It looks like the AMD posting of the open-source Radeon driver enablement code for next-gen "Navi" GPUs is imminent. In fact, the first bits of it quietly were pushed out today.

With the last of the MPEG-2 patents having expired last February, the Fedora / Red Hat legal team is ready to okay the shipping of MPEG-2 video support out-of-the-box in Fedora Linux at long last... But they don't yet know what implementation to use.

Purism has shared their latest update on the efforts around their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone they hope to begin shipping in Q3.

OpenBSD 6.5 was released today, about one week ahead of schedule for this security-minded BSD operating system. OpenBSD 6.5 is bringing several prominent new features including RETGUARD as its new stack protector and OpenRSYNC as its ISC-licensed in-progress replacement to rsync.

Nsight Systems, NVIDIA's proprietary cross-platform tool providing a timeline view of system resource analysis and other metrics while running GPU compute/graphics workloads, now can handle the Vulkan API.

Over the past decade there's been talks on a few occasions about either spinning NetBSD as a desktop platform or offering up various desktop usability improvements to make it easier to use this BSD as a desktop operating system. In 2019 there still isn't a great desktop experience to NetBSD but the new "OS108" is seeking to improve that with a NetBSD OS paired with the MATE desktop environment.

If you have been hit by a bug on Linux 5.1 where your X.Org Server would no longer start or separately where when using VirtIO DRM that XWayland and GNOME Shell would break, fixes have now landed in Linux 5.1 Git.

While Windows 10 users are gushing over Chrome finally introducing a "dark mode" for the web browser, on the Linux front there are no dramatic user-facing changes but just a lot of continued lower-level improvements for this cross-platform web browser.

On top of Intel's new open-source OpenGL driver seeing some hefty performance optimizations, the Iris Gallium3D driver has picked up another OpenGL extension ahead of the Mesa 19.1 branching.

Filament is Google's real-time physically based rendering engine that supports Android along with Linux and all other major platforms, including a target for WebAssembly+WebGL. Filament 1.2.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest step forward for this PBR rendering engine.

The Cage Wayland Compositor for kiosk / full-screen-one-app environments has managed to materialize.

While on the kernel-side there has been FreeSync support with the AMDGPU DRM driver since Linux 5.0 and for the OpenGL driver with RadeonSI there has been this functionality in Mesa 19.0 when paired with a supported kernel, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has missed out on this action until now. But landing just in time for the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze is now the FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync enablement for RADV.

The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Adding to the list of Mesa 19.1 changes is now AMD_compressed_ATC_texture being plumbed into Mesa/Gallium3D primarily with a focus on the Freedreno driver.

The Coreboot open-source firmware/BIOS project has finally seen initial AMD Zen CPU support as part of Google engineers bringing up Picasso APU support in order to handle an upcoming Chromebook launch.

The folks at CompuLab have achieved another engineering masterpiece with a passively-cooled PC with an Intel Core i9 9900K processor and up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics. Coming out of CompuLab, the PC is also Linux-friendly.

For those trying to avoid systemd, the Guile-based GNU Shepherd init system / service manager is out with a new feature release.

With today's GeForce GTX 1650 launch, NVIDIA has posted the 430.09 Linux driver as their first in this new driver series.

Coming in now a step below last month's GeForce GTX 1660 as an RTX-less Turing graphics card is now the GeForce GTX 1650 at the $149 USD price point.

There is just one week to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze and branching for this next quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers. Notable this round is the introduction of the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver for supporting Broadwell graphics and newer atop this next-gen OpenGL driver ahead of next year's Xe Graphics dGPU launch. With days to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, more performance optimizations have landed.

Earlier this month the developers behind Tensorflow open-sourced MLIR as the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation. They hope this IR can become a common format between machine learning models/frameworks and as part of that it might end up becoming an LLVM sub-project.

For fans of the Kodi HTPC software, version 18.2 of the "Leia" update is now available with several prominent fixes.

Intel continues working on its SPMD compiler as part of their SPIR-V translator running on the CPU and other efforts. ISPC is the Intel SPMD Program Compiler and at the end of last week reached its version 1.11 milestone for this C variant compiler designed for single program, multiple data programming.

The latest change merged for Mesa 19.1 is a workaround so the Epic Games' game launch correctly renders when using OpenGL.

For those wanting a community-supported, free version in effect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the two options have been CentOS with its close relation (and employment) by Red Hat or Scientific Linux that has been maintained Fermilab, CERN, and other research labs. Moving forward, however, these labs are going to be adopting CentOS 8 and they will not be developing a new version of Scientific Linux based on the upcoming RHEL8.

When drivers get dropped from the Linux kernel it's generally due to hardware being no one cares about anymore that hasn't been produced in many years and the code often falls into disrepair to the point that the only logical way forward is dropping the driver. That happened last year to the "FDOMAIN" driver but as does happen every so often (albeit rare) thanks to the code being still obtainable through Git and the nature of open-source, interested parties can step up and revive the code.

Canonical has shifted the default Java of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from OpenJDK 10 to OpenJDK 11. Plus here are some fresh OpenJDK 8/11/12 benchmarks on this Ubuntu Long Term Support release.

AMD this morning released AMDVLK 2019.Q2.2 as the newest tagged update to their open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux graphics driver.

NetworkManager 1.16 was released in March with WireGuard support, WiFi P2P, Intel IWD improvements, and much more. Surprisingly being released already is NetworkManager 1.18.

While awaiting DragonFlyBSD 5.6 as the BSD operating system's next feature release, DragonFlyBSD 5.4.2 has been released as the newest stable point release.

The Freedreno MSM DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 5.2. MSM provides the Direct Rendering Manager support around Qualcomm Adreno hardware and with this next kernel cycle is continuing to see better Adreno 600 series support.

Adding to the excitement of the Linux 5.2 kernel changes are a lot of Thunderbolt improvements expected to be introduced in this next kernel cycle.

The Netrunner Rolling Linux distribution that is based on Arch Linux / Manjaro (unlike the non-rolling release using Debian Testing) is out with a new release for this KDE-focused desktop platform.

Linux 5.1-rc6 is larger than the previous release candidate, but he isn't too worried right now about the condition of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel.

Most exciting this week in KDE space was seeing KWin pick up support for the NVIDIA EGLStreams implementation for Wayland with this proprietary graphics driver. Beyond the EGLStreams KWin support were also many fixes and other improvements to the desktop landing this Easter week.

Should you have any Daktronics scoreboards, video displays, or digital billboards, mainline Linux kernel support appears to be in the works.

While initially no qualified candidates stepped forward for the 2019 Debian Project Leader elections, following the extended nomination period and voting, Sam Hartman has been elected the newest leader of Debian.

Intel's i40e / XL710 Ethernet driver will begin supporting Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel.

One of the areas of Oracle Linux and its "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that the company continues investing in and differentiating it from upstream RHEL and alternatives is around Ksplice as their means of live kernel patching while Red Hat continues with Kpatch and SUSE with kGraft.

While initially some questions were raised over the usefulness and practicality of this driver when it was first proposed on the kernel mailing list, the NULL TTY driver is set to make its maiden voyage to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle.

SuperTuxKart, the open-source racing game inspired by Mario Kart and themed around Linux/Tux, has reached its 1.0 version after being in development the past 12+ years.

Being merged into the LLVM code-base this Saturday is JITLink, a just-in-time linker for parsing object files and letting their contents run in a target process.

Not only is the longtime Lima DRM driver for Arm Mali 400/450 graphics set to finally premiere with the Linux 5.2 kernel, but the Panfrost DRM driver is also being mainlined for the newer Mali graphics hardware.

A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel.

As we've been expecting from NVIDIA's recent DXR ray-tracing support back-ported to Pascal/Volta GPUs, there's now a NVIDIA Linux driver beta that offers VK_NV_ray_tracing for pre-Turing graphics processors.

Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it's been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system.

While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston.

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality.