Linus Torvalds has released the seventh weekly release candidate of the Linux 4.20 kernel.

While the holiday season is upon us, the KDE development pace hasn't slowed down with this past week seeing a number of exciting improvements to the Plasma desktop and KDE applications.

Christopher Schaefer has released a new version of his VK9 project that is translating Direct3D 9 to Vulkan, similar to DXVK and in fact the original project in this space for handling D3D on toop of VLK.

The Debian installer team has presented their fourth alpha release of the Debian Installer preparing for the 10.0 "Buster" release.

Given the proposed Libre RISC-V SoC that could function as a Vulkan accelerator by running the Kazan Vulkan implementation on it, I decided to have a fresh look at how the LLVMpipe performance is for running OpenGL on the CPU. Here are those tests done on a dual socket AMD EPYC server.

The PGI 18.10 Community Edition compiler was recently released that is geared for HPC workloads and aims to deliver optimal performance on multi-core processors and GPUs.

Patches for the board support for the Chameleon96 Intel FPGA board have been published and could soon be found in the mainline Linux kernel.

A big serving of AMD firmware/microcode updates landed on Friday in the linux-firmware.git canonical tree for both AMD Zen processors and Radeon graphics processors.

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle who is working under contract for Valve released a new version of this open-source layer for translating Direct3D 10/11 calls to Vulkan API for enhancing the experience for running Windows games on Linux.

NVIDIA rolled out the 417.42 Windows driver and 415.22.01 Linux driver on Friday that feature their very latest Vulkan components.

Intel's growing graphics team recently hosted a "Ask You Anything" on Reddit as they solicit more feedback and ideas from the community about their discrete graphics plans. From that, interest in their Linux graphics driver/software stack came in second for popularity.

The second weekly release candidate of Wine 4.0 is now available for testing this weekend.

With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 having been recently released, development is back onto full-swing in Git master. DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER2 lead developer Matthew Dillon has been landing HAMMER2 file-system improvements that he hopes to back-port to stable in the coming weeks.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for OpenRISC Linux debugging.

The Khronos Group is looking for feedback on its KTX2 specification that is used for storing textures for OpenGL (including GLES) and Vulkan while being a simple format and an extension of the original KTX with improvements for Vulkan and other graphics APIs.

Fedora developers are working on trying to figure out the best default behavior moving forward for their I/O scheduler selection.

The 64-bit ARM architecture code (a.k.a ARM64 / AArch64) with the Linux 4.21 kernel is seeing pointer authentication added as a new security feature.

Initially during the Linux 4.20 kernel merge window with the STIBP addition for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation it was turned on by default for all processes. But that turned out to have a sizable performance hit so the behavior was changed to only turn it on for processes under SECCOMP or when requested via the PRCTL interface. However, AMD is landing a patch that for select CPUs will have an always-on mode as evidently that's preferred for some AMD processors.

A new framework queued for introduction with the Linux 4.21 kernel is the ARM-developed Energy Model Management Framework.

The Radeon Software for Linux 18.50 driver release (a.k.a. "AMDGPU-PRO" 18.50) is now officially available

Released just one week after Qt 5.12 LTS, The Qt Company on Thursday published Qt 3D Studio 2.2 as the newest version of this development environment for designing 3D user interfaces and adding 3D content to Qt5 programs.

After being announced last week, Valve's Steam Link application for the Raspberry Pi is now officially available.

In addition to AMD's year-end Radeon driver updates issued today, their GPUOpen crew has also carried out some new open-source software releases.

AMD today released their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition geared for Windows gamers while Linux users should have AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 available shortly for those wanting to use this hybrid Vulkan/OpenGL driver component that does also feature the AMDGPU-Open components too in their stable but dated composition.

The KDE community is out with an early holiday presents for its users: KDE Applications 18.12 is shipping today.

For those not yet prepared to move over to the Mesa 18.3 series, Mesa 18.2.7 is out today with the latest batch of fixes.

Unity Tech is ending out the year with their Unity 2018.3 game engine update that brings a number of new features and improvements to its many supported platforms.

Complementing all of the AMDGPU feature work already staged for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, another (small) batch of material was sent out on Wednesday.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API.

The QEMU emulator that is widely used by the open-source Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 3.1 feature release. This is the QEMU update that is adding multi-threaded Tiny Code Generator support, display improvements, adds the Cortex-A72 model and other ARM improvements, and various other enhancements.

Complementing the Meson build system support for Wayland itself, the Weston reference compositor now has been Meson-ized.

AMD has published their latest batch of "DC" Display Core patches for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver.

NVIDIA has been shipping the Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit the past few months while now they are beginning to ship the AGX Xavier Module intended for use in next-generation autonomous machines.

With just over one week to go until the expected Linux 4.20 kernel release, Alex Deucher of AMD today sent in the latest batch of fixes to the DRM tree for landing at the end of this cycle.

GNOME 3.31.3 was released today as the latest development stepping stone towards next March's GNOME 3.32 desktop environment update.

Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux.

AMD developers today outed their latest "AMDVLK" open-source Vulkan driver code drop dubbed AMDVLK 2018.Q4.4.

It was just last week NVIDIA released the 415.22 driver while out today is the 415.23 update.

Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front.

Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack.

At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics.

The Btrfs file-system hasn't supported Swap files on it in early a decade, but that support will be restored again with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel.

Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.

Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13.