Phoronix

OpenChome Picks Up New VIA Support, But Still Lags

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:25:34 CST

The xf86-video-openchrome driver has seen its first proper release in quite a while. The xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905 release has support for new hardware and features...

Open-Source ARM Mali Code Published

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:17:52 CST

The initial code push has taken place for the Lima Project, which is the open-source ARM Mali graphics driver that's under development...

VMware's Virtual GPU Driver Is Running Fast

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:00:14 CST

For the past few years VMware has been improving the graphics acceleration support that is available via their virtualization platform. VMware -- through their 2008 acquisition of Tungsten Graphics -- has effectively re-written their graphics driver for their virtual "SVGA II" GPU to take advantage of the Gallium3D driver architecture, a new acceleration architecture, and many other improvements. This work has finally come together and is now working rather nicely.

Chrome Plays Around With More GPU Acceleration

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:25:03 CST

Google's Chrome web-browser is now up to version 18 beta and this latest release features greater GPU acceleration to speed-up your web-browsing experience, but there's a few caveats...

Canonical's New Spin: Ubuntu Business Remix

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:20:26 CST

While Canonical dropped official support for Kubuntu, this morning Mark Shuttleworth announced a new Ubuntu spin: Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix...

oVirt Manages Its First Release

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:10:04 CST

oVirt, the open-source virtualization infrastructure and management platform, just had its first release...

Mesa 8.0 Advances Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:06:05 CST

Here's another reason to celebrate today besides the release of Wayland 0.85: Mesa 8.0 has been officially released! Mesa 8.0 is what brings OpenGL 3.0 compliance to several open-source graphics drivers, advances the Gallium3D architecture, brings many new features, and a heck of a lot of other changes that materialized over the past six months...

First Wayland Release: Wayland 0.85 With Weston

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:28:28 CST

Kristian Høgsberg has just announced Wayland 0.85 and Weston 0.85, which mark the first official releases of Wayland and its reference compositor, respectively...

OpenSUSE Enters The Beer Business With "Old Toad"

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:10:41 CST

Nearly all of the X.Org/Wayland coverage from last week's FOSDEM 2012 event is available on Phoronix. There's one other Phoronix point to make from FOSDEM 2012... For those that don't know, openSUSE is in the beer business. Yes, the Linux project does really sell openSUSE beer...

The Virtual GEM Provider Is Still Being Hacked

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:15:09 CST

VGEM, the Virtual GEM provider for the Linux kernel, is still being developed and a new version has been published...

SPICE On KVM/QEMU Works Towards Gallium3D

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:29:17 CST

Red Hat's SPICE project that's used in KVM/QEMU virtualization environments is working towards better graphics support, which also includes work on a DRM driver and Gallium3D component for offering 3D acceleration support within guest virtual machines...

Planning the X/Wayland Marriage, X Server 1.13

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:59:57 CST

Keith Packard talked last weekend at FOSDEM about the imminent X.Org Server 1.12, the succeeding X.Org Server 1.13 release, and plans for bridging the X-to-Wayland migration...

Linux 3.3-rc3 Has No Big Surprises

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:28:17 CST

The Linux 3.3 kernel is now up to its third RC release and is fairly in shape...

Radeon Gallium3D Hierarchical-Z Updated (R600)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:09:43 CST

Now that the Radeon R600 tiling patches are done, Jerome Glisse has moved to updating the out-of-tree Hierarchical Z patches for the Radeon HD 2000 through 6000 series...

Nouveau Working On Video Decoding & More

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:05:33 CST

For those wondering what the Nouveau project has been up to with their open-source NVIDIA efforts via reverse-engineering besides the working OpenCL support, they have been setting their eyes on video decoding and other areas...

Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:51:43 CST

It is going on a year since showing how Unity, Compiz, GNOME Shell & KWin affect graphics/gaming performance, so here is an updated 2012 look. In this article are a variety of OpenGL benchmarks run under the current latest desktops as will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce. AMD and NVIDIA graphics were tested with both the latest closed and open-source drivers.

Tizen's Dawati Is Using A Hybrid X-Wayland

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:08:41 CST

Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more...

Sabayon 8 Is Now An "Extreme-Rolling" Release Distro

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:54:02 CST

The Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux distribution is out now with version 8 of their operating system. Besides many package updates and other new features, it's morphed into what the lead maintainer is calling the first "extreme-rolling release" distribution...

X Input 2.2 Multi-Touch Is Feeling Good

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:41:53 CST

X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2...

Major ReactOS Release: Themes, Shell, ACPI, WiFi

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:07:03 CST

ReactOS, the open-source operating system project that's been aspiring to be Microsoft Windows NT binary compatible for more than a decade, is out with a major release -- the first in nearly one year...

Intel Is Planning To Drop PowerVR Graphics

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:12:01 CST

There's some more exciting Intel news to report this week that will please plenty of Linux and open-source fans: Intel is planning to drop their use of Imagination Technologies PowerVR graphics within future-generation SoCs...

Fedora 17 Is Still Trying For Btrfs By Default

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:24:04 CST

The Fedora / Red Hat developers working on the Beefy Miracle are tentatively moving ahead with their plan to use Btrfs as the default Linux file-system for Fedora 17 and beyond...

Video: An Interesting Wayland Tech Discussion

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:58:54 CST

For those Linux enthusiasts interested in the Wayland Display Server, here's a video recording of an interesting technical discussion worth watching...

Intel's Lynx Point Chipset Is Getting Ready On Linux

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:33:58 CST

Support for Intel's Lynx Point chipset has been landing in recent days within various patches spread across many different projects, but more is on the way for Intel Haswell's landing...

DMA-BUF Is Ready To Push Forward Linux Drivers

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:06:12 CST

Besides the Intel chatter, Nouveau banging on OpenCL, Coreboot's less than interesting laptop, one of the other exciting meetings this past weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM was about DMA-BUF. DMA-BUF will help a range of Linux hardware drivers from embedded devices to multi-GPU desktops...

Canonical To Drop Support For Kubuntu

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:39:52 CST

After the forthcoming 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" release, Canonical will no longer be sponsoring the Kubuntu derivative and will be dropping support for this KDE-based alternative...

Nouveau Can Do OpenCL Compute For Open-Source NVIDIA

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:11 CST

There's another big accomplishment within the open-source graphics camp: Nouveau developers now having an initial working OpenCL implementation for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware on the driver that the Linux community developed themselves via reverse-engineering without NVIDIA's support...

NVIDIA Releases New Driver For X.Org Server 1.12

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:06:03 CST

Last week NVIDIA released a new beta Linux driver that is supportive of X.Org Server 1.12...