Phoronix

Linux Desktop Security Could Be A Whole Lot Better

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:38:09 CDT

The security researcher that uncovered a host of X.Org security issues went beyond just evaluating the X.Org libraries and looked at other Linux desktop packages too. There's many security-related bugs outstanding within the Linux desktop ecosystem and Ilja van Sprundel believes "things could be better by several orders of magnitude."..

KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces Feature Release

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:42:16 CDT

For those that didn't hear already, KDE 4.11 will be the last Plasma Workspaces feature release in the KDE4 series and this upcoming version will be maintained for a period of two years...

New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX 780

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:37:16 CDT

NVIDIA released today the 319.23 Linux graphics driver, which supports the just-released GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. There's also a couple of other changes to this certified Linux driver update, including 4K HDMI support...

Chrome 28 To Offer More Speed Improvements

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:33:36 CDT

This week's release of the Google Chrome 27 web-browser was made known by its faster load-times. While now in beta form, Chrome 28 will also bring greater speed improvements to Google's web-browser...

Digia Announces "Boot To Qt" Project

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:01:54 CDT

Digia has announced a new commercial endeavour that pairs a lightweight Qt stack atop an Android kernel/base operating system...

X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:51:36 CDT

It was just last month that there was an X.Org Server security issue dealing with hot-plugging of input devices. Being announced today is a new round of security problems, this time multiple issues dealing with X.Org client libraries...

Fedora 18 Comes To ARMv6, Raspberry Pi

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:51:46 CDT

While Fedora 18 has been out for months and so has Fedora 18 for ARM, an ARMv6 spin of Fedora 18 targeting the popular Raspberry Pi development platform has finally been released...

Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:32:35 CDT

Besides a new Raspberry Pi renderer for Weston, another interesting set of Wayland patches today is for providing output scaling support with Weston when using the X11 and DRM back-ends...

Raspberry Pi Gets New Wayland Weston Renderer

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:25:52 CDT

After working on the Raspberry Pi support for Wayland/Weston, Pekka Paalanen has announced a new "rpi-renderer" for the low-cost ARM development board...

Chrome 27 Loads Web Pages Faster

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:22:51 CDT

Google has announced the release of their Chrome 27 web-browser, which most notably provides faster load times of web-pages...

Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 Release Brings New Packages

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:04:02 CDT

While it wasn't part of the Debian 7.0 Wheezy release earlier this month, the GNU non-Linux folks have now put out Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This operating system pairs the Debian user-land with the GNU Hurd kernel...

Intel Ultrabook Performance Is Faster With Mesa 9.2

Wed, 22 May 2013 03:46:03 CDT

For those that were turned on by the recent Radeon Gallium3D performance improvements found in Mesa 9.2 but are Intel Linux graphics users rather than AMD, there's good news too. Here's some benchmarks showing off nice Intel OpenGL performance improvements found with Mesa 9.2 for an ASUS Ultrabook with HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics...

Hot Relocation HDD To SSD Support For Btrfs

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:34:17 CDT

In working to enhance the performance of the Btrfs file-system in cases where certain data/files are frequently used, a set of patches for providing hot relocation support has been posted...

Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 "Utsira" Released

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:00:12 CDT

Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 (codenamed "Utsira") has been officially released today with compiler improvements, support for the HHVM virtual machine, BSD support improvements, and other hardware/software improvements...

New Intel X.Org Driver Supports All Of Haswell

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:27:25 CDT

With the public launch of Intel's beautiful Haswell CPU being imminent, Intel has released the xf86-video-intel 2.21.7 DDX driver that should support all of the Haswell PCI IDs...

Mesa 9.1.3 Release Corrects Some Bugs

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:37:04 CDT

Mesa 9.1.3 was released today to address some outstanding bugs back-ported from the current Mesa 9.2 development code...

SQLite Now Faster With Memory Mapped I/O

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:31:08 CDT

SQLite 3.7.17 was released yesterday. What makes this new release of the popular lightweight SQL database software noteworthy is that it introduces support for memory-mapped I/O...

Intel Linux OpenGL Driver Leading Over Apple OS X

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:17:08 CDT

In revisiting the OpenGL graphics and gaming performance for an older Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" Apple system, the Ubuntu 13.04 performance with Intel's open-source graphics driver is now easily surpassing Apple's OpenGL driver found in OS X 10.8.3.

Microsoft Releases Skype For Linux 4.2, Has Bug-Fixes

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:35:34 CDT

Microsoft has finally done the Skype for Linux 4.2 update, which rolls in a bunch of bug-fixes but still doesn't put the Linux Skype client on par with OS X or Windows...

Qt For Tizen Launches, Based On Qt 5.1

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:28:10 CDT

Just two weeks after talking about a Qt 5 tool-kit port for the Tizen platform being worked on, the first release is now available...

KTAP Released For Linux Kernel Dynamic Tracing

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:24:33 CDT

Version 0.1 of KTAP has been released to provide a new scripting dynamic tracing tool for the Linux kernel...

Linux 3.10-rc2 Kernel Takes In A Few Extra Pulls

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:21:05 CDT

The second release candidate for the Linux 3.10 kernel is now out there. Torvalds released 3.10-rc2 on Monday with a few extra pulls that he wouldn't have accepted later on in the release cycle...

QEMU 1.5 Supports VGA Passthrough, Better USB 3.0

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:01:31 CDT

Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There's the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more...

Handbrake 0.9.9 Supports OpenCL Offloading

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:56:58 CDT

The Handbrake open-source video transcoder program now supports using OpenCL for accelerating certain operations along with introducing other new features to its brand new 0.9.9 release...

Freedreno Gallium3D Now Banging The Adreno A3XX

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:54:13 CDT

One month after Rob Clark began developing his Freedreno Gallium3D stack for Qualcomm's Adreno A3xx hardware, he's beginning to achieve visual success. While the code hasn't yet been merged into mainline Mesa, on an A320 as found on the Google Nexus 4 he has es2gears (the OpenGL ES version of glxgears) successfully running on this open-source code...

Jolla Announces Their First Phone

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:55:57 CDT

The ex-Nokia developers that formed Jolla to work on Sailfish OS to work on a new range of Linux-based smartphones to start where MeeGo left off, have announced their first smartphone...

The Cost Of Ubuntu Disk Encryption

Mon, 20 May 2013 03:02:43 CDT

It's been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks, but thanks to recent encryption improvements within the upstream Linux ecosystem, it's time to deliver some new Linux disk encryption benchmarks. In this article are results comparing Ubuntu 13.04 without any form of disk encryption to using the home directory encryption feature (eCryptfs-based) and full-disk encryption (using LUKS with an encrypted LVM).

Mageia 3 Released, Still Using Legacy GRUB

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:29:24 CDT

At long last the third major version of Mageia, the popular community fork of Mandriva Linux, is now available. There's a lot of new stuff to Mageia 3 like a new version of RPM and updated systemd, but the distribution is still not shipping GRUB2 by default...

NetBSD 6.1 Brings In More Features

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:55:51 CDT

The NetBSD project has announced the simultaneous releases of NetBSD 6.0.2 and NetBSD 6.1, with the latter introducing new features to the open-source operating system...

Using Six Monitors With AMD's Open-Source Linux Driver

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:40:13 CDT

Linux graphics drivers have come a long way in recent years for both the open and closed-source solutions from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. In this Sunday article, a Phoronix reader has shared his experiences in going from failing to setup two monitors under Linux just a few years ago with NVIDIA to now successfully driving six monitors on a single system using the AMD Linux driver...

Benchmarking The Intel P-State, CPUfreq Changes

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:08:37 CDT

On Friday there was the controversial news about the Linux "ondemand" cpufreq governor no longer being fit for best performance and power-savings on modern processors. Fortunately, for better handling the CPU frequency stage changes on modern Intel CPUs, Intel recently introduced the new P-State kernel driver...

FreeBSD Still Working On Next-Gen Package Manager

Sun, 19 May 2013 03:00:34 CDT

The FreeBSD camp continues to develop pkgng, a next-generation binary package manager for the operating system...

Sumo Lounge Emperor

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:22:32 CDT

Taking a break from our usual Linux hardware coverage and performance benchmarking this weekend is a look at the Sumo Emperor, a comfortable basis for lounging or working from a laptop.

DNF Still Advancing As Experimental Yum For Fedora

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:20:41 CDT

DNF is the experimental fork of the Yum package manager that premiered in Fedora 18. While much hasn't been heard of this experimental Yum replacement since its debut, work on it has still been progressing and is turning out to be in great shape, is slowly approaching feature-parity with Yum, and is faster...

Logitech Begins Supporting Linux Users

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:13:53 CDT

While Linux game developers and publishers have grown more interested in the Linux market-share over the past year following Valve's major Linux play, one of the sectors that is still lagging behind is gaming hardware and peripherals. Fortunately, Logitech is finally beginning to show their Linux cards...

Modern Intel Gallium3D Driver Still Being Toyed With

Sat, 18 May 2013 06:56:14 CDT

While it's not the default Linux graphics driver for Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge hardware, the "ilo" independently-developed Gallium3D driver for modern Intel graphics hardware continues to be developed...

Linux 3.10 Kernel Benchmarks On A Core i7 Laptop

Sat, 18 May 2013 03:03:47 CDT

As our latest coverage of the Linux 3.10 kernel comes new comparison benchmarks of the latest development kernel compared to its predecessor from an Intel Core i7 laptop sporting NVIDIA graphics...

GCC 4.8.1 Compiler Due To Be Out Next Week

Sat, 18 May 2013 01:56:56 CDT

The first point release to the GCC 4.8 compiler was made available in release candidate form on Friday, ahead of the official release that's expected next week...

Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS On Linux 3.10

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:16:24 CDT

Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

Linux 3.10 Kernel Benchmarks For Intel Ivy Bridge

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:37:19 CDT

Earlier this month I delivered Radeon DRM driver benchmarks and Nouveau DRM driver benchmarks from the in-development Linux 3.10 kernel. Being published this Friday evening are now Intel Ivy Bridge graphics benchmarks from the Linux 3.10 kernel compared to the earlier releases going back to Linux 3.5...

Linux's "Ondemand" Governor Is No Longer Fit

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:58:30 CDT

By default the Linux kernel uses the "ondemand" CPU frequency governor for achieving maximum clock frequency when system load is high and a lower clock frequency when the system is idle. However, it turns out that for at least modern Intel CPUs, this is likely no longer the case. This default kernel choice may lead to poor battery life and performance for modern Linux systems...

Firefox 22 Beta Enables WebRTC Support

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:37:20 CDT

Just days after the Mozilla Firefox 21 release, the first beta of the next Firefox 22 release is now available...

OpenSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 Released

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:22:02 CDT

The openSUSE development community has announced the immediate release of the first milestone release of openSUSE 13.1. This is the distribution's first development release ahead of their plans to ship 13.1 final in November...

DRM Graphics Driver Comes For Dove/Cubox

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:03:08 CDT

The SolidRun CuBox is advertised as the "world's smallest desktop computer" with a size of just two-inches cubed (5cm). The CuBox is powered by an ARM PJ4 800MHz SoC and now it has available an open-source DRM Linux graphics driver...

JADE: An LLVM-Based Video Decoder For MPEG RVC

Fri, 17 May 2013 01:48:48 CDT

LLVM continues to show its adaptability with the innovative compiler infrastructure now being used by JADE, the Just-In-Time Adaptive Decoder Engine. JADE is an LLVM-powered generic video decoder...

Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:24:57 CDT

Curious to see how the performance of the open-source ATI/AMD Linux graphics driver is evolving for aging hardware, a new round of OpenGL benchmarks were carried out on the once-popular ATI Radeon HD 4870 "RV770" graphics card. The performance was compared between the Mesa 7.11, 8.0, 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2-devel Git releases from an Ubuntu Linux system to see how the performance has changed for this driver in the past two years.

Ubuntu 13.10 Likely Switching To Chromium Browser

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:17:27 CDT

Yesterday evening I mentioned Ubuntu Linux developers would be discussing replacing Mozilla Firefox with Google Chromium as the default web-browser in Ubuntu 13.10. After the discussion today, it looks like this may very well happen...

Unity 7, Compiz To Be Polished For Ubuntu 13.10

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:45:05 CDT

As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical's next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release...