Spectre Patches, Snap, Happy Birthday LWN and More

News updates for January 22, 2018.

Are you using protection? Longtime kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, just posted a simple recipe for users to verify whether they are running a Spectre/Meltdown patched version of the Linux kernel.

Speaking of Spectre patches, Richard Biener made release candidate GCC 7.3 available today, and if all goes well, he plans for it to be an official release on Thursday, January 25, 2018.

Recently we shared news that the 4.16 kernel will start seeing some VirtualBox guest addition code, but that isn't the only thing being added to the kernel. A recent pull request is making its way into RC1 and will be adding a lot of updates to the existing sound drivers alongside new hardware support.

Late last week Canonical announced Slack as a snap, making it available across Linux platforms. It's in beta, but you can download it here.

And last but certainly not least, we'd like to send out a big Happy 20th Birthday to LWN!

Thanks to Petros Koutoupis for his contributions to this article.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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