A Recap Of The Many Interesting Presentations At FOSDEM 2018

Over the past week and a half we have highlighted many of the interesting presentations that took place at the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. Here's a look back if you are behind on your Phoronix reading.

FOSDEM 2018 ran from 3 to 4 February and some of the talks we found most interesting this year included:

- GNU Ring aims to compete with Skype and WhatsApp.

- GNU Hurd's hardware support remains in very rough shape.

- GRUB 2.04 should be released later this year as the new and improved version of the GNU bootloader.

- Nouveau hopes for a Vulkan driver in 2018 if this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver can be managed.

- GTK+ 4.0 should be released this fall.

- A big European hosting/cloud provider is using Coreboot on thousands of their servers.

- The first RISC-V development board was showed off but it's rather pricey.

- The EOMA68 computer card might finally ship this year.

- GFX-RS is very interesting as a Rust graphics project and making use of Vulkan portability.

- Looking back at Python 3 with 2018 marking ten years since the v3.0 release.

- Oracle still working on DTrace for Linux.

- Oracle also provided a look at the state of OpenJDK as they transition to their new six-month release cycle.

- There was also plenty of talk about the almost-to-GA-state MySQL 8.0.

- The AV1 video codec is making progress and still stepping closer to being finalized as the open-source, royalty-free video codec to compete with H.265.

- Speaking of AV1, GStreamer 1.14 has AV1 support along with many other features in the works.

- Red Had had plenty of employees at the conference. Hans de Goede talked about his work on lowering Fedora's laptop battery use.

- Red Hat's Jon Masters meanwhile keynoted about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU bugs.

- Kodi 18 development is heating up and should be released later this year with its many new features.

- LizardFS is making a lot of progress for a file-system you have probably never heard of.

- Genode OS is working on an Intel GPU multiplexer.

- Consulting firm Igalia has been investing in getting Chromium running nice on Wayland.

- Nicolai provided an update on the Radeon graphics stack but nothing too exciting if you are up-to-date on all your Phoronix reading.

The hundreds of talks from this Linux/FLOSS event can be watched via YouTube.