The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent in today as the new feature work for Linux 4.8.

The Khronos Group has now uploaded all of their session videos from last week's SIGGRAPH 2016 conference to YouTube.

There's golden register setting updates available for newer GCN hardware on the AMDGPU kernel driver, but it's not immediately clear if these changes will mean any performance or stability improvements for owners of Tonga, Iceland, Polaris, Carrizo, and Stoney hardware.

Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code. The latest are double-digit gains for at least the BioShock Infinite game.

Just over one month after the MATE and Cinnamon editions of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah", the Xfce edition is now available.

Firefox 48.0 is officially available this morning for all supported platforms.

David Airlie sent in the main DRM feature update a short time ago for the Linux 4.8 kernel. The code has already landed while Linus Torvalds was quick to note he's encountered some Intel DRM driver troubles.

Valve has published their monthly Steam Hardware/Software Survey results, including the Linux vs. macOS vs. Windows breakdown.

ARM platform enablement continues in Linux 4.8 with several new targets being supported by the mainline Linux kernel. The most notable ARM Linux 4.8 addition is support for the Broadcom SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 3.

Introduced in the Linux 4.6 kernel was the OrangeFS file-system while for the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel it's picking up a new feature.

Released two weeks ago was the NVIDIA 367.35 Linux driver as the latest stable binary driver for NVIDIA hardware. Here are some performance tests to see if it upped the NVIDIA Pascal Linux performance at all.

With writing this weekend about switching to an S7 Edge powered by Android as my primary smartphone, it generated a flurry of comments in the forums and elsewhere with people wanting to share their two cents. A surprising number of people have contacted me to ask why I didn't buy an Ubuntu Phone or to try to fault me for not buying an Ubuntu Phone.

David Miller submitted the networking subsystem updates last week for the Linux 4.8 kernel.

OpenSSH 7.3 was released today by the OpenBSD camp with some security fixes while also providing a few new options and other features.

We've now started the back-half of the two week merge window for the Linux 4.8 kernel. Here's a recap of all the pull requests I covered during the first week of this yet another exciting kernel cycle.

The third alpha release of Kodi 17 "Krypton" is now available and it has continued landing new/improved functionality.

While still in early form and won't be merged for this next kernel cycle (v4.8), a series of patches were published on Sunday to improve CPU frequency selection under Linux, including an algorithm change for the Intel P-State scaling driver.

Flatpak 0.6.8 was released this weekend as the newest feature release of this GNOME sandboxing tech formerly known as XDG-App.

As usual, there was a lot of exciting Linux graphics news and benchmarks done, Linux gaming advancements, and other prominent open-source news covered on Phoronix.

The GNOME Maps program has seen update in the GNOME 3.14/3.16/3.18/3.20/3.21 series with new releases to change its tiling provider so that the mapping program will work once again.

With Ubuntu 16.10 developers are finally finishing their migration to systemd by switching over the starting of graphical desktop sessions from Upstart to systemd.

For a variety of factors, I've long used an Apple iPhone but two weeks ago switched to using a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge; finally running Android on my main mobile device!

For Ubuntu 16.10, Canonical is planning to make use of a new project to unify and clean-up network configuration across Ubuntu projects from the desktop/server/cloud versions to MaaS and other forms.

The Btrfs "enospc-rework" that's been in development for several months by Facebook's Josef Bacik is landing with the Linux 4.8 kernel.

The NFS client updates for the Linux 4.8 kernel feature a few prominent additions.

It looks like that AMD is going to continue maintaining their Catalyst-based Linux driver until the new AMDGPU-PRO driver architecture is up to scratch. That is, support for FirePro workstation users at least caring about stable support on Enterprise Linux distribution. A new Catalyst Pro / FirePro Unified driver for Linux was released this week.

IBM continues prepping the Linux kernel for supporting the upcoming POWER9 processors.

Takashi Iwai's "sound" updates have been pulled in for the Linux 4.8 kernel.

Red Hat developer Rob Clark, the founder of the Freedreno driver for open-source reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno support, has made some significant performance optimizations to this Gallium3D driver.

The first release candidate to the upcoming ReactOS 0.4.2 release is now available, the project aiming to be an open-source re-implementation of Microsoft Windows.

The language bindings for the Vulkan high-performance graphics API have exploded since the debut of Vulkan 1.0 earlier this year. There's support from Rust to Java for interacting with this Khronos graphics API, including support for Python.

For those playing TORCS, The Open Racing Simulator, its performance for this driving game simulator should be slightly faster if using one of Mesa's Gallium3D drivers.

A few years ago was the Kickstarter-backed effort to open-source a real GPU hardware design albeit from a late 90's design. That effort ultimately failed just raising $12k of a $200k USD goal, but the GPU design was released under the GPLv3 anyways.

At the beginning of the month I wrote about That Open, Upgradeable ARM Dev Board Is Trying To Make A Comeback, the EOMA68-spec'ed project formerly known as the Improv Dev Board. It's still using the same (rather slow) Allwinner SoC but has since seen some improvements and there's also a laptop compatible route too. The project has now raised more than $50k USD, but their goal is still three times that at $150k they are trying to raise over the next month.

GIMP core developer Jehan Pagès has written a blog post about the recent work done on GIMP 2.9.4 as well as a look at its future.

Valve released SteamOS 2.87 this week as the latest "Brewmaster" release of their Debian 8 based Linux gaming distribution.

There already have been the main pull requests for the AMDGPU/Radeon DRM drivers for DRM-Next that in turn will land in Linux 4.8 next week. However, today there's been a last-minute update of more open-source AMD driver changes for this next kernel release.

One week after Overlord was released for Linux (anc macOS), Virtual Programming has released Overlord II for Linux.

Jolla announced today that their Sailfish OS 2.0.2 "Aurajoki" mobile operating system release is available as early access.

There's long been talk on killing FBDEV and getting rid of CONFIG_VT with a modern replacement making more use of DRM/KMS drivers, but so far none of those efforts have fully panned out. The latest proposal is a "DRM text mode" as an alternative to FBDEV/FBCON.

I've already written more than a dozen various bits of information about the Linux 4.8 kernel this week covering the big pull requests / subsystem updates. Here's a collection of some of the other PRs that have arrived this week.

Kernel developer Josh Triplett has announced the work he's been doing recently on developing git-series, a way to track changes to a patch series over time.

Consulting firm Igalia who was contracted by Intel to help work on their open-source Mesa driver has written a blog post about some of the progress they've made the past year.