Of the hundreds of projects for this year's Google Summer of Code, there are many interesting GSoC 2018 projects but one of those that I am most excited for is Vulkan-Virgl for getting this modern API supported with hardware acceleration by guest virtual machines.

The current VR landscape is fragmented and quite a mess with the lack of standardization and wide variety of hardware capabilities at this point, though fortunately the forthcoming OpenXR standard coming out of The Khronos Group for a standard API for application developers as well as a standard device layer / abstraction interface will clear this up when released later in 2018. But for now we have some interesting remarks from an open-source developer that has been engaging in this area and doing his best with the current VR scene.

There's been another weekly-ish public code push to the AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver stack and this time around it's heavy on feature work.

We have been covering the Linux driver upbringing of "Vega M" for the Vega/Polaris graphics found in select newer Intel "Kabylake G" processors. The code is still in flight before it will work in all released versions of the Linux driver components, but for those willing to build the code or rely upon third party repositories, Vega M is now working on Linux.

For those still making use of the venerable Ada programming language, the latest development code for GCC 9 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been seeing a number of Ada front-end improvements this week.

If by chance you happen to have an Intel DG41WV motherboard, it's now supported by mainline Coreboot so you can free the system down to the BIOS.

While Wayland support depends upon EGL and there has been EGL support within Mesa and the other graphics drivers on Linux for a number of years now, Firefox developers are still hesitant about shipping EGL support by default for Firefox on X11.

Months ago we had reported on Igalia's efforts for improving hardware video/media acceleration on the Chromium browser stack for Linux and getting Chromium ready for Wayland but it's been relatively quiet since then with no status updates. Fortunately, a Phoronix reader pointed to a fresh round of ongoing work in this space.

One day after the exciting Wine 3.9 update with VKD3D work and more, the Wine-Staging code has been updated against this latest development release.

If the latest Dell XPS 13 developer edition laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux doesn't match your needs, Dell has now rolled out several Precision laptop developer editions that also come loaded with Ubuntu LTS.

In addition to the release of openSUSE Leap 15, also making the rounds at this weekend's openSUSE conference in Prague is word of the openSUSE community forking the Spacewalk system management software into a new project they are calling Uyuni.

For those of you with some extra time over this US holiday weekend due to Memorial Day, FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 is now available for testing.

Prominent Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical has published his latest weekly update on the status of this Linux display server that continues working on supporting Wayland clients.

It's been a wild week for the various Direct3D-over-Vulkan projects with VKD3D 1.0 being released for the initial Direct3D 12 over Vulkan bits from the ongoing work in the Wine project to DXVK continuing to get better at its D3D11-over-VLK support. There's also an update on the VK9 front.

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the release of Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2, it's open-source GPU performance profiler. What's significant about this release is initial interoperability with the popular RenderDoc debugger.

Wine 3.9 is out as the project's latest bi-weekly development release. This latest build is certainly on the interesting side of the 3.x series.

For those looking to manage your Steam Controller and other supported Linux gaming peripheral input devices outside of Steam, there is a new release of the independently-developed SC-Controller Linux user-space software.

Vulkan 1.1.76 has just been released ahead of the US Memorial Day weekend with new extensions to excite Vulkan developers.

GNOME 3.29.2 is now available as the second development release on the road towards this September's release of GNOME 3.30.

Released on schedule from the openSUSE Conference 2018 in Prague is the openSUSE Leap 15 release derived from the sources of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.

The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.

The annual openSUSE Conference has kicked off today in Prague, Czech Republic and runs through Sunday. An Internet video stream of the sessions are also available for those missing out on this free event.

A minor update was pushed out to OpenBenchmarking.org overnight but the most visible end-user change you may notice is there are no longer any banner advertisements.

LibreOffice has reached its hard feature freeze and branching period with the first beta release being imminent.

The Vulkan's documentation/generator being re-licensed from an MIT-style license to the Apache 2.0 license had caused problems for the Wine project supporting newer than Vulkan 1.0.51, but fortunately that issue has been resolved.

The NVIDIA 396.24.02 Linux driver is available today and while it's a beta update, it ends up being quite an exciting release thanks to new Vulkan extensions.

Feral Interactive's Linux system tuning daemon, GameMode since being introduced earlier this year has primarily offered the ability to easily change the CPU scaling governor when gaming but not much more. Though a new feature is now in the works for GameMode.

Last week was the main AMDGPU features update for Linux 4.18 via DRM-Next while today a secondary pull request of further feature work has been submitted.

With the Linux 4.15 kernel there was the introduction of the Thunderbolt networking driver but support was still needed in user-space for making this peer-to-peer Thunderbolt networking support a reality.

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn't integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That's changing with a new patch series.

The first beta of PostgreSQL 11.0 is now available for testing.

Based off the Gallium3D "mesa_glthread" work for threaded OpenGL that can provide a measurable win in some scenarios, the Intel i965 Mesa driver has implemented this support now too.

With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode.

The UBports team have put out their latest batch of answers to common questions around this project that's still working to maintain the Ubuntu Touch software stack.

Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software.

Wine's Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer will now default to using OpenGL 4.4 contexts rather than legacy OpenGL contexts.

The open-source RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator will now offer faster performance on modern Intel systems.

While VKD3D 1.0 is out today for Direct3D 12 mapped over Vulkan, the DXVK project for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan is also out with a new release today.

The Wine project has announced the release of VKD3D 1.0, the first official release of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer primarily developed at CodeWeavers. VKD3D is the approach Wine is pursuing for getting Direct3D 12 games from Windows working on Wine under Linux or also under macOS when paired with MoltenVK.

For those wanting to use the open-source ROCm Radeon Open Compute stack on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it will be supported by the next release.

Adding to the list of changes coming to Linux 4.18 are updates to CPUFreq's "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor.

While DragonFlyBSD 5.3/5.4 is exciting on the performance front for those making use of the stable DragonFly operating system releases, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 is available this week.

While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter's open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August.

There's a suggestion/proposal to disable the Spectre Variant Two and Meltdown mitigation by default with the Linux kernel for in-order CPUs.

Just over one month after there were 2,000 Vulkan-mentioning projects on GitHub, the 2,100 project milestone has been breached.

PostgreSQL 11 is the next major feature release of this open-source database SQL server due out later in 2018. While it's not out yet, their release notes were recently updated for providing an overview of what's coming as part of this next major update.