234: Linux Action News
31 March 2022
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”.