Linux Action News

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.
• Ubuntu Edge
• Valve Contracts Another Prominent Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Developer — Great to hear and given her vast experience will be exciting to see what open-source improvements she manages to further advance Linux gaming.
• Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion.
• Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream
• git.centos.org
• A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by I...

We go hands-on with the big Xfce release that took four years and five months to develop. Kubernetes gets an audit that might just set a precedent, and Google has a new feature for AMP that has us all worked up.

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• Xfce 4.14 released — After 4 years and 5 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.
• Xubuntu Daily
• Open Sourcing the Kubernetes Security Audit — The group created an open request for proposals, taking responsibility for evaluating the submitted proposals and recommending the vendor best suited to complete a security assessment against Kubernetes, bearing in mind the high complexity and wide scope of the project.
• wg-security-audit at master · kubernetes/community · GitHub
• Someone audited the Kubernetes source
• Server-side rendering for AMP — AMP now officially supports a technique called server-side rendering (SSR) which you can apply to your AMP pages to make them load even faster. Our tests show increases of up to a whopping 50% on the popular FCP metric.
• OSdisc.com Has Closed — In just the past couple days, a very popular Linux OS supply site has closed.

We try out the latest GNOME 3.32 release, and why it might be the best release ever. New leader candidates for Debian emerge, we experience foundation inception, and NGINX is getting acquired.

Plus Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!

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• GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
• Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
• Debian project leader candidates emerge
• Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
• New Red Team Project — The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
• CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
• Funded by Github
• Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge” - Conservancy Blog
• NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
• Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
• Jeff Barr – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Android finally getting desktop mode — The AOSP Launcher has a new component that, when launched, brings up a new Android desktop interface.
• Here are the new Android Q features

We sift Mobile World Congress to find just the best and most relevant stories, and discuss the Thunderclap vulnerability.

Plus we say goodbye to Koroa, find a reason to checkout GRUB nightlies, and how Android aims to kill passwords for good.

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• LineageOS 16.0 released — We feel that the 16.0 branch has reached feature parity with 15.1 and is ready for initial release. With 16.0 being the most recent and most actively-developed branch, on March 1st, 2019 it will begin receiving builds nightly and 15.1 will be moved to weekly builds.
• XDA Coverage of LineageOS 16.0
• KaiOS now with 85M feature phones shipped — With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google
• KaiOS is doing well in US too
• RISC-V Support Added To The GRUB Bootloader — As working towards this year's GRUB 2.04 update, we've known they have been on the finishing stretch for merging RISC-V support and as of this morning that milestone has been crossed.
• RISC-V Support in the FreeRTOS Kernel
• Bringing energy efficiency to IoT architecture
• The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance
• Thunderclap and Linux — The authors built a "fake" network card2 and performed various DMA attacks and were able to temper with memory regions that their network card should have no access to whatsoever.
• [announce] Struck by a Thunderbolt
• [official site] Thunderclap
• RIP Korora — "Our @kororaproject website has been redirected to @fedora as we do not have any new releases coming. Thank you for your support over the last 13 odd years."
• We saw this coming

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

Sponsored By:

• Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

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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.
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS end of standard support — Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023.
• Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down — Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
• Internet Archive — Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.