While the Linux 4.16 merge window is nearing the end of the line, there still are some feature updates still being sent in, including a big batch of media subsystem changes sent in on Tuesday...
GStreamer core developer Tim-Philipp Müller has provided some insight about some current and upcoming happenings for the GStreamer multimedia framework project. He also addressed the recurring comment of "write it in Rust!" for better security/safety/reliability...
MySQL 8.0 should presumably appear this year although no public release date has been set. At last weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels were many talks about developers and database administrators eager for MySQL 8.0, well, at least for those not on the MariaDB bandwagon...
The GCC 8 stable compiler (GCC 8.1) should be officially released in the next month or two and Linux 4.16's gcc-plugins infrastructure is picking up support for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection...
What you won't find landing in the current in-development Linux 4.16 kernel is BUS1, the in-kernel IPC mechanism built out of the failure of KDBUS to reach the mainline kernel. While BUS1 isn't ready for mainline yet, D-Bus Broker continues moving along as a D-Bus compatible message bus delivering higher performance and reliability...
Last week Ingo Molnar sent in the main batch of scheduler updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, which included smarter task migration to try to yield better scalability, while today a second set of updates were sent in with an additional SMP optimization...
Going back about two years has been work towards supporting atomic mode-setting on Weston and we are finally seeing this support land for Wayland's reference compositor...
MenuLibre is the menu editor program supporting FreeDesktop.org's Desktop Entry Specification and supports most desktop environments out there for customizations of their menus...
Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code...
Over the past few months Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been focusing on Linux power improvements, in particular to extend the battery life of laptops running Fedora Linux. As indicated by his presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2018, he's making great strides in that effort...
ZFS On Linux 0.7.6 was released overnight as the latest release for these out-of-tree modules supporting the ZFS file-system natively on the Linux kernel via the OpenZFS code-base...
Last week the main pull request of XFS file-system driver updates for the Linux 4.16 was sent in and referred to by XFS maintainer Darrick Wong as having great scads of new stuff. The Oracle engineer has now sent in a secondary pull request of XFS for Linux 4.16...
The third development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 7.8-Folldal release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software and framework...
LizardFS for those unaware is yet another distributed file-system project with this MooseFS fork focusing on POSIX compliance, multi-platform support and aims to be fault-tolerant...
Among the many interesting presentations at this year's FOSDEM event included an update on the AV1 royalty-free, open-source video codec by Mozilla/Xiph.Org's Tim Terriberry...
Xorgproto had its inaugural release today as the collection of all the X.Org Server protocol headers formerly distributed as separate, standalone packages...
System76's Pop!_OS started off mostly as a re-branded spin of Ubuntu for the company's pre-loaded Linux laptops/desktops, but lately they have been venturing to more interesting changes at varying levels of the stack...
Palmer Dabbelt who maintains the RISC-V ports of GCC, Binutils, Linux, and glibc while working at RISC-V company SiFive spoke at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend about the software/hardware state of this royalty-free open-source CPU ISA...
Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.
Intel Coffee Lake CPUs began shipping in October and while their UHD Graphics are effectively re-branded Kabylake graphics, it's taken until today to get mainline support for Coffee Lake OpenCL support on Linux with Beignet...
In addition to Igalia developers being at FOSDEM 2018 to talk about their work on Chromium porting for Wayland, Alejandro Piñeiro of this Spain consulting firm talked about their contributions towards SPIR-V support within Mesa and particularly for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver...
Added to AMD's proprietary Windows/Linux OpenGL driver last August was a AMD_gpu_shader_half_float_fetch GL extension while today the documentation has been published and already merged into the Khronos registry...
Arguably the most interesting keynote at this year's FOSDEM event was Red Hat's Jon Masters talking about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities on an interesting technical level...
Besides talking about GNU Hurd in 2018 one of the other interesting talks in FOSDEM's micro-kernel track this year was on an Intel GPU resource multiplexer being developed by the Genode project...
Yesterday at FOSDEM 2018 Hurd developer Samuel Thibault talked about the work done on this GNU kernel for a PCI arbiter to allow different user-land drivers to access PCI devices concurrently. During this PCI arbiter talk he also went over the current state of the hardware support and recent achievements for GNU Hurd...
Last week Meltdown/Spectre patch wrangler Thomas Gleixner sent in various code clean-ups for Retpolines and KPTI with Linux 4.16 while today more feature work has been submitted. This includes initial mitigation work for Spectre v1 as well as IBPB support...
Albert Chu of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the release this weekend of FreeIPMI, the GNU project implementing Intelligent Platform Management Interface v1.5/2.0 support...
Red Hat's Lyude Paul has been spending the past number of weeks working out clock-gating support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with the open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver...
GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API...
A European cloud and dedicated server provider that designs their own servers is now designing their own BIOS using Coreboot and using this in production on thousands of servers...
Igalia has been one of the companies working on improving Chromium's support for Wayland and they shared their story about it at this weekend's FOSDEM 2018 event in Brussels...