Week 28 was rather restrained, there were no big upsets in Linuxland. However, a bug that has been in the Netfilter component of the kernel for 15 years has been fixed.
News about the kernel
At the the week, Linux Torvalds released the beginning of first RC for Kernel 5.14 . Torvalds also commented on the a year Paragon NTFS3 driver discussed ago, which Torvalds says is in good shape. Paragon should submit a pull request to initiate inclusion in mainline. Another OOM killer with a new concept will soon also aim to be included in the kernel. In LE9 it comes to protecting the file cache before the expulsion from the RAM when it is scarce.
Distributions
It was rather quiet this week with the distributions. Apart from the which have already been discussed in detail Solus 4.3 , Tails 4.20 and Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 , , I only noticed EuroLinux 8.3 . On the other hand, there is about the still unfinished haiku more good news . The porting to the RISC-V platform shows the first tangible results . The release of Beta 3 , however, was postponed by a week. The yesterday at Debian full freeze for Debian 11 “bullseye” occurred . The preliminary release date is still July 31, 2021, but this has not yet been officially confirmed. Canonical has with Ubuntu Pro announced a hardened version of its distribution .
A new video player based on GStreamer, which I mentioned a few days ago in connection with the PinePhone , is now also available for the desktop. Clapper scores with a lot of functionality and optically takes a back seat. It is currently available as a Flatpak on Flathub , in the AUR you can create Clapper 0.3. Other updated applications this week included GnuPG 2.2.29 LTS and KPhotoAlbum 5.8.1 .
Open hardware
New hardware in the form of processors is announced by LibreSOC , a team of engineers and creative minds with the aim of offering a completely open system-on-chip. A few days ago you published the layout for the chip production of the first OpenPOWER-based processor that did not come from IBM. The chip is to be produced in collaboration between the Chips4Makers community and researchers from the Sorbonne University in Paris. A new processor has also been from Russia announced . The state-owned Rostec group is developing an 8-core RISC-V processor that will be available for servers, desktops and notebooks from 2025.
As a competitor to the Nintendo Switch, Valve presented the new game console Steam Deck , which is supposed to run conventional Windows games and runs under SteamOS 3.0 with KDE Plasma as the desktop. It should be available for Christmas and cost 419 euros. This is of course in Nate Graham’s weekly column to the achievements of KDE due mention.
In the development
Kent Overstreet gives a status update on its which is under development bcachefs filesystem, . A critical bug has been fixed, where the issue was that an unclean shutdown in a multi-device file system with metadata replication could result in a write operation on one btree node, but not on another. Also in development is KWinFT , a fork of KDE’s window manager KWin focusing on Wayland. Developer Roman Gilg currently reports that the modular Wayland compositor future wlroots will be used as the backend in the .
Two conferences are pending, both of which will also be held online this year. The GNOME Developer Conference GUADEC will be held from July 21st. Debian’s annual conference begins on August 22nd DebConf . The organizers of a chance at a conference in real life MiniDebConf Regensburg expecting , which will take place on October 2nd and 3rd, are .
From the company
At the end of this week, two news items from companies. SUSE has , according to The Register slipped into the red because of its recent IPO . Purism has more encouraging news to report . After Red Hat, GNOME Foundation, GNOME and the unassigned changes, Purism ranks 5th among contributors to GTK 4 in terms of both number of commits and changes. Canonical, Intel and Collabora follow in further places.
