http://www.phoronix.com/ GNU/Linux and Solaris news from Phoronix en-us http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNw While OpenGL acceleration and GPU-assisted video playback are often most viewed as the areas that are severely lacking for the open-source Linux graphics drivers in comparison to what the binary-only ATI/NVIDIA drivers offer, another area that has not yet caught up to speed with the binary competition is power management. For years (going back to 2005) AMD has implemented PowerPlay support in their fglrx driver for dynamically clocking the GPU and memory clocks along with adjusting the voltages accordingly, based upon the user's input and then later generations of PowerPlay are more dynamic in nature. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:35:08 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNg Today marks the two-year anniversary of the creation of Phorogit.com. Phorogit is the Git repository that is sponsored by Phoronix Media to house the development of a few free software projects. The two most prominent projects currently housed at Phorogit are the ATI Catalyst Linux driver packaging scripts (fglrx-packaging.git) and the Phoronix Test Suite (phoronix-test-suite.git). Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:06:01 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNQ In hopes of pushing VDPAU beyond just being a NVIDIA Unix driver technology and to make it an open standard for Linux video driver developers wishing to provide HD video acceleration on Linux via the GPU, NVIDIA released a standalone VDPAU library back in September and have been trying to push some VDPAU bits for DRI2. Today NVIDIA has updated its standalone VDPAU library, libvdpau, which is now at version 0.3. This library update supports versioning to the drivers, configurable install directory support, libvdpau_trace, and documentation updates. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:19:22 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyNA Fedora 12 was just released this week, but features for Fedora 13 have been in planning long before this release made it out the door. In fact, it was last month that we began talking about features for Fedora 13. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:11:15 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMw X Server 1.7.2 is scheduled to be released a week from Friday, so in preparations for that, Peter Hutterer has just pushed out the second release candidate for this minor point release. X Server 1.7.2 RC2 is made up of 15 fixes (mostly for XQuartz) since the RC1 release that arrived earlier this month. There's nothing real exciting in this release beyond addressing bugs as most developers are now focused on X Server 1.8, which will be released in March. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:16:29 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMg It was just a week ago that we confirmed the Phoronix Test Suite is being ported to Windows, then on Monday delivered Phoronix Test Suite 2.2, and a day after that announced a major advancement for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" and that was image quality comparison and analysis support to take our benchmarking software to the next level. Today we are continuing on this roll by announcing the Phoronix Test Suite is coming to mobile phones! To assist those in optimizing their software on mobile phones and devices for not only the pure performance but also matters like monitoring the battery power consumption, the Phoronix Test Suite has made the jump into the mobile space. As of the latest Lenvik code now found in the Phoronix Test Suite Git tree, Palm's webOS platform is now supported and the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 can run on the Palm Pre and should be able to handle other webOS and Optware devices too. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:41:55 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMQ Linus Torvalds this afternoon put out the Linux 2.6.32-rc8 kernel release. The Linux 2.6.32 kernel, which brings 3D DRM and KMS support for ATI R600/700 GPUs, new wireless drivers, an improved VIA frame-buffer, and other improvements, is getting ready for release. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:48:18 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcyMA While GNOME 2.30 will not be the release that goes on to become GNOME 3.0 (instead it will be GNOME 2.32 in September that grabs the "3.0" tag), the second development release for the 2.30 series is now available. This new GNOME 2.30 development release goes by the version number 2.29.2. Among the changes to be found in GNOME 2.29.2 include Evince now supporting PDF File Attachment Annotations, gcalctool now has a command-line version called gcalccmd of this GNOME Calculator, GDM has picked up many enhancements, a Moblin front-end for gnome-bluetooth, and Tomboy now supports Ubuntu One. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:10:25 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxOQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxOQ Canonical's Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codenamed Lucid Lynx) is taking place this week in Texas, but happening right now on the Ubuntu-X mailing list is a discussion about what the X.Org plans are for Ubuntu Lucid. Bryce Harrington, Canonical's principal X leader, has shared his views about the X.Org package set for Ubuntu 10.04. As far as the X Server goes, Bryce believes it is a question between the 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8 releases. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:17:42 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxOA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxOA While we are still waiting on the release of Unigine Heaven for Linux, the Unigine Corp developers continue advancing this multi-platform game engine. The latest code being worked on for this engine adds support for physical cloth along with physical wind that impacts physical cloth areas. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:01:01 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNw CodeWeavers had released CrossOver Games 8.0 back in September, but now this morning they have put out CrossOver Games 8.1. The main addition in CrossOver Games 8.1 is support for Left 4 Dead 2, the much-anticipated Windows game created by Valve Corporation that was actually just released yesterday as the sequel to Left 4 Dead. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:43:10 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNg Today AMD finally lifted the lid on Hemlock, their new ultra high-end dual-GPU graphics card that is being marketed as the Radeon HD 5970 (similar to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 but now for the Evergreen GPU family). The Radeon HD 5970 has 3200 stream processors (1600 per Cypress GPU), a combined 2GB of GDDR5 video memory, and AMD Eyefinity support for driving three displays simultaneously. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:24:33 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNQ Back in June Enlightenment E16 reached version 1.0.0 and then a few weeks later there was an E17 development snapshot released, but there hasn't been a whole lot of news out of the Enlightenment camp over the past year. In fact, most new Linux users have likely never even heard of the Enlightenment. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:28:44 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxNA AMD has today pushed out their Catalyst 9.11 Linux driver. This release contains support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and initial support for OpenSuSE 11.2 along with a handful of minor bug-fixes. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:22:00 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMw It's one of the last major distribution updates coming out this year, but Fedora 12 (codenamed "Constantine") is now available. Fedora 12 features performance improvements, Ogg Theora 1.1 support, graphics improvements (including ATI kernel mode-setting by default), many virtualization improvements, PulseAudio improvements, Multi-Pointer X with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7, and many other new features. The Fedora 12 release announcement can be read on the Fedora Wiki while the various spins of Fedora 12 can be downloaded at FedoraProject.org. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:07:06 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMg Last night Adobe pushed out their first beta release for Adobe Flash Player 10.1. Alongside the Windows and Mac OS X beta releases was a 32-bit Linux build, but the 64-bit build isn't yet available so those users will need to be use the earlier 64-bit beta. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:35:29 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMQ Last Friday during the Gallium3D workshop we learned that the Tungsten Graphics developers that were bought out by VMware have been working on a virtual Gallium3D driver that would be used by guest operating systems running within VMware's virtualization platform. This is especially interesting considering that it will allow virtualized guests to have accelerated access to X11, OpenGL, OpenCL, X-Video, XvMC, and all sorts of other possibilities that's just limited by what's supported by the available state trackers. This afternoon Jakob Bornecrantz has pushed out this initial Gallium3D driver for use in VMware guests. Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:08:25 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcxMA Following a meeting last week between Jesse Barnes, Chris Wilson, and Kristian Høgsberg with developers working on the Clutter tool-kit and GNOME's Mutter window manager, there is a new GLX extension that has been proposed as a result. Jesse Barnes has announced their work on the GLX_INTEL_swap_event extension, which helps GLX integrate better with glib style event loops. GLX_INTEL_swap_event basically notifies the client when a buffer swap has been completed. Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:10:36 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwOQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwOQ Some of the notable news items we covered this week at Phoronix included a new GRUB 2.0 release, Mesa / Gallium3D coming to Android netbooks, exclusive word from a former Namesys employee that Reiser4 may go after mainline Linux inclusion in 2010, GNOME 3.0 being officially delayed to September, and a virtual Gallium3D driver coming for VMware. Some of the other interesting events this week included Khronos launching OpenWF, Fedora 13 codenames, a new PulseAudio release, VirtualBox 3.1 bringing teleportation support and other improvements, a Unigine Heaven status update, Intel and AMD making up for their past legal battles, MPlayer now supporting most Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs, and Wine 1.1.33 gaining more Direct3D 10 functionality. Other Linux graphics topics talked about this week besides VMware's virtual Gallium3D driver that should be very interesting for virtualization is the state of Gallium3D and its future, a talk about the Wayland Display Server, NVIDIA updated two of its legacy drivers, an overhaul of Mesa's GLSL compiler, and the ATI R300 Gallium3D DRI support being done. Featured articles at Phoronix this week included a review of the OCZ Agility EX SSD that uses SLC memory and performs remarkably well, benchmarks of EXT3, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and ReiserFS using a 32GB USB flash drive, and a review of the SilverStone Raven RV02 chassis. When it comes to our popular benchmarking/testing software, the Phoronix Test Suite we shared this week that PTS Lenvik will run on Windows 7 and released PTS Bardu Beta 3 with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.0 "Bardu" officially arriving this week. Lastly, before calling it a week, we would like to remind everyone that our 2009 Linux Graphics Survey is currently taking place for the month of November. Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:41:45 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwOA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwOA A few weeks back there was the Linux Plumbers Conference and one of talks was hosted by Kristian Høgsberg where he talked about his Wayland project. We were the first to publicly talk about the Wayland Display Server when it was in its very infancy at being an alternative to the X Server. Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:19:43 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNw While quality native Linux games are rather in short supply, those that do end up coming out of the professional game studios end up being first-person shooters, just look at Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Cold War, Unreal Tournament 2004, etc. Even on the open-source side there are many first-person shooters from Nexuiz to Warsow to many others. Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:12:19 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNg VMware hosted a Gallium3D workshop today at its headquarters in California (and via teleconference too) where the former Tungsten Graphics developers talked about all that they have been working on with Gallium3D, the current state of this graphics driver architecture, and what's to come. The biggest news coming out of this workshop is word that a virtual Gallium3D driver is coming, which will allow Gallium3D to run within a virtualized environment. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:31:48 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNQ For months Sun's VirtualBox virtualization software picked up OpenGL and Direct3D acceleration support for virtualized guest operating systems, but now 2D/3D hardware-acceleration support for those running operating systems under VMware's virtualization products are imminent. It was almost one year ago that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, but now their motives behind that acquisition are becoming more clear. Being hosted at VMware's headquarters today in Palo Alto, California was a Gallium3D Workshop, where various open-source Mesa developers are currently at and others connecting remotely. At this workshop it has just been announced that a "virtual" GPU driver for Tungsten's Gallium3D driver architecture will soon be publicly released. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:06:37 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwNA While many of the distributions arriving this autumn and winter are shipping with an X Server 1.6 build rather than the new X Server 1.7, if you are using Fedora 12 or another distribution shipping with the latest X.Org 7.5 packages, there is good news if you are a customer of NVIDIA's older graphics hardware. NVIDIA hasn't updated its three legacy drivers (the 71.xx.xx, 96.xx.xx, and 173.xx.xx series) since this past July when delivering various bug-fixes and new kernel support, they have updated two of their legacy drivers this week. The new releases are 173.14.22 and 96.43.14, which NVIDIA has tagged as legacy pre-releases, and both drivers now contain X Server 1.7 support along with an updated nvidia-installer to detect newer Debian distributions that use /usr/lib32 instead of /emul/ia32-linux as the 32-bit library path. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:31:42 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwMw http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzcwMw It was a year ago that Wine developers began working on Direct3D 10.0 support and then in March developers at CodeWeavers began working on the Direct3D 10 support too. Recent Wine releases in particular have brought better Direct3D 10.x coverage and this work has continued with the just-released Wine 1.1.33. Wine 1.1.33 implements more Direct3D 10 functions, the Gecko browser engine is now installed at wineprefix creation time, there is better support for certificates in crypt32, improved sound support in mciwave, and many cleanups for issues spotted by the Valgrind memory debugging utility. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:07:47 CST