The X.Org Foundation is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code where student developers engage with various open-source efforts on a range of projects. If there are interested and capable participants, GSoC 2019 could bring a Vulkan settings/preferences user-interface for the Mesa drivers, new OpenMAX acceleration bits, and other possible initiatives.

It turns out Fedora 29's Mesa 19.0 packages have recently been shipping in a "debug" mode since they switched to using the Meson build system and that has been leading to slower performance.

SUSE developer Thomas Zimmermann has posted his work on "FBDEVDRM" as a new Direct Rendering Manager driver for exposing the DRM interfaces on top of legacy "FBDEV" frame-buffer drivers. For old frame-buffer drivers not ported to modern DRM/KMS interfaces, this could open up some interesting possibilities and at least allow these vintage display drivers to work with the likes of Plymouth and other programs only supporting the DRM interfaces.

For nearly six years there has been a bug report about high CPU load when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver causing high CPU load when running the KDE desktop and making use of double buffering. This issue has been finally resolved.

AMD's Vulkan driver team this morning issued their AMDVLK 2019.Q1.9 Linux driver update as the latest tagged release for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that does include a binary driver build for Ubuntu systems.

The Gallium Nine state tracker providing Direct3D 9 API support for Windows games/applications running on Linux under Wine will now be a little bit faster when using Intel's new Iris Gallium3D driver.

Another change being sought for Fedora 31 is including some newer GRUB2 modules as part of the distribution's GRUB EFI boot-loader build to provide some additional security functionality.

Google developer Matthew Garrett recently took over work on the long-standing "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches with a goal of preventing the running kernel image from being modified and strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel. These patches, which have been around for years and shipped by some Linux distributions, didn't make it into the recent Linux 5.1 merge window but now a pull request has been issued in trying to ship it with Linux 5.2.

Earlier this month was the feature proposal for Fedora 31 to finally upgrade to Mono 5, which has been out for nearly two years for this open-source .NET environment. This feature request has been approved for Fedora 31 while it's also been decided to allow it into Fedora 30 if it can land within the next week.

Feral Interactive just announced they will be releasing their DiRT 4 racing game port this week for macOS and Linux.

Jolla has announced the release today of Sailfish OS "Oulanka" as their version 3.0.2 update.

It's just one week past the end of the Linux 5.1 merge window and the Intel open-source developers have already sent out their first pull request to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material they are planning for the Linux 5.2 release this summer.

GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC 9) will be formally released in the coming weeks as version 9.1. With GCC 9 are many big improvements as the annual update to this longest serving free software code compiler.

While Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver is not enabled by default and considered still experimental in its support of Broadwell graphics and newer, in all of our tests thus far it's been working out very well and haven't encountered any hangs so far in our tested OpenGL workloads. But with no OpenGL driver being immune from potential GPU hangs, a patch series is pending to improve the GPU recovery heuristics.

Valve Software has been backing work on Fossilize as an open-source project providing a serialization format for persistent Vulkan object types.

Since the short-lived Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + Wayland experience, the Ubuntu desktop has still been using the trusted X.Org Server session by default. While Ubuntu 19.04 will soon be shipping and the Ubuntu 19.10 development cycle then getting underway, don't look for any Wayland-by-default change to be around the corner.

It's been just over one year since the previous release of Redox OS while today this Rust-written operating system has finally been succeeded by Redox OS 0.5.

Last month brought the release of PyPy 7.0 as the JIT-ed performance-optimized Python implementation. PyPy 7.0 brought alpha Python 3.6 support, an updated CFFI module, and other enhancements. Out now is PyPy 7.1 as its successor.

Linus Torvalds has announced the second weekly release candidate for Linux 5.1.

A few days ago I posted some Chrome vs. Firefox benchmarks using the latest Linux builds. Some readers suggested Firefox could be more competitive if forcing WebRender usage and/or moving to the latest nightly builds, so here are some complementary data sets looking at such combinations.

For fans of GNU's Nano text editor, version 4.0 was released this Sunday where overlong lines are no longer automatically hard-wrapped, smooth scrolling has been enabled by default, and other improvements made.

During this week's Game Developers Conference was the usual Khronos Dev Day where Vulkan, WebGL, glTF, and OpenXR took center stage. During the Vulkan State of the Union some details on their future endeavors were covered.

It's Sunday and that means KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his (great) weekly recap of the interesting improvements made over the past week in KDE land.

There still is no sign of Xfce 4.14, but this week marked the release of a big update to Xfce's screensaver component.

With existing Windows APIs being a nuisance, under NDA'ed documentation, and other problems, WireGuard developers have taken to developing a "good" TUN driver for Windows. This lets user-space programs serve as virtual network adapters to read/write directly into the network stack.

The OpenChrome driver is still inching towards the mainline kernel more than one decade after VIA x86 graphics were last somewhat common. The newest achievement for the OpenChrome DRM driver is the merging of the new TTM memory allocator code.

The MOTU 8Pre is a Firewire-connected device for digital audio workstations to be able to connect eight microphone inputs. The hardware itself is more than one decade old and in fact the manufacturer already discontinued the product, but with Linux 5.2 the kernel will be supporting this device.

Released for GDC/GTC week was Nsight Graphics 2019.2, the proprietary cross-platform, closed-source utility tool for debugging, profiling, and analyzing Direct3D, OpenGL, and other GPU-accelerated APIs.

For those with a PRIME style notebook or just making use of dual/multiple graphics processors in your system, Primus-VK allows for using a secondary/dedicated GPU for rendering while driving the display from the alternative (often integrated graphics) GPU. Primus-VK is implemented as a Vulkan layer as a clean approach for dealing with multiple GPUs in a Vulkan world.

A few weeks back I wrote about Xilinx looking at contributing their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers to the mainline Linux kernel. They are continuing to work on that goal and pushed out their latest kernel driver patches this week for these Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.

While the Linux 5.0 kernel brought initial support for the long-awaited open-source FreeSync implementation, the Linux 5.2 kernel coming out this summer will likely have additional improvements.

Python 2 support will formally reach end-of-life on 1 January 2020 and Fedora 31 is preparing for that by working to drop packages (or parts of packages) that depend upon Python 2.

OpenArena, one of the most well known open-source games built atop the ioquake3 engine of what started out as id Tech 3, has now seen an independent port to the Vulkan graphics API.

Released at the start of February was the big Lutris 0.5 release with an enhanced GTK interface, GOG.com support, and much more for this open-source gaming platform. Lutris 0.5.1 is now available with some much needed fixes.

Google engineers are ending out their work week by issuing the beta of Chrome 74.

The Fedora 30 Beta was anticipated for release next Tuesday after having been under a beta freeze since 5 March, but that's not going to happen and now they are hoping to ship in early April.

Given the recent releases of Chrome 73 and Firefox 66, here are some fresh tests of these latest browsers on Linux under a variety of popular browser benchmarks.

With many AMD driver developers being over in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, this week AMDVLK saw rather small changes for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.

Maxim Levitsky of Red Hat sent out a "request for comments" patch series this week introducing NVMe VFIO media storage device support for the Linux kernel.

GNU Parallel is a tool for carrying out multiple commands/jobs in parallel on one or more computers. Out today is the GNU Parallel 20190322 release with a few changes over last month's update.

The latest open-source game engine project working to re-implement a legendary commercial game is DevilutionX. This new effort is an open-source re-implementation of Blizzard's Diablo game from 1996 while now working on Linux and other operating systems nicely.

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced the release of libinput 1.13 Release Candidate 2 on Thursday as the newest test release for this input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland Linux systems.