Phoronix

With the Linux 4.12 merge window now over, here is a look at some of the most exciting features that were added to the Linux kernel for this next installment.

The latest monthly KDE Frameworks 5 update is now available for KDE/Qt developers...

FreeType 2.8 has been released and this version brings some big features to this widely-used open-source font engine...

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics has another important performance feature...

Linus Torvalds has went ahead and closed the Linux 4.12 kernel merge window one day early with the release of 4.12-rc1...

If you happen to have an ASRock G41C-GS still in use or tucked away in your closet, this older motherboard for Intel Core 2 CPUs now has support for Coreboot to free the proprietary BIOS of the motherboard. Or if you don't but still have other parts available, this motherboard is still available from a few online shops...

Dmitry Torokhov has sent in some last-minute updates for the Linux 4.12 kernel around its input support...

With big merges this cycle from the DRM additions, a lot of new staging code, and more, the Linux 4.12 kernel is a bit heavier... Here's some numbers...

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has been busy this spring leading the charge on advancing the VC4 DRM+Gallium3D driver stack that most notably is used by Raspberry Pi devices for a fully-open graphics driver stack...

Following last week's main feature pull request of the Direct Rendering Manager updates for Linux 4.12, David Airlie has now submitted -- and was already pulled by Torvalds -- some fixes ahead of this weekend's expected 4.12-rc1 release...

Rohit Jain of Oracle's Linux kernel team is working on an interrupt aware scheduler, which should improve performance for workloads with interrupt activity...

At Microsoft's Build 2017 Conference this week they announced plans to bring Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora to the Windows Store. This would make it easier to deploy these Linux distributions on their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in an easier manner than currently...

For those that haven't yet switched over to the newly-stable Mesa 17.1 series, last quarter's Mesa 17.0 series was just updated with the v17.0.6 point release...

AMD has made good on their word to open-source their ROCm OpenCL stack...

With Mesa 17.1 having been released this week, the release calendar has been updated for Mesa 17.2...

It had been close to one month since the last Vulkan update, which is rare since usually point releases to Vulkan 1.0 ship every week or two. But with the wait comes many bug fixes to the specifications as well as two new specifications...

Wine 2.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for this program to run Windows applications/games on Linux and macOS...

With the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver recently hitting the milestone of effectively being Vulkan 1.0 compliant, I figured this warranted a good time for running a fresh open-source Vulkan vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance comparison on various graphics cards. For additional context, the RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL numbers are also present to provide additional value.

The GNU OrgaDoc project has seen its first release in thirteen years...

The Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, most notably used by various Raspberry Pi boards and other SBCs, will have a thermal driver in the Linux 4.12 kernel...

With Wayland now being present on Chrome OS for the Android compatibility layer, modifications to Crouton were made to allow Fedora Workstation with Wayland to run atop these Wayland-enabled Chromebooks...

Con Kolivas has released his latest version of the MuQSS CPU scheduler that succeeds the Brain BFS scheduler...

There's a root exploit vulnerability present on both KDE4 and KDE5...

The Chrome/Chromium web-browser now has a GPU service scheduler...

The VK9 hobbyist project implementing Direct3D 9 over the Vulkan graphics API is beginning to reach the more challenging milestones...

The X.Org Foundation is looking for interested individuals to offer bids for organizing the 2018 X.Org Developers' Conference...

It's not GIMP 2.10 or the GIMP 3.0 unicorn, but for those wanting the latest-and-greatest GIMP image manipulation program update, v2.8.22 is now available...

GNOME 3.24.2 is now available as the second and last planned point release to the GNOME 3.24 desktop series until the GNOME 3.26 debut in September...

For those that didn't pick up a Steam Controller or Steam Link back during Valve's holiday sales, they are running a Steam Hardware sale the next few days...

Last night well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olsak released a new patch series threading Gallium3D's pipe_context and initially is suitable for the RadeonSI driver. Given the performance gains he mentioned in the patch series, I was anxious to try out this new Gallium3D threading capability.

Westfield is a new independent project that provides a Wayland protocol XML parser and generator for JavaScript...

Now that GCC 7 was released as stable last week, the GCC trunk/master code-base is back open for merging more feature work with the beginning of the GCC 8 development cycle...

Microsoft used its Build 2017 conference for rolling out the first public preview of .NET Core 2.0...

NVIDIA at their annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC'17) have provided more public details about the forthcoming CUDA 9 compute update...

The kbuild updates for the Linux kernel aren't usually noteworthy but at least this time does bring a few LLVM/Clang related changes...

A new point release of the OpenShot video editor is now available for those satisfied with this open-source non-linear video editing solution...

Not to be confused with the recently-landed OpenGL threaded dispatch support that recently landed in Mesa Git, Marek Olšák has now published a set of patches for threading Gallium3D for RadeonSI: moving the execution of all Gallium3D pipe_context calls into a separate CPU thread...

Following the 117 patches adding 314k lines of code to AMDGPU for enabling the next-generation "Raven Ridge" Zen+Vega APU within the AMDGPU DRM driver, Raven support patches have emerged for the RadeonSI driver, including support for the new VCN video block...

Artanis 0.2 has been released, a newer GNU project that's a web application framework written in Guile Scheme...

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used the company's GPU Technology Conference to today announce the Volta V100 accelerator for data centers and HPC workloads...

Alex Deucher of AMD has posted the initial AMDGPU DRM/KMS kernel driver patches for bringing up graphics on the next-generation "Raven" APUs...

Patches came out today expanding the Vega 10 family with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack...

NetworkManager 1.8 is now available as the latest version of this widely-used network management component to Linux systems...

Mesa 17.1.0 is now officially available as the Q2'2017 update to this important piece to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack...

NVIDIA's gaming software, GeForce Experience, now has support for OpenGL and Vulkan...

The ARM folks have requested that the TEE subsystem and OP-TEE drivers be included in Linux 4.12, the Trusted Execution Environment...

A two-year-old patch for the X.Org Server from a NVIDIA developer has finally landed...

Last week was the main ACPI / power management updates for Linux 4.12 while Intel's Rafael Wysocki has now submitted a second set of feature updates for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Git 2.13 is now available as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source version control system...

AMD's CodeXL utility that's open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella for graphics profiling/debugging is up to version 2.3...