Phoronix

NVIDIA's Dead Open-Source Driver Gets Updated

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:15:03 CDT

Back in March an announcement came out of NVIDIA as they were getting ready to launch the GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" graphics cards that they would be dropping support for the xf86-video-nv driver. The xf86-video-nv driver really didn't provide much of a feature set and was far behind the Nouveau KMS and Gallium3D drivers even though these were reverse-engineered by the open-source, so NVIDIA announced they would be discontinuing this open-source DDX driver and advised its customers to just use the VESA driver until they are able to download and install NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. However, today they have decided to release an updated driver...

Wine 1.3.0 Begins A New Development Cycle

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:38:33 CDT

It was just two weeks ago that Wine 1.2.0 was released as the second major stable release of Wine in the nearly two decades that this free software project has been around, but the developers are now out today with their first development release of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.0 release already pulls in a great deal of new code...

Lian Li PC-T60 ATX Test Bench

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:01:07 CDT

When testing out new hardware at Phoronix the systems are often running in an open environment atop a table rather than nestled away within an ATX case. While cases like the Raven RV02 and Fortress FT02 are wonderful to work with and use, when routinely swapping out hardware whether it's graphics cards or motherboards, it can be time consuming having to open up the chassis each time, remove any screws, pull out the existing hardware, and then install the new hardware. Running the hardware simply off its own cardboard box is often the quickest and most efficient path, but each system can occupy a lot of table space and lead to a rather cluttered work area. Fortunately, Lian Li has introduced a new ATX test bench called the PC-T60 that is designed for those enthusiasts or professionals that are frequently swapping out PC hardware.

ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:56:09 CDT

It was just one week ago that the R600g driver that is to provide open-source Gallium3D support to ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700) graphics cards didn't do much as it's shader compiler was far from complete. However, after the author of this driver, Jerome Glisse, embarked on a new strategy, the the glxgears milestone was quickly hit...

GLX-Dock 2.2 Enters Beta With Greater Usefulness

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:36:30 CDT

The first beta release of GLX-Dock 2.2 is now available for those looking to add a Mac OS X-like dock to their Linux desktop. The GLX-Dock 2.2 release is focusing upon improving four core areas of this open-source application dock: being unobtrusive yet useful and simple while also introducing a new panel view...

Alien Arena 2010 v7.45 Offers Up More Features

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:06:59 CDT

Back in May there was the initial Alien Arena 2010 (v7.40) open-source game release of this year, but now John Diamond has come about with another update that continues to offer up a number of new features and other improvements. The previous update introduced five new game levels and rendering improvements while this newest update offers:..

KDE SC 4.7 May Utilize OpenGL 3.x For Compositing

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:35:03 CDT

We're just days away from the release of KDE SC 4.5, but details are now surfacing from Martin Graesslin about his planned KWin compositing changes in the KDE SC 4.6 and 4.7 releases. Compositing in KDE SC 4.6 should be much faster, support mobile rendering using OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, and potentially offer a stable ABI. With KDE SC 4.7 is where we're looking at the KDE world to potentially begin tapping OpenGL 3.0 for a better compositing experience...

CrossOver 9.1 Is Based Upon Wine 1.2 Goodness

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:21:23 CDT

Wine 1.2 was released earlier this month with more than 23,000 changes since the release of Wine 1.0 some two years ago. This stable update to this major free software project is impressive and many more Windows applications now have life under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. CodeWeavers, which is the primary corporate backer of the open-source Wine project, has now released CrossOver (Office) 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1 to their customers...

GNOME 3.0 Delayed To March 2011

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:39:06 CDT

Two years ago at GUADEC, the annual developer's conference for GNOME, it was announced that GNOME 2.30 would be released as GNOME 3.0. With GNOME's long-standing tradition of putting out major updates every six months, this put the GNOME 3.0 release to be in March of 2010. Last November it was then decided to delay GNOME 3.0 to September of 2010 to give developers more time to prepare on this first major overhaul to the GNOME desktop in years. It's just been announced though from this year's GUADEC conference happening this week that GNOME 3.0 will now not be released until March of 2011...

Radeon EGL Patches For Mesa, Wayland

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:30:08 CDT

Yesterday we reported on the state of Wayland with the project's founder, Kristian Høgsberg, showing the initial GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit running under this interesting display server. Besides the lack of tool-kits being fully ported over to run under Wayland, another stumbling block for advancing Wayland's development and usage has been the relatively high barrier to entry for simply getting Wayland to run. Fortunately, that barrier is slowly being lowered...

The Gallium3D R600 Driver Now Has Texture Support

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:59:50 CDT

There's good news for those interested in the open-source Gallium3D driver for the ATI R600/R700 (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series) graphics cards: the R600g driver is beginning to work. While there's been the classic Mesa R600/R700 driver for months now that is working fine for most users, once finished the Gallium3D version should offer better performance, better OpenGL support (OpenGL 2.1 support off the bat, but that's still a ways behind OpenGL 4.1), and many other possibilities via Gallium3D's different state trackers...

AMD Ups The Workstation Ante With A New FirePro Driver

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:00:08 CDT

Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this proprietary Linux driver update found that the performance in some workstation applications had increased by up to 59% by simply installing this updated driver while other OpenGL tests had just improved rather modestly with 20%+ gains. AMD though is preparing to release another driver update for Microsoft Windows and Linux that ups their workstation graphics performance even more! We have run some tests of this new beta driver against their older driver with both their low-end and ultra-high-end FirePro products and have found the improvements again to be astonishing.

Kristian Shows Off GTK+ 3.0 On Wayland

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:46:51 CDT

Earlier this month the Wayland TODO list was updated -- a month after it received some summer love -- and now we some new information from the founder of the Wayland Display Server, Kristian Høgsberg...

Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:00:03 CDT

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

We're Now Up To OpenGL 4.1; Brings New Features

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:27:16 CDT

The Khronos Group came out in mid-March to release the OpenGL 4.0 specification along with OpenGL 3.3 (to bring as many OGL4 features back to OGL3 as possible for older hardware that doesn't support OpenGL 4.0), but today from SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles they have rolled out OpenGL 4.1. The Khronos Group has now put out six ratified versions of OpenGL in less than two years and the 4.1 release adds more graphical goodies to this industry standard. OpenGL 4.1 is also joined by version 4.10 of GLSL, the GL Shading Language...

New Windows vs. Linux Benchmarks Are On The Way

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:20:33 CDT

A few months back we began publishing some open-source Windows benchmarks once the Phoronix Test Suite started picking up Microsoft Windows 7 x64 support to join Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X as another supported testing platform. We had published Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks and then a benchmarking threesome of Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. We had also benchmarked EXT4 vs. the NTFS file-system while the real loser throughout all of this testing was the Intel Linux graphics driver as being the really sore spot for Linux performance when compared to Windows throughout all of our tests. A new set of Windows vs. Linux benchmarks are to be carried out over the next week or two and we will be running even more tests this time around...

AMD Catalyst 10.7 For Linux Has Eyefinity Support

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:26:19 CDT

As was widely anticipated, today AMD is rolling out their Catalyst 10.7 graphics driver for Windows and Linux platforms. On the Windows side, their Catalyst 10.7 rolls out support for OpenGL ES 2.0. ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (along with the FirePro hardware) running Windows can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 support with HTML5 for in-browser graphics rendering. However, that support hasn't yet made its way to the Catalyst Linux driver, but there are other changes packed away in this month's update...

Running ZFS With CAM-based ATA On FreeBSD 8.1

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:00:01 CDT

As was mentioned in last Friday's article, Which Is Faster: Debian Linux or FreeBSD, tests of FreeBSD atop the ZFS file-system (rather than UFS2+S) are currently underway and those results are expected to be published in full later this week as the ZFS disk performance is compared directly to UFS2+S, UFS2+J, and also Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems. Today though we have a few ZFS performance numbers to share as we look at the performance of the new CAM-ATA sub-system on FreeBSD.

The 2010 Linux Graphics Survey Is Coming Up

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:23:46 CDT

For a fourth year we will once again be hosting the annual Linux Graphics Survey at Phoronix. This survey is designed to quantify what areas of the Linux graphics stack that end-users are most interested in, the popularity of the different Linux drivers and hardware in use, and to collect other metrics of interest to developers and other stakeholders...

Compiz 0.9.2 Is On The Way

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:12:11 CDT

One of the Compiz developers has updated his blog about the ongoing work towards the Compiz 0.9.2 release now that Compiz 0.9 was finally released earlier this month...

FFmpeg's VP8 Decoder Blasts Google's Decoder

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:38:33 CDT

It was just back in May that Google opened up the VP8 video format that they got their hands on through the acquisition of On2 and at the same time they created the WebM container format. VP8 has already received a lot of love by the open-source community -- both developers and end-users -- and support for it has already worked its way into FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other multimedia projects. Google released the libvpx library as their official VP8 decoder library, but now the FFmpeg developers have created their own decoder and it's shockingly faster than that of Google's own open-source library...

FreeBSD 8.1 Released With Many Updates

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:48:01 CDT

We knew it was coming (and that FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE has been on the FreeBSD FTP servers for a few days already), but the FreeBSD 8.1 release announcement is now available over at FreeBSD.org...

Testing Intel's New GLSL Mesa Compiler With ATI Graphics

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 05:00:01 CDT

With Intel developers earlier this week expressing their plans to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa by the end of next month, which besides providing various shader compiler optimizations and being a better framework going forward is already set to correct 50+ bugs, we decided to try out this Mesa "GLSL2" compiler. However, as Intel explicitly stated they haven't tested this new GL Shading Language compiler that's been in development for months with any other hardware drivers (or even Gallium3D) besides their own Intel DRI driver, we decided to see how well it works with the open-source Radeon classic and Gallium3D drivers. It ended up being both good and bad.

Here's The R600 Gallium3D Driver Running Gears

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:19:54 CDT

If you read the previous R600g news post from less than an hour ago this should come as no surprise, but: the ATI R600g Gallium3D driver has finally reached the milestone of being able to properly run glxgears. This GLX demo is simple and useless as a benchmark, but is an important development milestone and as talked about in that previous news piece, Jerome hopes to tackle texture support within a few days so then we will see more interesting OpenGL capabilities and we are potentially just days away from being able to run Quake with R600g and a modern ATI graphics processor (you can already do so with an open-source driver stack using the classic Mesa R600/700 driver)...

The R600g Driver May Soon Be Working, But Lacks A Compiler

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:47:36 CDT

Just days ago we reported on the lack of progress with the ATI R600g driver that intends to provide Gallium3D support for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards, but fortunately today there has been some activity in the Mesa Git repository for this open-source driver and a statement issued by the lead developer (Jerome Glisse) about its progress and he also has shared a TODO list...

Linux 2.6.35-rc6 Kernel Released; Final Coming Soon

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:00:33 CDT

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the Linux 2.6.35-rc6 kernel. This release just carries bug and regression fixes, but there are some noteworthy fixes -- particularly if you have been experiencing stability issues for a while with Intel graphics hardware...

Sauerbraten "Cube 2" 2010 Update Released

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:35:22 CDT

If you are looking to do some Linux / open-source gaming this weekend but are looking for something new besides the recent release of VDrift, the Sauerbraten developers are out with their first update in 14 months. Sauerbraten 2010-07-19 "Justice Edition" has been released with plenty of changes...

What Will Mesa's New GLSL Compiler Provide?

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:04:09 CDT

Yesterday we reported on Intel preparing to push its new GLSL compiler into Mesa by the end of next month so that it can be released with Mesa 7.9 by the end of this quarter. While Intel has developed this new compiler for the OpenGL Shading Language for their own needs and hardware, other Mesa drivers -- including those for Gallium3D -- will be using it once merged. After any initial bugs are addressed in the other drivers from this new GLSL compiler banging them in different ways, what good will this new shader compiler be for the end-user?..