FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library.

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port.

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update.

Arch Linux is finally transitioning to glibc 2.27, which may make for a faster system.

Following RadeonSI adding "Vega M" support for the new Radeon graphics appearing embedded on select Intel Kabylake processor packages, the RADV developers have similarly staged their Vega M support in this open-source Vulkan driver.

While the relevant bits for supporting Intel GPU mediated pass-through to virtual machines with KVM are now upstream in the Linux kernel as well as in QEMU 2.12, Intel developers have just announced their quarterly release of "KVMGT" for those wanting the officially blessed configuration for running Intel virtual GPU support with KVM virtual machines.

AMD's Alex Deucher has sent in a small set of fixes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver in the Linux 4.17 kernel.

Following yesterday's 20-way graphics card comparison for Rise of the Tomb Raider that debuted yesterday on Linux and is exclusively powered by Vulkan, my next benchmarking objective was trying out the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, to see how it would work given the successes of RADV on launch-day for this latest Feral Interactive game port.

Earlier this month we covered "The Forge" picking up initial Linux support and now they have rounded out their full-featured Linux support with Vulkan rendering.

The Broadcom VC5 driver stack is being renamed to V3D and developer Eric Anholt is looking at merging it into the mainline Linux kernel.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update.

The KDE community has announced the release today of KDE Applications 18.04 as the first major update to the open-source KDE application set for 2018.

Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass.

AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver.

The usage of LLVM as part of the graphics driver stack continues to be picked up now especially in the Vulkan/SPIR-V world.

Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers.

Intel tonight announced they are open-sourcing their nGraph compiler code, which serves as a framework-neutral deep neural network model compiler.

One of the most common Linux hardware questions I've received dozens of times in the past few weeks alone has been over the support for "RX Vega M" Vega-based graphics processors found on select newer Intel Kabylake CPUs. It appears RadeonSI at least should now support these Radeon graphics on Intel CPUs.

In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series.

Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation.

The first release candidate of the upcoming Xen 4.11 virtualization hypervisor release is now available.

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

We've known openSUSE Leap 15 would arrive this summer now we finally know when exactly it will make its debut.

Feral Interactive has just announced they will be launching Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux tomorrow, 19 April.

For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series.

Google has rolled out Chrome 66 to its stable channel for Linux desktop users as well as other supported desktop/mobile operating systems.

Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release.

Four years after the debut of Trisquel 7.0 and a year and a half since the 8.0 Alpha, Trisquel 8.0.0 is now available for this Linux distribution that's endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.

Following last week's release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has already landed a big patch series for what will likely become Weston 5.0.

In the three weeks since GIMP 2.10 finally reached the release candidate stage a lot of changes have continued to land and today marks the GIMP 2.10 RC2 availability.

While some at Oracle were busy releasing Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 as their RHEL7 downstream, the remaining Solaris developers were putting out a refreshed public beta spin of Solaris 11.4.

GNOME 3.29.1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards what will eventually become GNOME 3.30 in September.

Last week NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta that most notably introduces their new "NVVM" Vulkan SPIR-V compiler. Coming out today is a new Vulkan beta update with some continued enhancements.

Just one week after launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Oracle has released the latest version of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7. The Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 pulls in the latest *EL7 changes while also offering their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.

Nginx 1.14.0 is now available as the latest open-source stable release of this popular web server alternative to Apache.

Of the many great features/changes for Linux 4.17, one of the most exciting to us is the idle power efficiency and performance-per-Watt improvements on some systems thanks to a rework to the kernel's idle loop handling. Rafael Wysocki and Thomas Ilsche as two of the developers working on this big code change presented on their work today for this CPU idle loop ordering problem and its resolution.

Eric Anholt believes he is getting quite close to the stage of merging the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel tree.

The upcoming Qt 5.11 tool-kit release will have generalized ray-casting support within the Qt 3D module.

The upcoming Fedora 28 Linux distribution release is now under its "final freeze" for releasing in the next few weeks.

The 2018 X.Org Board of Directors elections are over with 49 of the 91 X.Org registered members having casted a ballot.

Earlier this month Intel ISA documentation pointed to a new CPU micro-architecture codenamed "Tremont", we've seen a few kernel patches also referencing Intel Tremont, and now there is Tremont microarchitecture support for LLVM's Clang compiler.

While back in 2015 there was Azure Cloud Switch as Microsoft's first foray into having their own Linux distribution that handles networking within their Azure data centers, today they have announced their Azure Sphere product for IoT use-cases and it's powered by Linux.

The Debian release team has put out their latest information concerning the upcoming Debian 10 "Buster" release.

AMD kicked off the start of a new week by doing fresh code drops of the PAL and XGL code-bases used to form the AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver.

Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3.

Vulkan 1.1.73 is out as the latest minor refinement since last month's big Vulkan 1.1 update.

While the Linux 4.17 merge window officially closed yesterday with the release of Linux 4.17-rc1, FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi is now trying to get his changes added.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 Milestone 3 is now available for evaluation as the latest step towards the official 8.0-Aremark release due out later this quarter.

With Qt 5.11 already due to ship at the end of next month, Qt developers have begun discussing the follow-on Qt 5.12 release to ship in late 2018.

Purism's latest hire to work on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux smartphone effort is a UI/UX designer who has long been involved with GNOME.

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors.