Going back to last year there's been the "Glamor Acceleration" project out of Intel to accelerate the 2D operations within X using OpenGL on Mesa. This is similar to the Xorg state tracker approach and while it's not yet enabled by default, Intel OTC developers have been making much progress in recent months. In this article is a look at the recent Glamor update while comparing it to the stock Intel UXA acceleration as well as to the other experimental acceleration option: Intel SNA.

NVIDIA has released the updated 295.53 binary Linux display graphics driver for GeForce and Quadro hardware.

After David Airlie brought up the new DDX driver API for the X.Org Server, a new discussion was born concerning the lack of patch review taking place for the X.Org Server.

To further enhance the Linux virtualization experience with VMware products, the company is preparing to push the Virtual Machine Communication Interface and VMCI Sockets into the mainline Linux kernel.

This weekend there was a new release of Wine-Mono, a project which marries Wine with components of Mono.

There's a new release of the OpenChrome open-source VIA X.Org driver.

Following up on the performance comparison earlier this month of comparing Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics between Windows and Linux, up today are the results of a comparison of Windows 7 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card.

At the FESCo meeting on Monday, aside from Fedora reaffirmining their commitment towards the GCC compiler, the FESCo members also approved some new features for Fedora 18. One of the approved features has already sparked the grievance of Lennart Poettering.

While the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" series is nearly six-months old, the open-source support for these new "GCN" graphics cards remains largely unusable.

While FreeBSD 10 is preparing to fully switch to LLVM's Clang compiler and deprecate GCC, don't expect such a compiler change to happen in the Fedora camp in the foreseeable future. Fedora engineers have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to GCC and stance on "alternative compilers" within this Red Hat distribution.

For those curious about the performance changes for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware when moving from Ubuntu 11.10 to Ubuntu 12.04, here is a quick overview.

The new driver API for the X.Org Server that would finally allow for the X.Org stack to better compete with modern desktop drivers on Windows and Mac OS X, may actually see the light of day, prior to the Wayland push.

Wasteland 2, the very successful Kickstarter game project as the sequel to the two-decade-old Wasteland RPG, will be running on the Unity Engine with its Linux client included.

One of the more interesting technical sessions last week at the UDS-Q summit was concerning the Ubuntu 12.10 plans for a system compositor, which would be based upon Wayland. While I still view it as unlikely to happen in any meaningful way for Ubuntu 12.10, other developers have since expressed their views as well.

Asked on the developers' mailing list last week was whether LLVM could be used for a decompiler, which an independent developer is working to construct.

Lennart Poettering has written a guide for optimizing systemd to the extent that a two-second boot-time or less for this popular free software project.

The weeklong Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" wrapped up on Friday in Oakland, California. There was a lot of interesting notes shared on Phoronix from the UDS-Q event, so here's a summary of the most prominent happenings last week as the future of Ubuntu Linux was plotted.

For any unfortunate souls still stuck to crippled graphics hardware, there's five X.Org drivers that have been updated this weekend.

Following the OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker having been merged into Mesa earlier this week, the open-source Radeon OpenCL support is coming close.

Version 2 of the Rotary Interactivity Favor Scheduler (RIFS) was published on Friday. The RIFS scheduler for the Linux kernel is designed for driving a low-latency Linux desktop.

The final release of the Linux 3.4 kernel is about one week away, but until then there is the 3.4-rc7 kernel to take for a spin.

As indicated by the Q1-2012 FreeBSD Status Report, LLVM's Clang compiler is quickly replacing GCC for this popular BSD operating system. The developers are also making much progress in a GNU-free C++11 stack. For FreeBSD 10 they're aiming for Clang as the default C/C++ compiler, deprecate GCC, and to have a BSD-licensed C++ stack.

For the first three months of the 2012 calendar year, the FreeBSD project achieved a lot when it came to advancing their open operating system. Here's some of the interesting highlights from their quarterly status report.

The DMA-BUF PRIME support in the popular open-source Linux graphics drivers is coming together for the Linux 3.5 kernel to allow for GPU offloaded rendering.

With the x32 ABI for Linux finally coming together, Ubuntu developers are making plans to support this interesting ABI in the future.

Ubuntu developers are currently exploring the possibility of using Mono AOT to reduce start-up time, allow for better memory sharing, and for greater performance optimizations.

It's time for another bi-weekly Wine development snapshot. The latest release arriving on Friday, Wine 1.5.4, offers up a few interesting features.

While things are coming to a close in Oakland at the last day of UDS-Q, there was an interesting session that concerns the future of third-party driver installation on Ubuntu 12.10 and future releases.

Thanks to growing user-interest, it looks like there is going to be a GNOME Shell flavor of Ubuntu to satisfy those who aren't fond of the direction of Canonical's Unity desktop.

If you were hoping that Ubuntu 12.10 would mark the switch from Upstart to systemd for its init daemon, there was no surprise announcement and the Ubuntu developers are continuing to push for the advancement of Upstart.

Today's certainly an interesting day for some prominent and long-awaited Linux software events. Aside from PowerTOP 2.0, ConnMan 1.0, and the merging of Clover-G3D, PulseAudio 2.0 also made it out the door.

Aside from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center finally releasing PowerTOP 2.0, developers at the company have also finally released a stable version of another one of their initiatives: ConnMan.

While the OpenCL enablement process for the open-source GPU drivers isn't over yet, there's a big accomplishment today: the "Clover" OpenCL state tracker for Gallium3D has finally been merged to Mesa Git master.

After a long and drawn out development cycle, PowerTOP 2.0 is finally available.

At the request of Phoronix readers, and that the default I/O scheduler may change, here's a comparison of the CFQ, Deadline, and Noop schedulers on three systems and covering both rotating media (HDD) and solid-state storage (SSDs).

File this as you wish, but since talking about The Biggest Problem For A Linux PC Vendor, I've heard some interesting information from a source regarding future Tegra plans. The mentioned work if it reaches the market would be extremely interesting and would be good news for Linux users.

BCache for the Linux kernel is still being worked on and is now up to its thirteenth revision prior to being merged into the mainline Linux kernel. BCache provides write-through and write-back caching as a new block device.

In some more non-Ubuntu news this week, the release candidate for Mageia 2 is now available. Rocks 5.5 and Rocks 6.0 was also released.

Mesa is finally getting closer to properly supporting MSAA, a.k.a. Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing, but for now this is just Intel Sandy Bridge supported.

Last year plans began to surface for Ubuntu TV -- a version of the popular Linux distribution intended to be deployed by television manufacturers -- and during the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week there was much talk about the Ubuntu TV plans.

NVIDIA has today expanded their GeForce 600 series Kepler line-up with the launch of the GeForce GTX 670.

As Phoronix readers were quick to discover following the boring Ubuntu EA talk yesterday, the open-source web-site for Electronic Arts is also a disappointment.

Here's some other interesting notes from the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit this week in Oakland.

The Btrfs file-system was again brought up at UDS for discussion surrounding the plans for this next-generation Linux file-system in Ubuntu 12.10.

When announcing the Quantal Quetzal, Mark Shuttleworth mentioned "quality" over ten times in his blog post. He also reinforced the quality of Ubuntu at his keynote on Monday for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. But what's the biggest quality issue this week in Oakland?

The xf86-video-modesetting generic KMS-dependent driver for X.Org has been updated. Separately, the call for pulling the GLX_ARB_create_context support at long-last into the X.Org Server has been made.

Tonight at the Ubuntu Developer Summit I'm talking about the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Here's some of my notes for those unable to make it or were able to attend but would like additional information.

An Electronic Arts representative just finished talking at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland.

A meeting at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland just ended concerning a Wayland-based system compositor for Ubuntu 12.10.

NVIDIA CUDA developer relations just fired off an email entitled NVIDIA Contributes CUDA Compiler to Open Source Community.

Here's the X.Org plans for Ubuntu 12.10.

While comparing compiler performance of different Linux code compilers on different software stacks and hardware configurations is nothing new at all to Phoronix, usually it's done on x86 hardware. However, with ARM hardware becoming increasingly common and much more powerful, here's a comparison of the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers on a dual-core ARM development board.

Ubuntu Friendly -- the Canonical-spawned initiative for the community to try to provide information on computer hardware that's "friendly" to run Ubuntu Linux -- is not being actively maintained.

Here's an interesting look at the state of the Ubuntu bug count as it concerns Linux graphics driver issues.

It appears that Unity 2D -- the Qt non-accelerated desktop version of the Ubuntu Unity desktop -- will be abandoned by Canonical. There's also going to be some GNOME 3.6 packages appearing in Ubuntu 12.10.

The first native Linux games from Electronic Arts are beginning to appear within the Ubuntu Software Center.

A Qt 5.0 discussion was held in Oakland on Monday.

In the name of security, Ubuntu developers are looking at ways to lock-down or verify the way third-party Debian packages are handled on Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu 12.10, the Quantal Quetzel, is likely to ship with the Linux 3.5 kernel. However, the Ubuntu kernel team will reserve the option to ship with Linux 3.6 if time and interest allows.

Discussed on Monday during the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit were the plans to introduce a new sound theme to the Quantal Quetzel.

Yesterday at the Ubuntu Developer Summit while trying to enjoy the disappointing beer selection, a leading PC vendor that sells Linux-loaded PCs shared with me the biggest problem they face when it comes to Linux pre-loaded systems at this time.