It's been a while since last having anything to report on with VLC with the VLC 3.0 release still not available, but thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there was an interesting project around working on 3D format support...
While Oracle recently laid off a ton of SPARC staff (and Solaris), not everyone was let go and it's still not instantly a dead platform. With Linux 4.14 there are some SPARC improvements for those relying upon this ex-Sun hardware...
One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year associated with the GNOME project was on reworking the Mutter compositor from requiring X11/XWayland code-paths for starting the Wayland compositor...
The Piper mouse configuration interface to libratbag is one of the success stories from this year's Google Summer of Code and fortunately the involved student developer has continued contributing to the project...
One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects within the BSD realm this summer was working on a new boot management tool and library for ZFS on FreeBSD. It's still in the works, but progress is being made...
AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has published a set of patches today for adding out-of-order rasterization support to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Long story short, this can boost the Linux gaming performance of GCN 1.2+ graphics cards when enabled...
Earlier this summer we heard how System76 might make their own distribution installer. They indeed are moving forward in this effort to construct their own installer from scratch and it's written in Rust...
While Oracle is slashing Solaris and SPARC jobs, their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system continues getting pushed forward. Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 is now available as their re-based version off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4...
GSoC 2017 student developer Jacob Lifshay who spent his summer working on Vulkan-CPU as a CPU-based Vulkan software implementation (and recently renamed the project to Kazan) has continued working on his open-source project post-GSoC to make this interesting Vulkan project a reality...
Besides the separate pull request that brought Zstd compression support for Btrfs with the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel, the main Btrfs pull request was also submitted on Friday for updating this Linux file-system...
Like us, many of you have probably been anxious for weeks to see a plethora of benchmarks featuring AMD's EPYC processors. An EPYC-equipped server arrived today courtesy of AMD and TYAN and is now in the process of being tested at Phoronix. Next week we should have some initial comparison numbers to feature of the AMD EPYC 7601 processor under Linux while in the weeks ahead will be more extensive numbers in looking at the Linux performance in different areas followed by FreeBSD/BSD results and other interesting tests. Here's our first look at this Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 server.
As we previously reported on, there was a Google Summer of Code project this year optimizing FFmpeg's VP9 decoder particularly around AVX2 instructions and threading. The project was a success and VP9 decoding should be much faster with FFmpeg as a result...
There's more good news about work-in-progress patches for those GCN 1.0 owners that have been looking to get your graphics card running full-featured under the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the existing Radeon Direct Rendering Manager driver...
Curious around the GNOME Shell desktop and improvements made during the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle in transitioning away from Unity 7 and X.Org to GNOME and Wayland, I took the recently-reviewed Razer Blade Stealth laptop and tried out the very latest Ubuntu desktop daily ISO on this Intel laptop. Here are my initial impressions of the current Ubuntu 17.10 desktop experience as well as some power/boot/performance benchmarks of 17.10 in its daily state compared to Ubuntu 17.04 on this Kabylake system.
For the many of you Linux users that have been desiring an AMD laptop, things could get interesting with Lenovo having just announced the ThinkPad A-Series...
After delays pushed its release back by about one month, LLVM 5.0 was just released a few minutes ago along with its associated sub-projects like the Clang 5.0 C/C++ compiler...
In two weeks now Purism has managed to raise over $200,000 USD towards their dream of building a privacy/free-software-minded smartphone running their own custom Linux-based software stack. But they remain a long ways to go from their $1.5 MM goal...
Linux hwmon developer Guenter Roeck has posted a patch adding support for Family 17h (Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc) temperature monitoring support to the existing k10temp Linux kernel driver...
Building off last week's Wine 2.16 bi-weekly development snapshot, the crew working on the more bleeding-edge/experimental Wine-Staging branch have released their v2.16 update with various features tacked on...
Mauro Carvalho Chehab has sent in a big pull request of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This time around there are multiple new drivers yielding around a net addition of around 30k lines to the Linux kernel...
Intel developers have published a new round of drm-intel-testing updates for those developers or enthusiasts wishing to begin testing this in-progress code for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver with this code eventually being queued for the Linux 4.15 cycle...
While Linux users of AMD's new Zen-based Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors are still waiting for thermal driver support to hit the mainline Linux kernel, FreeBSD developers have already managed to produce the Zen "Family 17h" CPU thermal monitoring support on their own...
For those with Qualcomm Adreno A3xx graphics hardware and looking forward to playing with the MSM+Freedreno open-source driver stack, it's one step easier tracking down the right components with the necessary binary-only firmware blobs now living within linux-firmware.git...
For those of you still maintaining COBOL code-bases, GnuCOBOL 2.2 is now available as what was formerly OpenCOBOL and also the project's first stable release in nearly one decade...
It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it's now available in draft form...
Jon Thomas has announced the release of the OpenShot Video Editor 2.4 released. Among the features of OpenShot 2.4 are "vastly improved stability" for this non-linear, cross-platform video editor...
The crypto subsystem updates have been pulled in for the Linux 4.14 kernel and it includes more complete AMD Secure Processor support, among other changes...
Takashi Iwai of SUSE has mailed in his sound driver updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This time around there isn't too many speaker-shattering changes, but a wide range of fixes and a few notable changes...
While we have tested a number of Linux distributions on Intel's new Xeon Scalable platform, here are some initial BSD tests using two Xeon Gold 6138 processors with the Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U barebones server.
Google has announced the availability today of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) Release 16. This release is worth mentioning in that Google is now encouraging developers to start using libc++ as their C++ standard library...
For those not riding the in-development Debian "Buster" packages or the "Sid" bleeding-edge packages, the default desktop GNOME session is using Wayland by default...
With the quick F27 cycle given the Fedora 26 delays in getting that previous release out the door, this week already marks the Fedora 27 beta freeze...
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