As anticipated, LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the official availability today of LLVM 7.0 compiler stack as well as associated sub-projects including the Clang 7.0 C/C++ compiler front-end, Compiler-RT, libc++, libunwind, LLDB, and others.

From June of 2014 with Linux 3.16 until last week, the Linux kernel was affected by another potential local privilege escalation bug.

One of the talks we are most interested in at XDC2018 is on the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver we discovered last month was in development.

Spearmint, an enhanced version of the open-source ioquake3 engine in turn derived from the id Tech 3 source code, will see the big "1.0" milestone in October. But that will also coincide with the developer and ioquake3 maintainer ceasing work on this engine now with an eighteen year lineage.

Days following the NetworkManager 1.14 release, feature activity on the next release is progressing and the newest addition is nm-initrd-generator.

Back in June was the first release candidate of Opus 1.3 (libopus v1.3) with this open-source audio codec allowing to use SILK down to bitrates of about 5kb/s, wideband encoding down to 9kb/s, improved security, improved Ambisonics support, and much more. Libopus 1.3 RC2 is now available along with some tooling updates.

Last week AMD sent out initial support for yet-to-be-released "Picasso" APUs with the Linux AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. Today on the user-space side the support was merged for the OpenGL RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

As expected when discovering a Valve "Moondust" repository on GitHub, today they indeed posted the code to this latest VR tech demo.

It looks like NVIDIA has their launch-day Linux support in order for the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards slated to ship later this week as arriving today at Phoronix was the RTX 2080 Ti.

Last year Creative Labs introduced the Sound BlasterX AE-5 PCI Express gaming sound card while finally there are some patches pending for supporting this high-end sound card in Linux.

The "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver for use by VirtualBox guest virtual machines that has been part of the mainline Linux kernel the past several cycles will soon see atomic mode-setting support.

It's been a number of months since last having any major news to report on POCL, the "PortableCL" project providing a portable OpenCL/compute implementation that can run on CPUs, select GPUs, and other accelerators.

Earlier this month Valve developers began working on Mesa/RadeonSI fixes for Wolfenstein: The Old Blood to run nicely with the open-source Linux drivers while the game is running under Steam Play / Proton. The last batch of these fixes for The Old Blood are now in Git for Mesa 18.3.

The PostgreSQL database server is the latest open-source project adopting a Code of Conduct to promote inclusivity and appropriate conduct in engaging with the community.

The Qt Company has released the first alpha milestone of the upcoming Qt 5.12 tool-kit update.

Just days after the patches were published for enabling 16-bit integers within shaders for the RADV driver, this Radeon Vulkan driver code has been merged.

Going on for a while now have been D language front-end patches for GCC to allow this programming language to be supported by the GNU Compiler Collection. It's been a long battle getting to this state but it looks like it soon might be mainlined.

For those currently relying upon Autotools for building Mesa3D, the days are numbered and soon will likely need to shift over to their modern Meson build system support.

A few days ago we wrote about Red Hat developer and Flatpak creator Alexander Larsson getting Flatpaks running on Windows albeit using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). He's now shared more details on that accomplishment.

Mir 1.0 was talked about for release last year but at the last minute they reverted it to Mir 0.28. There is now a patch pending that is once again attempting the Mir 1.0 milestone.

Later this week the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" GPUs begin shipping and one of the interesting additions with this new GPU architecture is support for mesh shaders.

The LLVM/Clang 7.0 release had been running a bit behind schedule and warranted a third release candidate, but this week LLVM 7.0.0 is now ready to ship.

Back in June, Valve announced "Moondust" as a new VR technical demo to showcase their hardware efforts (primarily with the Knuckles EV2 VR controllers) and consists of some mini games. It looks like this tech demo might be soon open-sourced.

Last month we covered early work being done on an Intel 2.5G Ethernet Linux driver. That "IGC" driver for Intel I225-LM/I225-V 2.5G Ethernet adapters didn't make it for Linux 4.19, but it looks like it will be on track for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel.

One of the features that didn't materialize for LLVM / Clang 7.0 is the SPIR-V support within the compiler toolchain.

Happening back at the end of June was WineConf 2018 in The Hague as the annual Wine developer conference. The remaining video recordings from that event are finally available.

Prior to releasing Linux 4.19-rc4 and Linus Torvalds taking a temporary leave of absence to reflect on his behavior / colorful language, he did apply a Code of Conduct to the Linux kernel.

Linux 4.19-rc4 is out today as the very latest weekly development test kernel for Linux 4.19. It's another fairly routine kernel update at this stage, but more shocking is that Linus Torvalds will be taking a temporary leave from kernel maintainership and Greg Kroah-Hartman will take over the rest of the Linux 4.19 cycle.

SQLite 3.25 was released this weekend as the newest feature update to this embed-friendly SQL database library.

Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year's end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance.

After writing yesterday about kernel contributions of AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel, I kicked off the hours-long process of gitstats analyzing the Linux kernel Git repository for some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends.

One of the coolest innovations landing this year in PostgreSQL was LLVM-based JIT support to speed up database queries. But it's not going to be enabled by default in the upcoming PostgreSQL 11 release.

Come KDE Applications 18.12 in time for the holidays, the KMail KDE email client will finally offer a unified inbox.

Busy since Friday's release of Wine 3.16, the volunteers maintaining the Wine-Staging tree with the various experimental/testing patches atop upstream Wine are out with their adjoining update that continues with just under 900 patches being re-based.

OpenGL 4.6 has been out for more than a year but the Mesa-based drivers (namely RadeonSI and Intel) remain blocked from officially advertising this latest GL revision due to not yet supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension and related ARB_spirv_extensions.

Given all the new hardware enablement work going into the Linux kernel recently, I was curious how the code contributions were stacking up by some of the leading hardware vendors... Here are those interesting numbers.

Flatpak creator and lead developer Alexander Larsson of Red Hat has got the basics of Flatpak applications working under Microsoft Windows 10.

It was a busy Friday for the open-source AMD folks as in addition to releasing AMDGPU DDX 18.1 and the big ROCm 1.9 release, their latest batch of feature changes were also submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This is going to be another exciting release for Radeon Linux users.

The latest revised patches were sent out on Friday evening for WireGuard, the very promising secure VPN tunnel technology developed over the past few years by Jason Donenfeld.

Elisa is one of several options when it comes to music players for the KDE desktop. Elisa 0.3 entered beta this week as another step forward for this relatively young project.

For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open Compute stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features.