Shepherd, the init/service manager of the GNU system with GNU Herd and can be used as an alternative to systemd on Linux systems as well, is up to version 0.5.

For those of you using OBS Studio for screen recording on the Linux desktop or screencasting, the latest code now supports GPU-offloading to VA-API for the H.264 video encode process.

While the Linux kernel has been patched for months (and updated CPU microcode available) to mitigate Spectre Variant Two "Branch Target Injection" this has been focused on kernel-space protection while patches are pending now for userspace-userspace protection.

You may have remembered when the XDC2018 agenda was published there was "Untitled Vulkan break-out kick-off. Topic still under NDA." We now know what that was about.

Collabora has been developing a new "Zink" Gallium3D driver for Mesa that gets OpenGL running over Vulkan.

Since the start of August KDE Neon re-based to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has been in testing while now this re-base is official.

The GNOME release team has made available GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only planned point release to the GNOME 3.30 series.

The lead developer of the WireGuard in-kernel secure VPN tunnel, Jason Donenfeld, published his sixth round of patches on Tuesday for getting this important networking code and its related Zinc crypto code into the mainline kernel. It's looking like the code might have baked enough for debut in the upcoming 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle.

Earlier this month AMD sent out the initial Linux graphics driver patches for "Picasso" APUs and now a new patch series today sheds some light on a new capability for these new APUs reported to be similar to current Raven Ridge hardware.

Java 11 (JDK 11) is officially out today as the first Java Long-Term Support (LTS) release under Oracle's new six month release strategy.

NVIDIA announced today that the release date for the GeForce RTX 2070, the much cheaper but still quite capable Turing graphics card, with pricing to start at $499 USD.

Prolific Linux game porter/developer Ryan Gordon has been tackling improvements to the SDL2 library's 2D rendering code with the introduction of a batching system.

The Fedora project has officially announced the beta release this morning of Fedora 29.

Remember GraphicsFuzz? That was the effort started by university students for fuzzing GPU drivers via WebGL in the browser and over the course of their research found various OpenGL driver bugs, including for mobile drivers. Last month the start-up born out of that university research was acquired by Google and now their work is open-source.

KDE developer Roman Gilg has shared the current state of Wayland support for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.14 release as well as an outlook to improvements on the horizon.

The Portable Computing Language (a.k.a. POCL or PortableCL) is the effort for getting OpenCL running on CPUs as well as other hardware for this open-source code-base that supports OpenCL 1.2 with some OpenCL 2.0+ functionality.

With Fedora 29 Beta set to ship today, here's a reminder about some of the great changes on the way with this next installment of the Fedora Linux distribution that is on track to officially release around the end of October.

The Collabora open-source consulting firm whose expertise spans from the Linux kernel to LibreOffice and X.Org had another successful year. The UK-based company last week reported their 2017 financial position last week providing a glimpse at the viability of open-source / free software consulting.

Tomorrow marks the start of the annual X.Org Developers' Conference that is not only about the X11 server but also Mesa, Wayland, Linux input, and other areas of the desktop stack.

This afternoon AMD sent out their first Linux kernel patches for what might end up being a new feature for the "EPYC 2" / Zen 2 processors.

This evening the "Cosmic Cuttlefish" embarked on its beta freeze ahead of the official Ubuntu 18.10 Beta due out later this week.

It's been just under one month since Oracle's long-awaited debut of Solaris 11.4 and now its first stable release update has been issued.

Earlier this month AMD finally got back on track with issuing new patches for FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / HDMI Variable Refresh Rate support now that there seems to be a consensus among the Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver developers over what this API should look like so it can support the multiple technologies and drivers at play.

The developers at Siemens AG working on the Jailhouse Linux hypervisor found it wise to issue their version 0.10 release prior to heading out to Oktoberfest.

The latest open-source project now officially adopting a Code of Conduct is Vulkan.

On the server front next month Linux gets to go up against Windows Server 2019 while released today by Apple was macOS Mojave.

Mesa 18.1.9 is now available as the last planned point release of last quarter's release stream.

For those running a mix of Linux and Windows Servers or simply wanting to know what the "competition" has going on, Microsoft announced today that Windows Server 2019 will be reaching general availability in October.

Wayland's Weston compositor will no longer try to takeover your virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display.

While last week Purism entered into the hardware security space with the Librem Key as a USB-based smart card, industry veteran Yubico today announced their YubiKey 5 Series.

It hasn't been merged to Mesa 18.3-devel yet nor even published on the Mesa-dev list for review, but it turns out Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has begun working on a heads-up display (HUD) for the driver.

The past few years open-source Intel developers have been creating a new Linux wireless daemon to potentially replace wpa_supplicant. This daemon, IWD, continues getting more feature-complete and is well on its way toward version 1.0.

OpenCV, the popular Open-Source Computer Vision real-time library, is nearing its big "4.0" release with a number of improvements for this widely-used library.

It's been a long time since last hearing anything new with PlayOnLinux, a graphical front-end to Wine catered towards making it easier running Windows games on Linux, but they are out this weekend with a version 5.0 alpha release.

It's now been one week since Linus Torvalds announced he's taking a break to work on his empathy skills, etc. Greg Kroah-Hartman is handling the Linux release duties in Torvalds' absence and today marked the release of Linux 4.19-rc5.

Development on DXVK for mapping Direct3D (primarily D3D11) atop Vulkan continues speeding along for boosting Windows gaming on Wine / Steam Play (Proton). Ending out the weekend is the release of DXVK 0.80.

OpenShot open-source video editor creator Jonathan Thomas announced this weekend the debut of the program's v2.4.3 release.

Back in June is when the Linux kernel patches appeared for the Hygon Dhyana, the new x86 processors based on AMD Zen/EPYC technology licensed by Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co for use in Chinese data-centers. While the patches have been out for months, they haven't reached the mainline kernel quite yet but that might change next cycle.

The KDE Plasma 5.15 release due out next year will likely be in good shape for Wayland remote desktop handling.

Coming to KDE Applications 18.12, the Dolphin file manager will finally be able to show LibreOffice document previews as the icons.

The concept has been talked about before and there has been some previous work in this direction while "CLVK" is a newly-established effort for getting OpenCL running on top of Vulkan drivers.

It took several weeks past the initial stable debut of the Linux 4.18 kernel, but the Reiser4 file-system has now been updated to work with this new kernel build.

The next major Linux kernel cycle whether it is called Linux 4.20 or ends up being called Linux 5.0 as expected is now slated to carry support for the high-end Creative Labs' Sound BlasterX AE-5 sound card.

A shader cache is in development for the DXVK Direct3D-to-Vulkan API translation layer used by Steam Play / Proton and optionally by Wine. This shader cache holds a lot of potential for reducing in-game stuttering and helping boost the overall performance.

Yesterday I published a number of CUDA and OpenCL benchmarks for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card that happened to show the very strong GPU compote potential for this new Turing GPU. Another workload with promising potential for this powerful but pricey graphics card is [email protected]

Last week AMD sent in their big feature pull request of AMDGPU driver changes to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.20 (or what will likely be Linux 5.0) and since then more changes have been queuing in their work-in-progress branch.

In preparation for the upcoming VMware Fusion 11 and VMware Workstation 15 releases, their Mesa/Gallium3D-based driver stack for Linux guest GPU acceleration has been seeing a variety of updates.

Released on Friday was the sixth alpha release of the upcoming Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor release that still strives for compatibility with the i3 window manager workflow.

The Genode open-source operating system framework written from scratch with a micro-kernel design has been working on Sculpt OS as a general purpose operating system. This week the project reached its latest milestone.

For eligible students or others with time to participate, the winter 2018 round of the Outreachy program opened this week for applications.