Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has shared another weekly update concerning his summer 2017 hacking on the VC4 open-source driver stack that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi.

This weekend I posted a comparison of OpenGL/Vulkan performance for Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs with Serious Sam 3: BFE now that it's updated to the Vulkan-enabled "Fusion" 2017 update. For those curious about the Intel HD Graphics gaming potential for this game, here are some results.

Igor Stoppa of Huawei continues working on a new kernel feature to provide read-only protection for dynamic data.

TrueOS-aligned Lumina Desktop Environment 1.3 is now available as the latest stable release for this Qt-powered desktop environment.

Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted his set of 92 patches for implementing an experimental NIR back-end within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

GNU is home to a wide variety of free software projects, some more notable than others. One of the lesser known GNU projects is Motti, a "simple multiplayer strategy game."

AES-128-CBC support is coming to fscrypt, the generic file-system crypto code in the Linux kernel that's currently in use by F2FS and EXT4 for offering native file-system encryption support.

Rob Clark continues doing great work on the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno graphics as well as the related MSM DRM driver for display support with Snapdragon SoCs.

It looks like the first AMD-powered Chromebook might be getting closer to reality.

The LLVM Clang compiler toolchain now has mainline support for the Ananas platform.

Back in May we talked about ARB_gl_spirv / NIR Support Being Worked On For RadeonSI while now we have more details from AMD's Nicolai Hähnle regarding these plans.

Back in March we reported about LLVM 5.0 anticipating better AMD Ryzen performance thanks to a proper scheduling model slated to land. But months later, AMD still hasn't produced the code.

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 4.12-rc7 with what could be the final release candidate prior to declaring the stable Linux 4.12 kernel.

The Debian project is warning Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake users to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on their CPUs due to a possible issue affecting those with out-of-date microcode.

On Friday we launched the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey and as of this morning we're at nearly 12,000 results so far (11,879 as of writing). While there's still more than one week left to fill in the survey, here's how things are looking so far.

A fair amount of new device support and other improvements are getting ready for the Linux 4.13 kernel via the HID and input trees.

It's looking like the EXT4 file-system updates for the upcoming Linux 4.13 cycle could be a bit more interesting this time around.

The latest Git code for FFmpeg now supports VA-API accelerated VP9 encoding.

Latte Dock, the desktop dock based on KDE's Plasma Framework and Qt, is preparing for their next release at the end of August.

The third beta for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1 is available for testing this weekend.

A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver.

Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state.

We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area.

Georges Stavracas' latest work on GNOME is making the GNOME Music player less slow.

System76 continues working on improvements to the GNOME stack as part of their transition in-step to using it over Unity 7, in line with Canonical's decision to switch Ubuntu over to GNOME and abandon their grand Unity 8 ambitions.

Wine 2.11 has arrived as the latest bi-weekly development release for this program to handle Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems.

Marek Olšák's changes to make Rocket League and Witcher 2 happy on the RadeonSI OpenGL driver are now in place.

Serious Sam 3: BFE has been upgraded (for now, the non-VR version) against the Serious Sam 2017 "Fusion" engine changes, which means Vulkan for this latest Croteam game.

Here is some more complementary data to this week's Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux With Core i5, Core i7, Ryzen 7.

Remember that "openSUSE Tablet" last year that was seeking crowd-funding and even advertised by the openSUSE crew for being a Linux tablet as cheap as $200 USD? Sadly, it's not a reality while the company still appears to be formulating something.

Given the continued flow of KHR_no_error patches hitting Mesa 17.2 Git by Valve developers, here is a fresh comparison using the just-updated Padoka PPA with comparing the impact of using this support via the MESA_NO_ERROR=1 switch.

The Baikal renderer is a newly-released, open-source implementation of the AMD Radeon ProRender API. Baikal has evolved into a fully-functional rendering engine and its only hardware requirement is on OpenCL 1.2.