An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to Bloomberg, EQT is planning an IPO for German Linux and enterprise software company SUSE. EQT is a Swedish-based private equity firm with 50 billion euros in raised capital. SUSE is the leading European Union (EU) Linux distributor. Over the years, SUSE has changed owners several times. First, it was acquired by Novell in 2004. Then, Attachmate, with some Microsoft funding, bought Novell and SUSE in 2010. This was followed in 2014 when Micro Focus purchased Attachmate and SUSE was spun off as an independent division. Then, EQT purchased SUSE from Micro Focus for $2.5 billion in March 2019. With an IPO of approximately $6 billion, EQT would do very well for itself in very little time.

Bloomberg states that the IPO talks are in a very preliminary stage. Nothing may yet come of these conversations. As for SUSE, a company representative said, "As a company, we are constantly exploring ways to grow. But as a matter of corporate policy, we do not comment on rumor or speculation in the market."

"Security firm Kaspersky said Friday that it discovered a Linux version of the RansomEXX ransomware," reports ZDNet, "marking the first time a major Windows ransomware strain has been ported to Linux to aid in targeted intrusions." RansomEXX is a relatively new ransomware strain that was first spotted earlier this year in June. The ransomware has been used in attacks against the Texas Department of Transportation, Konica Minolta, U.S. government contractor Tyler Technologies, Montreal's public transportation system, and, most recently, against Brazil's court system (STJ)...

The RansomEXX gang creating a Linux version of their Windows ransomware is in tune with how many companies operate today, with many firms running internal systems on Linux, and not always on Windows Server. A Linux version makes perfect sense from an attacker's perspective; always looking to expand and touch as much core infrastructure as possible in their quest to cripple companies and demand higher ransoms. What we see from RansomEXX may soon turn out to be an industry-defining trend, with other big ransomware groups rolling out their Linux versions in the future as well.

And, this trend appears to have already begun. According to cyber-security firm Emsisoft, besides RansomEXX, the Mespinoza (Pysa) ransomware gang has also recently developed a Linux variant from their initial Windows version.

According to Phoronix, a Dell privacy driver is is being prepared for the Linux kernel. From the report: Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. These new Dell privacy buttons are basically hardware kill switches for the microphone and web camera video stream. The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware.

The Dell privacy driver in its current form is talked about for the camera and microphone support but the patch does also note a "PRIVACY_SCREEN_STATUS" bit as well. Presumably they will be extending this privacy driver as well for privacy screen handling around reducing the horizontal/vertical viewing angles of the display. The dell-privacy Linux driver in its initial form can be found via the kernel mailing list. It's great seeing Dell working on this driver punctually for Linux ahead of their next-gen laptops.

Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google's open-source Chromium web browser. ZDNet reports: Some of you may be saying, "Wait, haven't they offered Chromium for years? Well, yes, and no. For years, Mint used Ubuntu's Chromium build. But then Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, moved from releasing Chromium as an APT-compatible DEB package to a Snap. The Ubuntu Snap software packing system, along with its rivals Flatpak and AppImage, is a new, container-oriented way of installing Linux applications. The older way of installing Linux apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems for the Debian and Red Hat Linux families, incorporate the source code and hard-coded paths for each program.

While tried and true, these traditional packages are troublesome for developers. They require programmers to hand-craft Linux programs to work with each specific distro and its various releases. They must ensure that each program has access to specific libraries' versions. That's a lot of work and painful programming, which led to the process being given the name: Dependency hell. Snap avoids this problem by incorporating the application and its libraries into a single package. It's then installed and mounted on a SquashFS virtual file system. When you run a Snap, you're running it inside a secured container of its own. For Chromium, in particular, Canonical felt using Snaps was the best way to handle this program. [...]

Lefebvre wrote, "The Chromium browser is now available in the official repositories for both Linux Mint and LMDE. If you've been waiting for this I'd like to thank you for your patience." Part of the reason was, well, Canonical was right. Building Chromium from source code is one really slow process. He explained, "To guarantee reactivity and timely updates we had to automate the process of detecting, packaging and compiling new versions of Chromium. This is an application which can require more than 6 hours per build on a fast computer. We allocated a new build server with high specifications (Ryzen 9 3900, 128GB RAM, NMVe) and reduced the time it took to build Chromium to a little more than an hour." That's a lot of power! Still, for those who love it, up-to-date builds of Chromium are now available for Mint users.

Dan Kohn, leader of the Linux Foundation's Public Health (LFPH) initiative and former executive director at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has passed away of complications from colon cancer. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin wrote yesterday (via LFPH): Dan played a special role at the Linux Foundation. He helped establish the organization that we are today and oversaw the fastest growing open source community in history, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Dan was also a pioneer. In 1994 he conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the internet after building the first web shopping cart.

What you may not know about Dan was his lifelong desire to help others. From serving as a volunteer firefighter in college to stepping aside from his role in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to incubate and found the Linux Foundation Public Health initiative which is helping authorities around the world combat Covid19; Dan could always be counted on in a crisis.

Dan leaves behind his wife Julie and two young boys, Adam and Ellis... We will be creating a scholarship fund for his children and will send out information in the coming days as to how folks can contribute. LFPH has set up a card for the community to sign to forward to his family when the time is right. You may sign it here.

Alex Williams from The New Stack has also paid tribute to Kohn.

SiFive today announced it is creating a platform for Linux-based personal computers based on RISC-V processors. VentureBeat reports: Assuming customers adopt the processors and use them in PCs, the move might be part of a plan to create Linux-based PCs that use royalty-free processors. This could be seen as a challenge to computers based on designs from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, or Arm, but giants of the industry don't have to cower just yet. The San Mateo, California-based company unveiled HiFive Unmatched, a development design for a Linux-based PC that uses its RISC-V processors. At the moment, these development PCs are early alternatives, most likely targeted at hobbyists and engineers who may snap them up when they become available in the fourth quarter for $665.

The SiFive HiFive Unmatched board will have a SiFive processor, dubbed the SiFive FU740 SoC, a 5-core processor with four SiFive U74 cores and one SiFive S7 core. The U-series cores are Linux-based 64-bit application processor cores based on RISC-V. These cores can be mixed and matched with other SiFive cores, such as the SiFive FU740. These components are all leveraging SiFive's existing intellectual property portfolio. The HiFive Unmatched board comes in the mini-ITX standard form factor to make it easy to build a RISC-V PC. SiFive also added some standard industry connectors -- ATX power supplies, PCI-Express expansion, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB ports are present on a single-board RISC-V development system.

The HiFive Unmatched board includes 8GB of DDR4 memory, 32MB of QSPI flash memory, and a microSD card slot on the motherboard. For debugging and monitoring, developers can access the console output of the board through the built-in microUSB type-B connector. Developers can expand it using PCI-Express slots, including both a PCIe general-purpose slot (PCIe Gen 3 x8) for graphics, FPGAs, or other accelerators and M.2 slots for NVME storage (PCIe Gen 3 x4) and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules (PCIe Gen 3 x1). There are four USB 3.2 Gen 1 type-A ports on the rear, next to the Gigabit Ethernet port, making it easy to connect peripherals. The system will ship with a bootable SD card that includes Linux and popular system developer packages, with updates available for download from SiFive.com. It will be available for preorders soon.
For some more context: Could RISC-V processors compete with Intel, ARM, and AMD?

"The Linux Foundation has formed a new group to provide public health authorities with free technology for tracking the spread of the coronavirus and future epidemics," writes Business Insider. Launched in July, the group has already released two apps "that notify users if they've been in contact with someone who has tested positive with COVID-19." Since these apps are open source, people can contribute code and customize them, allowing regions with similar needs to collaborate, general manager at Linux Foundation Public Health, Dan Kohn, told Business Insider. Developers that want to build an app off these projects can access or download the source code.

These apps take advantage of technology launched by Apple and Google, which can be integrated into any app, that uses Bluetooth on people's smartphones to track who a user has been in close proximity with, without identifying the specific people. If anyone tests positive for COVID-19 and uploads that information to a database run by a local public health authority, any user who has been in close contact with that person will get a notification through their app saying they may have been exposed — again, without identifying who has COVID-19. If someone knows that they may have been exposed, they can either self-quarantine or get tested.

"Essentially we think exposure notification could have a big impact on reducing the overall rate of exposure," Kohn said. An Oxford University study in April said that if about 60% of the population used a contact tracing app, it could grind the diseases spread to a halt. Researchers on the team also found that digital contact tracing can cut down spread even at much lower levels of usage.

"No one asked Microsoft to port its Edge browser to Linux," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet, adding "Indeed, very few people asked for Edge on Windows.

"But, here it is. So, how good — or not — is it..?" The new release comes ready to run on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE Linux distributions... Since I've been benchmarking web browsers since Mosaic rolled off the bit assembly line, I benchmarked the first Edge browser and Chrome 86 and Firefox 81 on my main Linux production PC.... First up: JetStream 2.0, which is made up of 64 smaller tests. This JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmark suite focuses on advanced web applications. It rewards browsers that start up quickly, execute code quickly, and run smoothly. Higher scores are better on this benchmark.

JetStream's top-scorer — drumroll please — was Edge with 136.971. But, right behind it within the margin of error, was Chrome with a score of 132.413. This isn't too surprising. They are, after all, built on the same platform. Back in the back was Firefox with 102.131. Next up: Kraken 1.1. This benchmark, which is based on the long-obsolete SunSpider, measures JavaScript performance. To this basic JavaScript testing, it added typical use-case scenarios. Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization, created Kraken. With this benchmark, the lower the score, the better the result. To no great surprise, Firefox took first place here with 810.1 milliseconds (ms). Following it was Chrome with 904.5ms and then Edge with 958.8ms.

The latest version of WebXPRT is today's best browser benchmark. It's produced by the benchmark professionals at Principled Technology. This company's executives were the founders of the Ziff Davis Benchmark Operation, the gold-standard of PC benchmarking. WebXPRT uses scenarios created to mirror everyday tasks. These include Photo Enhancement, Organize Album, Stock Option Pricing, Local Notes, Sales Graphs, and DNA Sequencing. Here, the higher the score, the better the browser. On this benchmark, Firefox shines. It was an easy winner with a score of 272. Chrome edges out Edge 233 to 230.
The article concludes that "Oddly, Edge, which turned in a poor performance when I recently benchmarked it on Windows, did well on Linux. Who'd have guessed...? Edge is a good, fast browser on Linux. If you're a Windows user coming over to Linux or you're doing development work aimed at Edge, then by all means try Edge on Linux. It works and it works well."

Yet Vaughan-Nichols admits he's still not going to switch to Edge. "Chrome is more than fast enough for my purposes and I don't want my information tied into the Microsoft ecosystem. For better or worse, mine's already locked into the Googleverse and I can live with that."

emil (Slashdot reader #695) shares an article from Linux Journal re-visiting the saga of the btrfs file system (initially designed at Oracle in 2007): The btrfs filesystem has taunted the Linux community for years, offering a stunning array of features and capability, but never earning universal acclaim. Btrfs is perhaps more deserving of patience, as its promised capabilities dwarf all peers, earning it vocal proponents with great influence. Still, [while] none can argue that btrfs is unfinished, many features are very new, and stability concerns remain for common functions.

Most of the intended goals of btrfs have been met. However, Red Hat famously cut continued btrfs support from their 7.4 release, and has allowed the code to stagnate in their backported kernel since that time. The Fedora project announced their intention to adopt btrfs as the default filesystem for variants of their distribution, in a seeming juxtaposition. SUSE has maintained btrfs support for their own distribution and the greater community for many years.

For users, the most desirable features of btrfs are transparent compression and snapshots; these features are stable, and relatively easy to add as a veneer to stock CentOS (and its peers). Administrators are further compelled by adjustable checksums, scrubs, and the ability to enlarge as well as (surprisingly) shrink filesystem images, while some advanced btrfs topics (i.e. deduplication, RAID, ext4 conversion) aren't really germane for minimal loopback usage. The systemd init package also has dependencies upon btrfs, among them machinectl and systemd-nspawn . Despite these features, there are many usage patterns that are not directly appropriate for use with btrfs. It is hostile to most databases and many other programs with incompatible I/O, and should be approached with some care.
The original submission drew reactions from three disgruntled btrfs users. But the article goes on to explore providers of CentOS-compatible btrfs-enabled kernels, ultimately opining that "There are many 'rough edges' that are uncovered above with btrfs capabilities and implementations, especially with the measures taken to enable it for CentOS. Still, this is far better than ext2/3/4 and XFS, discarding all the desirable btrfs features, in that errors can be known because all filesystem content is checksummed." It would be helpful if the developers of btrfs and ZFS could work together to create a single kernel module, with maximal sharing of "cleanroom" code, that implemented both filesystems... Oracle is itself unwilling to settle these questions with either a GPL or BSD license release of ZFS. Oracle also delivers a btrfs implementation that is lacking in features, with inapplicable documentation, and out-of-date support tools (for CentOS 8 conversion). Oracle is the impediment, and a community effort to purge ZFS source of Oracle's contributions and unify it with btrfs seems the most straightforward option... It would also be helpful if other parties refrained from new filesystem efforts that lack the extensive btrfs functionality and feature set (i.e. Microsoft ReFS).

Until such a day that an advanced filesystem becomes a ubiquitous commodity as Linux is as an OS, the user community will continue to be torn between questionable support, lack of features, and workarounds in a fragmented btrfs community. This is an uncomfortable place to be, and we would do well to remember the parties responsible for keeping us here.
So how do Slashdot's readers feel about btrfs?

PeerTube (developed by Framasoft) is "the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 400,000 videos published by 60,000 users and viewed over 15 million times," according to its web site. But now they're exploring livestreaming, writes Debian developer Phil Hands (Slashdot reader #2,365): Holding DebConf20 online this year highlighted the effort involved in setting up Live Streaming using Free Software — something that is beyond the reach of many smaller events which is where PeerTube with Live Streaming should be a perfect fit.
In June PeerTube had posted a roadmap with a humble request for donations in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign: At a time when no one knows what the future holds, we deem it inappropriate to start a crowdfunding campaign and threaten not to do our best on PeerTube if we don't get the necessary funds. We believe in the public utility of PeerTube, so much so that we commit to working on it for six months to make this v3 happen, even if we must do it with our own funds (which we had already done for v2).

We still hope that by sharing this roadmap as widely as possible, some of you will support us in our approach with a donation that will allow us to fund this project.
And this week PeerTube's official Twitter feed announced that "Thanks to Debian's €10,000 donation we've just reached the 4th step of our PeerTube fundraising" — livestreaming. "Many thanks to all those who donated. And it's not too late to contribute."

"We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible," added the Debian blog, "and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future." It describes their donation as "a strong sign of recognition from an international project — one of the pillars of the Free Software world — towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies."

And secondly, "it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone. The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia."

An anonymous reader shares a report: As stated earlier, new Ubuntu versions come April and October, and wouldn't you know it, we are at the end of the latter. With Halloween a bit more than a week away, Canonical today releases Ubuntu 20.10. Ubuntu's version numbering scheme is based on year (YY), a period, and the month (MM). For instance, the previous stable version was released this past April and it is numbered as 20.04. In addition, Canonical (the operating system's owner) assigns names -- sequentially and alphabetically. The alphanumeric code name is always based on two words starting with the same sequential letter -- an adjective followed by an animal name. The aforementioned 20.04 is named "Focal Fossa." This time, the operating system will be called Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla." This new version of the desktop operating system is loaded with fixes, new features, and a renewed focus on the now-iconic Raspberry Pi. Yes, folks, with a compatible Pi (models with 4GB or 8GB of RAM), you can now have the full Ubuntu desktop experience. More about the new features here.

Last month, Microsoft officials said they'd release a preview of the new Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux some time in October. On October 20, Microsoft made good on the promise, making available the Edge Dev Channel build for Linux. ZDNet reports: The new release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE Linux distributions. Microsoft is planning to release weekly builds, like it does with the Dev Channel builds for other platforms. To get started, users can download and install a .deb or .rpm package directly from the Edge Insider site, which will configure a system to get future automatic updates. Or users can install Edge from Microsoft's Linux Software Repository. More detailed instructions are available on Microsoft's Chredge-on-Linux blog post.

The Linux 5.10 kernel's XFS file-system will have two new on-disk meta-data capabilities, reports Phoronix: 1. The size of inode btrees in the allocation group is now recorded. This is for increasing redundancy checks and also allowing faster mount times.

2. Support for timestamps now until the year 2486.

This "big timestamps" feature is the refactoring of their timestamp and inode encoding functions to handle timestamps as a 64-bit nanosecond counter and bit shifting to increase the effective size. This now allows XFS to run well past the Year 2038 problem (where storing the time since 1970 in seconds will no longer fit in a signed 32-bit integer and thus wraparound) to now the Year 2486. Making a new XFS file-system with bigtime enabled allows a timestamp range from December 1901 to July 2486 rather than December 1901 to January 2038. For preserving backwards compatibility, the big timestamps feature is not currently enabled by default.

Last month Eric Raymond suggested Microsoft might be moving to a Linux kernel that emulates Windows. ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argued such a move "makes perfect sense", and open source advocate Jack Wallen even suggested Microsoft abandon Windows altogether for a new distro named Microsoft Linux.

It eventually drew the attention of Canonical's engineering manager for Ubuntu on WSL, who published a blog post with his own personal thoughts. Its title? "No, Microsoft is not rebasing Windows to Linux." The NT kernel in Windows offers a degree of backward compatibility, long-term support, and driver availability that Linux is just now approaching. It would cost millions of dollars to replicate these in Linux. Microsoft has plenty of paying customers to continue supporting Windows as-is, some for decades. Windows is not a drain on Microsoft that would justify the expense of rebasing to Linux for savings, as Raymond has argued... It is unclear if the Windows user space could even be rebased from NT to the Linux kernel and maintain the compatibility that Windows is known for, specifically what enterprise clients with mission-critical applications are paying to get....

Microsoft has doubled down on Windows in recent years. Microsoft has invested in usability, new features, and performance improvements for Windows 10 that have paid off. These improvements, collaborations with OEMs, and the Surface helped revitalize a PC market that at one point looked in danger of falling to iPads and Chromebooks... Internal reorganizations in 2018 and 2020 show that the future of the Surface and Windows are now inextricably linked. Windows powers the Xbox and we are in a resurgence of mostly Windows-based PC gaming. Microsoft also has ideas for Windows 10X, the next operating system concept following Windows 10 (that I think we will get in gradual pieces), with future hardware like the Surface Neo in mind...

The much more interesting question is not whether Microsoft is planning to rebase Windows to Linux, but how far Windows will go on open source. We are already seeing components like Windows Terminal, PowerToys, and other Windows components either begin life as or go open source. The more logical and realistic goal here is a continued opening of Windows components and the Windows development process, even beyond the Insiders program, in a way that benefits other operating systems...

Raymond is correct in one key part of his blog. I do think the era of the desktop OS wars is ending. We are entering a new era where your high-end workstation will run multiple operating systems simultaneously, like runtimes, and not necessarily all locally. The choice will not really be Windows or Linux, it will be whether you boot Hyper-V or KVM first, and Windows and Ubuntu stacks will be tuned to run well on the other. Microsoft contributes patches to the Linux kernel to run Linux well on Hyper-V and tweaks Windows to play nicely on KVM. The best parts of Ubuntu will come to Windows and the best open source parts of Windows will come to Ubuntu, thanks to an increasing trend towards open source across Microsoft.

The key take-away though is that open source has won. And Raymond can be proud of helping to articulate the case for the open source development model when he did.
The post also explores "the reasons why I think this fantasy this keeps cropping up on Slashdot and Hacker News," calling the idea "a long-held fantasy for open source and Linux advocates."

But instead he concludes "Neither Windows nor Ubuntu are going anywhere. They are just going to keep getting better through open source."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier, Microsoft released the source for Windows Calculator. And now, that calculator app has been ported to Linux by Uno Platform. Best of all, it's insanely easy to install as it is packaged in Snap format. "The good folks in the Uno Platform community have ported the open-source Windows Calculator to Linux. And they've done it quicker than Microsoft could bring their browser to Linux. The calculator is published in the snapstore and can be downloaded right away," explains Rhys Davies, Product Manager, Canonical.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google and Intel are warning of a high-severity Bluetooth flaw in all but the most recent version of the Linux Kernel. While a Google researcher said the bug allows seamless code execution by attackers within Bluetooth range, Intel is characterizing the flaw as providing an escalation of privileges or the disclosure of information. The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later. So far, little is known about BleedingTooth, the name given by Google engineer Andy Nguyen, who said that a blog post will be published "soon." A Twitter thread and a YouTube video provide the most detail and give the impression that the bug provides a reliable way for nearby attackers to execute malicious code of their choice on vulnerable Linux devices that use BlueZ for Bluetooth.

Intel, meanwhile, has issued this bare-bones advisory that categorizes the flaw as privilege-escalation or information-disclosure vulnerability. The advisory assigned a severity score of 8.3 out of a possible 10 to CVE-2020-12351, one of three distinct bugs that comprise BleedingTooth. "Potential security vulnerabilities in BlueZ may allow escalation of privilege or information disclosure," the advisory states. "BlueZ is releasing Linux kernel fixes to address these potential vulnerabilities." Intel, which is a primary contributor to the BlueZ open source project, said that the most effective way to patch the vulnerabilities is to update to Linux kernel version 5.9, which was published on Sunday. Those who can't upgrade to version 5.9 can install a series of kernel patches the advisory links to. Maintainers of BlueZ didn't immediately respond to emails asking for additional details about this vulnerability. Ars Technica points out that since BleedingTooth requires proximity to a vulnerable device, there's not much reason for people to worry about this vulnerability. "It also requires highly specialized knowledge and works on only a tiny fraction of the world's Bluetooth devices," it adds.

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available, bringing a bunch of refinements as well as some larger features. Some of the KDE Plasma 5.20 highlights include (via Phoronix): - Numerous fixes to the KWin window manager / compositor including a number of Wayland fixes. Among the Wayland work in Plasma 5.20 includes Klipper support and middle-click paste, mouse and touchpad support nearly on par to X11, window thumbnails in the task manager, crash fixes, and more.

- Improved notifications.

- Different redesigns and additions to the KDE System Settings from SMART monitoring to better looking interfaces.

- Redesigned on-screen displays.

- Various tack manager and system tray improvements. More information about KDE 5.20 is available here.

FSGSBASE support in Linux "has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side," Phoronix wrote back in August. As it started its journey into the kernel, they provided a preview on August 10: The FSGSBASE support that was finally mainlined a few days ago for Linux 5.9 is off to providing a nice performance boost for both Intel and AMD systems... FSGSBASE support for the Linux kernel has been around a half-decade in the making and finally carried over the finish line by one of Microsoft's Linux kernel engineers...

FSGSBASE particularly helps out context switching heavy workloads like I/O and allowing user-space software to write to the x86_64 GSBASE without kernel interaction. That in turn has been of interest to Java and others...On Linux 5.9 where FSGSBASE is finally mainlined, it's enabled by default on supported CPUs. FSGSBASE can be disabled at kernel boot time via the "nofsgsbase" kernel option.
Today on the Linux kernel mailing list, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.9: Ok, so I'll be honest - I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It's just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for.
And Phoronix reported: Linux 5.9 has a number of exciting improvements including initial support for upcoming Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" graphics cards, initial Intel Rocket Lake graphics, NVMe zoned namespaces (ZNS) support, various storage improvements, IBM's initial work on POWER10 CPU bring-up, the FSGSBASE instruction is now used, 32-bit x86 Clang build support, and more. See our Linux 5.9 feature overview for the whole scoop on the many changes to see with this kernel.

Following up on speculation from Eric Raymond and ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, open source advocate Jack Wallen imagines what would happen if Microsoft just switched over altogether from Windows to a Linux distro named "Microsoft Linux": A full-on Linux distribution released by Microsoft would mean less frustration for all involved. Microsoft could shift its development efforts on the Windows 10 desktop to a desktop that would be more stable, dependable, flexible, and proven. Microsoft could select from any number of desktops for its official flavor: GNOME, KDE, Pantheon, Xfce, Mint, Cinnamon... the list goes on and on. Microsoft could use that desktop as is or contribute to it and create something that's more in-line with what its users are accustomed to...

[U]sers would very quickly learn what it's like to work on a desktop computer and not have to deal with the daily frustrations that come with the Windows operating system. Updates are smoother and more trustworthy, it's secure, and the desktop just makes more sense. Microsoft has been doing everything in its power to migrate users from the standard client-based software to cloud and other hosted solutions, and its software cash cow has become web-centric and subscription-based. All of those Linux users could still work with Microsoft 365 and any other Software as a Service (SaaS) solution it has to offer — all from the comfort and security of the Linux operating system...

If Microsoft plays its cards right, the company could re-theme KDE or just about any Linux desktop in such a way that it's not all that different from the Windows 10 interface. Lay this out right, and consumers might not even know the difference — a "Windows 11" would simply be the next evolution of the Microsoft desktop operating system. Speaking of winning, IT pros would spend less time dealing with viruses, malware, and operating system issues and more time on keeping the network (and the servers powering that network) running and secure... Microsoft would be seen as finally shipping an operating system worthy of the consumer; the consumer would have a desktop operating system that didn't deliver as many headaches as it did moments of actual productivity and joy; and the Linux community would finally dominate the desktop.

Last week open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond argued Microsoft was quietly switching over to a Linux kernel that emulates Windows. "He's on to something," says ZDNet's contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: I've long thought that Microsoft was considering migrating the Windows interface to running on the Linux kernel. Why...? [Y]ou can run standard Linux programs now on WSL2 without any trouble.

That's because Linux is well on its way to becoming a first-class citizen on the Windows desktop. Multiple Linux distros, starting with Ubuntu, Red Hat Fedora, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), now run smoothly on WSL2. That's because Microsoft has replaced its WSL1 translation layer, which converted Linux kernel calls into Windows calls, with WSL2. With WSL2 Microsoft's own Linux kernel is running on a thin version of the Hyper-V hypervisor. That's not all. With the recent Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20211, you can now access Linux file systems, such as ext4, from Windows File Manager and PowerShell. On top of that, Microsoft developers are making it easy to run Linux graphical applications on Windows...

[Raymond] also observed, correctly, that Microsoft no longer depends on Windows for its cash flow but on its Azure cloud offering. Which, by the way, is running more Linux instances than it is Windows Server instances. So, that being the case, why should Microsoft keep pouring money into the notoriously trouble-prone Windows kernel — over 50 serious bugs fixed in the last Patch Tuesday roundup — when it can use the free-as-in-beer Linux kernel? Good question. He thinks Microsoft can do the math and switch to Linux.

I think he's right. Besides his points, there are others. Microsoft already wants you to replace your existing PC-based software, like Office 2019, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs like Office 365. Microsoft also encourages you to move your voice, video, chat, and texting to Microsoft's Azure Communication Services even if you don't use Teams. With SaaS programs, Microsoft doesn't care what operating system you're running. They're still going to get paid whether you run Office 365 on Windows, a Chromebook, or, yes, Linux.

I see two possible paths ahead for Windows. First, there's Linux-based Windows. It simply makes financial sense. Or, the existing Windows desktop being replaced by the Windows Virtual Desktop or other Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings.... Google chose to save money and increase security by using Linux as the basis for Chrome OS. This worked out really well for Google. It can for Microsoft with — let's take a blast from the past — and call it Lindows as well.