Phoronix

As part of his ongoing contract work for improving virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support on the Linux desktop, now that his DRM leasing and other X.Org Server / kernel level work is getting in order, Keith Packard sent out a set of patches implementing direct display extensions for Mesa's Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers...

With the Gallium3D OpenGL on-disk shader cache most notably used right now by the RadeonSI driver, TGSI is the intermediate representation currently being cached to the disk for speeding up game load times, etc. Given the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature, Timothy Arceri of Valve has added NIR caching support...

For the Linux 4.16 merge window ARM submitted Spectre and Meltdown mitigation for the 64-bit ARM architecture while now those security changes are being called for backporting to the Linux 4.15 stable series...

LunarG today has begun shipping an updated version of their SDK based against the upstream and current Vulkan 1.0.68 specification...

Valve has added support for the AMD/GPUOpen TrueAudio Next within the latest beta of SteamAudio 2.0...

With many of you likely upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS upon release and the recommendation to use disk encryption as important as ever on any important system especially laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and looking at the current performance overhead of using the current "home directory encryption" and "full disk encryption" options available to Ubuntu Linux users.

Taking care of a nearly eight year old feature request, GNOME Shell's Alt-Tab switcher has picked up the ability to close applications, similar to the functionality Apple offers with macOS...

Even IBM System/390 "Linux on z" systems are prone to the Spectre security vulnerability. But with Linux 4.16, s390 is getting its initial Spectre Variant One and Two mitigation...

As expected, the VLC 3.0 media player is now available!..

Fedora Atomic Workstation is beginning to come together for allowing the core operating system to update atomically as a whole while the desktop applications are expected to be Flatpaks...

Last week the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.16 was sent in that included many AMDGPU updates, AMDKFD HSA updates, better Intel Cannonlake graphics support, Jetson TX2 display support, MSM DEVFREQ handling, and much more. But missing were any open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver changes. There is now a secondary DRM pull request with Nouveau updates...

Mesa 18.0, the first new Mesa 3D release of 2018, is coming up quite soon while today brings the fourth release candidate...

KDAB, the Qt-focused consulting firm, has released GammaRay 2.9. GammaRay is their project allowing for introspection of Qt applications, similar in nature to the GTK Inspector...

If you are a KDE user and haven't yet upgraded to Plasma 5.12, you may want to do so soon, or one of the recent point releases -- especially if your system is potentially accessible by others to insert rogue flash/memory devices...

Steve Langasek of Canonical has laid out a draft proposal about allowing Snaps to be shipping by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release...

Google released the latest beta of the Chrome/Chromium web-browser today. Chrome 65 Beta isn't as exciting as some past browser updates, but there are still some new additions to note...

The KDE community and the Odin Group have announced a new version of the Slimbook, the KDE-branded laptop running Neon. While it's an improvement over last year's model, it's still a tough sell against other laptops/ultrabooks...

Last week was the updates providing initial Spectre Variant Two and Meltdown mitigation for 64-bit ARM hardware on the Linux 4.16 kernel. This week as the Linux 4.16 merge window nears the end, Spectre Variant One mitigation has come for ARM64 as well as other Spectre V2 / Meltdown updates...

This summer's release of openSUSE Leap 15 that is currently in beta and built off the sources of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will feature a KDE Plasma on Wayland option...

PostgreSQL 10.2 is now available as the latest point release to PostgreSQL 10...

With the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel there are improvements to note for both AMD and Intel users...

Valve has onboarded another open-source Linux graphics driver developer...

Google's cpu_features library makes it easier for detecting modern CPU capabilities like FMA, SSE, and AVX extensions when writing hand-tuned code...

The long sought after VLC 3.0 multimedia player release will be here anytime now...

Many of you have been anxious to get ROCm/OpenCL compute working with the open-source Radeon Linux driver on modern GPUs while using a mainline kernel and that day continues inching closer...

Maintainers of openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release packages continue in being very punctual with their package updates...

Back in 2016 AMD introduced WattMan to their Radeon Software driver to allow for fine-tuning of GPU voltage, engine clocks, memory clocks and more. An incarnation of that is now approaching their open-source Linux driver...

Oracle's Mark Reinhold spoke at last weekend's FOSDEM conference about the state of OpenJDK for open-source Java...

RADV, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver, now has external memory host support via the VK_EXT_external_memory_host extension that was recently introduced in the Vulkan 1.0.66 update...

With the NVIDIA proprietary driver continuing to only support EGLStreams for their Wayland support until the new "Unix device memory allocator" project pans out, one of the big limitations has been no XWayland support for running X11 applications. Fortunately, that's now changing...

The second release candidate of LLVM 6.0 has been tagged...

While initial RISC-V support was added to Linux 4.15, it was only the architecture code and not any device drivers. With Linux 4.16, the RISC-V developers admit this time around they didn't get as many changes in as they were hoping for, but they do have some improvements to land this cycle...

The SDL library that's most commonly associated with being an abstraction layer used by Linux games now has Wayland XDG-Shell support...

Intel today lifted the lid on the Xeon D-2100 series, what used to be known as Skylake-D...

After nearly one year in development, lead MATE developer Martin Wimpress has announced version 1.20 of this GNOME2-forked desktop environment...

KMyMoney, the KDE personal finance manager program, has reached version 5.0 and with that big "5" release it's been ported to KDE Frameworks 5...

The Qt Company this morning announced the beta availability of the Qt Creator 4.6 integrated development environment...

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...

Darren Hart of VMware's Open-Source Technology Center sent out the platform-drivers-x86 updates today for the Linux 4.16 kernel...

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...

The ownCloud-forked Nextcloud software for file hosting and communication is out with their latest major release...

More video acceleration related commits landed in the Mesa 18.1-dev Git tree this week...

KDE Plasma 5.12.0 is now available that also serves as the second long-term support release for the Plasma 5 desktop...

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...