For those happening to use Oracle Solaris on desktops/workstations, Solaris 11.4 will finally be making the transition from GNOME 2 to the GNOME 3.24 Shell.

Well known open-source AMD 3D driver developer Marek Olšák has published a set of new patches featuring his latest optimization work: 32-bit GPU pointers.

David Woodhouse of Amazon has sent out the latest quickly-revising patches for introducing the "Retpoline" functionality to the Linux kernel for mitigating the Spectre "variant 2" attack.

The Khronos Group has released their first Vulkan graphics/compute programming specification update of 2018.

While it's approaching one year since Canonical decided to divest from Unity 8 and mobile/convergence, the UBports community continues making some progress in getting their forked desktop environment ready for their forked Ubuntu Touch environment as well as the desktop.

On Friday DragonFlyBSD's Matthew Dillon already landed his DragonFly kernel fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. But what about the other BSDs?

With the plethora of software security updates coming out over the past few days in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, released by SUSE was a Family 17h "Zen" CPU microcode update that we have yet to see elsewhere... It claims to disables branch prediction, but I've confirmed with AMD that is not actually the case.

Last month Ubuntu 17.10 ISOs were pulled due to a BIOS/UEFI corrupting problem. They got the problem under control by the end of December and there is a software fix available for affected laptops, particularly a number of Lenovo laptops and those from a few other vendors. Next week a fixed Ubuntu 17.10 release is now expected.

While all eyes have been on Intel this week with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, a disclosure was publicly made this week surrounding AMD's PSP Secure Processor in an unrelated security bulletin.

We are stepping closer to the official Wine 3.0 release but not quite there yet though it's looking like it could be here within the next week or two.

Linux, macOS, and Windows has taken most of the operating system attention when it comes down to the recently-disclosed Meltdown vulnerability but the BSDs too are prone to this CPU issue. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed his fixes for Meltdown.

Nearly one year after rolling out the Jetson TX2 developer board with the "Tegra186" SoC, the Tegra DRM driver in Linux 4.16 will finally be offering basic display support with this open-source driver.

When talking about the Fedora/RedHat Anaconda installer it still brings back bad memories from the Anaconda fallout a few years ago when they went through some painful transitions that also led to release delays. In 2018, Fedora/RedHat developers are taking up the initiative of modularizing the Anaconda installer.

Besides VM performance and databases and heavy I/O taking a performance hit in the "Kernel Page Table Isolation" patches in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown attack, it looks like Wine's performance may also be impaired.

Not only is RadeonSI working on NIR support but Red Hat has begun working on NIR support for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as part of a compute effort and possible Vulkan support in the future.

AMD has posted their remaining patches for now for getting the discrete GPU support upstream in the AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" that is part of their ROCm compute stack.

Xilinx is interested in contributing the latest DRM/KMS driver upstream.

The work led by Valve Linux driver developer Timothy Arceri on adding tessellation shader support to RadeonSI's NIR code-path has been merged to Mesa 17.4-dev Git.

While SteamOS has felt like it's just been on life-support the past year, Valve is starting off 2018 by a fairly sizable SteamOS Brewmaster Beta update.

Solus taking a break from their Steam Linux integration improvements and their other open-source desktop innovations has been experimenting with their own Qt Wayland compositor over the holiday period.

The open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver, RADV, now has patches for supporting VK_ANDROID_native_buffer.

NVIDIA has released their first beta driver in the long-awaited 390 series.

With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up.

For those of you riding the Mesa 17.3 stable train, the second point release is expected for release this weekend with many fixes.

Just ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Dell has unveiled a new XPS 13 high-end laptop.

Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year.

ARM Holdings has submitted patches implementing support for the ARMv8.4-A instruction set update for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Mario Kleiner's work on plumbing Mesa for handling 10-bit colors has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git.

Lucas Stach has submitted the DRM driver updates for Etnaviv that are requested to be pulled for Linux 4.16.

Besides the already-merged Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches, other Linux kernel patches are coming out now in light of the recent Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has wired in support for ETC2 texture compression to this Mesa-based, open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

Not only is Purism working on their Librem 5 smartphone this year with hopes of still readying the software and hardware for shipping to consumers in 2019, but they are also planning to unveil their tablet this year.

We're finally getting actual technical details on the CPU vulnerability leading to the recent race around (K)PTI that when corrected may lead to slower performance in certain situations. Google has revealed they uncovered the issue last year and have now provided some technical bits.

While at the moment with the mainline Linux kernel Git tree AMD CPUs enable x86 PTI and are treated as "insecure" CPUs, the AMD patch for not setting X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE will end up being honored.

Last summer the embedded Linux OpenWRT and LEDE projects voted in favor of re-merging their efforts while now in 2018 that effort is coming back together now that the logistics have been addressed.

LLVM/Clang 6.0 has been branched, thus making LLVM/Clang 7.0 open for development on master.

The Calamares project as a reminder aims to be the universal installer framework for Linux systems that is distribution-agnostic and already used by Manjaro and KaOS and OpenMandriva. Calamares 3.2 is being worked on as the installer framework's next major release.

One of the new features being worked on by KDE developers in the new year is better desktop integration with web browsers.

DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics.

GNOME's BuildStream project has declared its first stable release, v1.0, after being in development for the past year.

Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit.

With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel.

The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone.

While Wine 3.0 is expected to be released later this month, Wine 2.0.4 is available right now as the current stable release for running Windows programs on Linux.

Remember Linspire? The Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" is back from the dead...

Systemd had a busy 2017 and its code-base is now up to over one million lines.

Qt 6.0 planning has begun and we should be hearing more about this next major tool-kit update as the year goes on. Here's some of what we can expect from Qt in the near future.

During the recent holidays when running light on benchmarks to run, I was toying around with LLVMpipe in not having run this LLVM-accelerated software rasterizer in some time. I also ran some fresh tests of Intel's OpenSWR OpenGL software rasterizer that has also been living within Mesa.

For those wondering Mesa's rate of change last year while adding in many OpenGL 4.5~4.6 features, a lot of Vulkan driver activity, countless performance optimizations, and the plethora of other work that took place in 2017, here are some numbers.