Linux Action News 207

Desktop Linux graphics are about to get a significant investment, Mozilla and Canonical work together on a Firefox Snap, and some key new insights into the Linux port to Apple’s M1.

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• Red Hat - Senior Software Engineer - HDR Enablement — The Red Hat Workstation Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work on desktop, compositor, and GPU support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats and displays for Linux.
• Jared Domínguez on Twitter — "It's that time again. I'm looking for someone to join my team to work on enabling HDR support in upstream Linux, Fedora and RHEL. Global applicants welcome. Underrepresented minorities highly encouraged."
• Ubuntu to Make Firefox Snap Default in 21.10 — “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
• Bug #1943840 “[FFe] Update the ubuntu-desktop-minimal seed to us…”
• Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop — This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.
• Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple’s M1 GPU — Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.
• XDC 2021 - Day 1 - September 15, 2021 - YouTube
• Apple M1 USB Type-C Linux Support Code Sent Out For Testing — Sven Peter has sent out the initial USB Type-C enablement work for the Apple ACE1/2 chips used by Apple M1 systems.
• Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12 — While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
• Alyssa Rosenzweig on Twitter — Hello from Linux on my M1's internal storage! Thank you to @svenpeter42 for the NVMe driver. My daily driver now supports internal storage plus hotpluggable HDMI (native resolution), USB, and Ethernet.
• X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security
• LVFS Serves Up 2+ Million Firmware Downloads In The Past Month — Over the past thirty days, LVFS has served up more than two million firmware files to users.
• LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
• Richard wrote on twitter — We hit 2 million firmware downloads in the last 30 days for the first time. There are now over 3000 firmware files available on the LVFS, with over 100 vendors using 50 different protocols. It's been a huge amount of work but it feels pretty awesome.
• LVFS Supported Device List
• Researchers Find Malware Hiding in Windows Subsystem for Linux | Tom’s Hardware
• There’s now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux — "These files acted as loaders running a payload that was either embedded within the sample or retrieved from a remote server and was then injected into a running process using Windows API calls,
• KSMBD In-Kernel File Server Already Needs Important Security Fix - Phoronix — This "important security fix" was sent in today for the Linux 5.15 kernel, potentially landing in time for 5.15-rc2 later today.