released promising security updates until 2025 — Linux Mint has released version 20.3, codenamed 'Una,' as a long-term support version that will receive security updates until 2025.
• Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon released!
• Linux Mint is reverting Firefox to Mozilla config after partnership signed
• Jack Dorsey spearheads new fund to defend Bitcoin developers against legal action — In an email addressed to developers, sent early on January 12, Dorsey described the open-source community as “especially susceptible to legal pressure.”
• [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund
• Jupiter Extras: Road Trip Memories

GnuPG has some great news, Libadwaita 1.0 has arrived and we share our thoughts, plus a big batch of updates from the Matrix project.

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• Koch: A New Future for GnuPG — Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well.
• A Short introduction to Fuchsia — FuchsiaOS, by now just Fuchsia, was designed to be an entirely modular system, allowing its libraries and applications to be entirely removed, updated and added on it without the system get affected .
• fimage — Portable Fuchsia Emulator
• More Troublesome x86 Android Tablets Being Fixed Up By New Linux Driver — The forthcoming x86-android-tablets driver is focused on the issue of many x86 tablets having invalid entries within their ACPI DSDT tables.
• Libadwaita 1.0 Released For Kicking Off A New Year Of GNOME App Development — GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.
• The Mega Matrix Holiday Special 2021 — Looking back at 2021, it’s unbelievable how much stuff has been going on in the core team.

We kick off our annual predictions episode with what we got right and wrong this year and then attempt to predict what will happen in 2022.

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• Previous Predictions: Linux Action News 169
• Year in Review: How we’re curating the web with you and our top Pocket features
• Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year
• Pocket and Slate Podcast Partnership Announcement
• Asahi Linux