Last week upon conclusion of the X.Org Foundation elections it was revealed the planned X.Org + SPI merger failed. The failure to change the by-laws and become part of SPI failed not due to losing the vote, but in not securing enough votes to command the two-thirds majority of X.Org members needed to approve the change. X.Org members and the board are now pondering the next steps...
While usually not presenting any major features each release cycle, the libata feature pull request for Linux 4.1 is a bit more interesting this time around...
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big staging pull request for the Linux 4.1 kernel, which has a number of patches courtesy of new women developers that participated in GNOME OPW / Outreachy...
Just hours after Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.0 kernel, the GNU Linux-Libre 4.0 kernel was released by the Free Software Foundation of Latin America...
GCC developer Honza HubiÄka has written a lengthy blog post about the features coming up for GCC 5, what will be initially released as GCC 5.1 in the next two weeks...
The Khronos Group has published the 30th revision of SPIR-V, the intermediate representation at the heart of the new Vulkan graphics API and OpenCL 2.1 compute API...
A few days ago I ran some fresh hard drive file-system benchmarks on Linux 4.0 and today those results are being complemented by the solid-state drive results. Tested on the SSD were the popular EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems.
Those paying attention to the mailing list may have seen the patches yesterday that surfaced from an independent developer for implementing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 with Intel's graphics driver for Gen 7+ hardware. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true...
For those running older Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D graphics driver, an important update landed in Mesa 10.6-devel Git this past week...
Ted Ts'o at Google has implemented EXT4 encryption support that will likely be baked into the next Android "M" release and is being worked toward for mainline inclusion in the upstream Linux kernel...
Last year Valve made all of their games free to Debian developers as a thank you since SteamOS is based on Debian. Now Valve is giving out their collection of all current and future games to open-source Mesa developers...
A new release of ZFS On Linux is available this week for providing the latest capabilities for this Oracle/Sun ZFS file-system implemented as an out-of-tree, native Linux kernel driver...
As part of the work towards allowing easy UEFI/BIOS updates from the Linux desktop in a standardized manner, Richard Hughes has been developing the new fwupd component...
For those searching for a low-cost system/motherboard for experimenting with Coreboot, there's another new AMD motherboard that now works with Coreboot's upstream Git code. The board costs only about $30 USD and works with all modern AMD AM1 processors...
Back when the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smart-phone launched in February it was only available in limited numbers via "flash sales" facilitated by the company. At last, now this first Ubuntu smart-phone is available to order by anyone within the European Union...
A few months back I wrote about the poor state of Chrome/Chromium HiDPI support on Linux but fortunately with the latest unstable web browser code these issues appear to have been resolved...
LibFuzzer was recently added to LLVM as a library for in-process fuzzing. LibFuzzer combined with other open-source fuzzing capabilities make it easy for uncovering new bugs within LLVM and other projects...
While AMD has yet to make the Catalyst 15.3 Beta Linux graphics driver available for download from their web-site, they released the driver to Canonical and as such this new AMD Linux driver has been available in Ubuntu 15.04 for a few weeks. Canonical is now back-porting this proprietary driver back into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr...
After almost two years of the X.Org Foundation's Board of Directors pursuing a merger with SPI, the 2015 X.Org Elections have ended and the results were sent out to X.Org members last night...
It's been a while since last running any Linux file-system tests on a hard drive considering all of the test systems around here are using solid-state storage and only a few systems commissioned in the Linux benchmarking test farm are using hard drives, but with Linux 4.0 around the corner, here's a six-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.0 with a HDD using EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and even NTFS, NILFS2, and ReiserFS.
In recent months we've covered an Ubuntu tablet with a 1TB hard drive, another sketchy Ubuntu tablet, and other awkward devices looking to ship Ubuntu in tablet/mobile form without any support from Canonical. There's yet another tablet to talk about today...
A Linux user has started an LKML discussion over compiling the kernel with -O3 for driving performance improvements out of a more-optimized kernel binary...