With the launch of Mozilla Firefox 58 slated for next week, WebAssembly will become even faster thanks to a new two-tiered compiler.

The experimental RadeonSI NIR back-end is taking a final step forward for Mesa 18.0.

GNU developers are preparing to quickly ship GCC 7.3 now in order to get out the Spectre patches, a.k.a. the compiler side bits for Retpoline with -mindirect-branch=thunk and friends.

The Dead Island open world survival horror action RPG game that's more than six years old should now work with Mesa's Gallium3D drivers.

With being past the cutoff of new features to be merged to DRM-Next for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, here is a recap of the prominent changes to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for this next kernel cycle.

While KDE Discover's Flatpak support was declared "production ready", that isn't the only app sandboxing tech they are working on: their Ubuntu Snap support is also coming together nicely.

Beyond the Retpoline support already found in the mainline Linux kernel, developers are working on Retpoline Underflow support that would be used for Intel Skylake and Kabylake CPUs. RETPOLINE_UNDERFLOW protects against falling back to a potentially poisoned indirect branch predictor when a return buffer underflows and this additional protection is needed for Intel Skylake/Kabylake processors. I ran a couple benchmarks.

With the flurry of Mesa development activity with Mesa 18.0 being branched in a few days, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver picked up support for another extension.

If you have been curious about the state of Purism's Librem 5 smartphone project since its successful crowdfunding last year and expedited plans to begin shipping this Linux smartphone in early 2019, the company has issued their first status update.

The Mesa 18.0 feature freeze and release candidate will be issued in the days ahead.

The Facebook crew responsible for the HHVM project as a speedy Hack/PHP language implementation is out with its 3.24 release.

For those curious about the performance impact of the Retpoline patches as found in the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks on an assortment of old and new AMD Linux systems.

For those using the 340 series legacy driver for NVIDIA GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 series GPU support, the 340.106 driver has been released.

With KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, the KWin window manager / compositor's X11/X.Org code will now be under an "eternal feature freeze" as development will focus more on Wayland.

Epic Games has rolled out their public preview build of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.19 game engine update.

Valve has pushed out a new SteamOS Beta build for the Debian Jessie-based "Brewmaster" series.

Mesa 17.3.3 should be released later this week with nearly three dozen fixes over the previous Mesa 17.3 point release.

Patches are being prepped to improve the OverDrive overclocking/underclocking support within the AMDGPU DRM driver and for allowing voltage controls.

An independent open-source developer has announced "Advanced DRI Configurator" in what he's hoping could eventually replace DriConf for configuring Mesa parameters.

The backporting of -mindirect-branch, -mindirect-return and -mindirect-branch-register, a.k.a. the GCC "Retpoline" patches, have been back-ported and merged into the GCC 7 branch.

Microsoft made many upstream contributions to the Git version control system over the past year to improve its performance and they plan to continue contributing to the project.

Yet more functionality to find with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel is the first bits of Jailhouse hypervisor functionality being mainlined.

While BPF has been under the spotlight recently in light of Spectre, with the upcoming Linux 4.16 cycle this in-kernel virtual machine and originally packet filter will be picking up new features.

In improving the power-savings of NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs running on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Red Hat developer Lyude Paul has published a set of patches allowing for full clock-gating with these older graphics cards.

Ahead of the official release expected in February, the KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta is available today as the latest step forward for the KDE desktop.

The upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will be mainlining the VirtualBox Guest "vboxguest" kernel driver.

While initial support for Retpoline was merged into the Linux 4.15 Git kernel last week and is now being backported to some supported Linux kernel series, there is still additional work ongoing for properly mitigating Spectre v2 on Intel Skylake CPUs and newer.

Igalia has sent out the fourth version of their patches for wiring in ARB_gl_spirv support into the Mesa OpenGL driver. This extension is the last main blocker from Intel having OpenGL 4.6 support and allows for SPIR-V ingestion support for better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan.

Coming just over one week since Vulkan 1.0.67 is now the Vulkan 1.0.68 graphics/compute programming specification update.

Mir's Wayland support continues being hacked on and now being tackled is support for the XDG-Shell protocol.

An Intel open-source developer has sent out a set of patches implementing the EGL ANDROID_blob_cache extension for Mesa.

Retpoline support for mitigating the Spectre vulnerabilities will soon be present in the Linux 4.9 and 4.14 stable kernels.

Coreboot 4.7 is now available as the latest release of this free and open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement.

The first release candidate of Samba 4.8 is now available for this popular open-source project implementing the SMB/CIFS protocols.

The GCC 8 compiler is on to its last stage of development.

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.15-rc8 as the last planned release candidate prior to officially debuting Linux 4.15 next weekend.

Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark has landed initial support for texture tiling with Qualcomm Adreno A5xx graphics hardware.

Just one week after Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 Milestone 1, the second development release of 7.8-Folldal is now available for testing.

The crew responsible for the open-source Godot cross-platform game engine have announced the 3.0 Release Candidate ahead of the imminent stable release of this major update.

Hitting the GCC 8 compiler Git/SVN code this Sunday morning are the changes needed compiler-side for CVE-2017-5715 / Spectre mitigation.

Earlier this week ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung laid out plans for Wayland 1.15 and Weston 4.0. There's been some push-back on the proposed dates to try to allow some more work to land in these upcoming six month releases to Wayland/Weston, but long story short, these next releases will be here in the near future.

The latest Coreboot Git code now has support for the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard.

With the Linux 4.15-rc8 kernel that is expected for release today as the final step before Linux 4.15, it's still seeing continued security improvements in the wake of the Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) landed at the start of the year for x86/x86_64 systems for fending off the much talked about CPU attacks while the ARM64 / 64-bit ARM code is still a work-in-progress but looks like it will be squared away for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle.

It seems to be a busy weekend for KDE news... The latest is that the Flatpak app sandboxing support formerly known as XDG-App is considered production ready within KDE Discover.

KDE Frameworks 5.42.0 was released today as the latest monthly feature update to this collection of add-on KDE libraries complementing Qt5.

The KDE-developed, Qt-powered digiKam photo management software is out with its first feature update of 2018.

Now that Firefox's GTK3 support is finally into shape, Firefox 59 will be doing away with GTK2 tool-kit support.

LittleFS is a lightweight file-system that's being developed for embedded systems.

Yesterday I posted some Linux hardware statistics going back to 2011 using data collected by the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those yearly metrics hadn't contained any GPU/driver data, but here are those numbers.

The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."

Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISOs are now available as well as for most of the *buntu derivatives. The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops.