One week after the release of the new X.Org mode-setting driver there's another release with more changes.

One day after putting out the Intel 12.02 package, Intel released the xf86-video-intel 2.18.0 DDX driver.

Earlier this week I shared a pleasant surprise in Mesa 8.1 Radeon Gallium3D with some significant performance improvements to be found in the current Mesa Git code-base for the "R600g" driver in some OpenGL games. In this article is a more diverse look at the current state of Mesa 8.1 development for R600 Gallium3D and comparative benchmarks from every major release going back to Mesa 7.10.

Where oh where is the open-source support for the "Southern Islands" GPUs, a.k.a. the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series? It's been over two months since the first hardware launched and there still is no open-source Linux driver support available.

Lenz Grimmer on behalf of Oracle has announced the second beta release of DTrace for Linux.

Intel released its "12.02 graphics driver" package today for Linux, which advertises stable support for the Intel Ivy Bridge platform.

Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.

While the Linux 3.3 kernel is still weeks away from release, there's more building up to look forward to with its successor: the Linux 3.4 kernel. A few months down the road when Linux 3.4 makes it out, there will be some additional Intel performance improvements.

Does Red Hat Enterprise Linux perform any better (or worse) than the various "Enterprise Linux" distributions that are derived from RHEL? Now that Scientific Linux 6.2 was released, here is a performance comparison of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, and Scientific Linux across three different systems.

DragonflyBSD 3.0 was released today with major performance improvements for multi-core systems thanks to the recent VM SMP work, plus file-system performance improvements for HAMMER, and many other changes.

When running some tests on the latest Mesa 8.1-devel Gallium3D code-base for the "R600" Radeon Gallium3D driver, I was surprised by some of the results.

FlightGear, a leading open-source flight simulator, has hit a major milestone with the release this week of FlightGear 2.6 and the many improvements it brings to free software flying.

Regardless of whether you're an Apple fan or not, by now you've likely heard the information about Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" that began making its rounds on the Internet since last week. But how's the performance of Mac OS X 10.8 and how will it compare to the competition on the Linux side, namely Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? In this article are our first benchmarks of the developer preview release of Mac OS X 10.8 compared to Mac OS X 10.7.3 and then Ubuntu 11.10 plus the latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS development snapshot.

Adobe has issued a statement this morning that they will effectively be abandoning Flash Player support on Linux. After Flash Player 11.2 they will no longer be providing updates for Linux users but just maintaining the 11.2 release. Google is expected to take over with a Flash Player implementation based upon a new API, but only for Google Chrome-based web-browsers.

Flashrom, the open-source update to flash your motherboard BIOS and can also modify other flash ROM chips like graphics card BIOSes, has hit version 0.9.5. With this latest release there's greater hardware support and other new capabilities.

Mageia, the popular community fork to Mandriva, is now up to beta on version two of their Linux operating system.

Last week I posted an image quality comparison of the Radeon Gallium3D driver versus AMD's Catalyst Linux driver to highlight some visual differences between the open and closed-source Radeon graphics drivers. Now here's a look between the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver.

The Apache Software Foundation officially released the Apache 2.4 today as the first major update to this leading open-source web-server in more than a half-decade. Apache 2.4 is slated to deliver superior performance to its 2.2 predecessor and better compete with the growingly-popular NGINX web-server.

Following a "Kernel Display and Video API Consolidation" mini-summit held at the Emebedded Linux Conference (ELC 2012) last week, Linaro and other mobile/embedded Linux stakeholders have come up with several graphics-related action items for the Linux kernel. One of the proposals is to split KMS and GPU drivers in the kernel.

After writing about Btrfs LZ4 compression support and that the Btrfs FSCK tool wasn't available, it turns out that there is the new Btrfs repair tool, but it's not widely known and it's not recommended to ever use it -- at least at this stage.

Kot In Action, the developers behind the Steel Storm series, has announced the alpha release of their forthcoming Tomes of Mephistopheles title.

The KWin compositing window manager for KDE may drop its older OpenGL renderer, which would remove support for vintage GPUs/drivers, but this would also include eliminating -- at least temporarily -- support for the AMD Catalyst graphics driver.

There's a new KMS/DRM driver to introduce to the world: UDL. UDL is a DRM kernel mode-setting driver for the USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters.

Last week a status update was issued concerning the plans for OpenChrome kernel mode-setting (KMS) support for VIA hardware under Linux. There's finally a goal set for a release this summer.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland Milestone 2 is now available for your open-source benchmarking needs under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Solaris. This second development milestone supports the upcoming Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" operating system, new hardware detection abilities, and other improvements.

The x32 effort, an undertaking to provide a native 32-bit ABI for x86_64 on Linux, is finally moving closer to fruition. Peter Anvin has published the set of x32 patches for the Linux kernel that are now up for review and comments.

There's some resurrected hope for the kernel symbols of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism to be not restricted to only GPL drivers, which started off as a request by NVIDIA. This could lead to better NVIDIA Optimus support under Linux, among other benefits.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about Hierarchical-Z/HyperZ support for R600g since its set to provide a measurable performance benefit the open-source Radeon driver for modern GPUs. This support has still not been mainlined and there are still a few issues to work out, but at least the support is stable for the older "R300g" driver and has been around for quite a while at this point. For those wondering what to expect from HiZ/HyperZ performance boosts, here is a preview.

The proper fsck utility for the Btrfs file-system remains M.I.A. while a contribution from an independent developer introduces LZ4 compression support to this next-generation Linux file-system.

VLC 2.0 (codenamed "Twoflower") has been released as a major update to this very popular open-source multimedia player.

It seems that the Ubuntu Kernel Team is indeed taking power management serious for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The kernel team announced this weekend that they will be attempting to enable Intel RC6 power-savings by default within the Precise Pangolin kernel.

The Linux 3.3-rc4 kernel was released this Saturday evening after a peculiar 32-bit kernel bug had led to the release being delayed by a few days.

The latest Humble Indie Bundle ended earlier this week without much fanfare and less than $1M USD in sales, but there's a new special weekend bundle that's a bit different from the rest... This new bundle lasts for only the weekend (28 hours left) as three teams compete to each make a brand new game in the span of this weekend.

The FOSDEM 2012 conference ended two weeks ago in Brussels while this past week more of the videos from the various technical sessions were uploaded for the public.

After laying out plans earlier this month at FOSDEM for releasing Wayland 1.0 this year, Kristian Høgsberg has now written a more detailed message to the Wayland developers that outlines some of the TODO list and other plans for making Wayland 1.0.

David Airlie officially released the first version of the xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver this week. The xf86-video-modesetting driver is a generic KMS X.Org driver that will work with any kernel mode-setting DRM driver in Linux, but only provides shadow frame-buffer support.

A patch has been sent over to the Btrfs developers that can result in the next-generation Linux file-system being 5~10% faster in writes by introducing an extent buffer cache for each i-node.

Blender 2.62 was released on Thursday with notable improvements to the Cycles Render Engine, motion tracking, the Blender Game Engine, and much more.

OpenSUSE, the Linux distribution that also brews good beer, is out this week with the first milestone for the forthcoming openSUSE 12.2 Linux release.

Another week has passed in the Wine world since it went into code-freeze in late January and so now there's another release candidate available.

In recent weeks I have shown how Ubuntu 12.04 is ARM-ing up for better performance on the ARMv7 architecture by enabling hard-float builds and how the TI OMAP4 support has come together resulting in significant performance gains. Nevertheless, how is modern ARM hardware now comparing to the low-end Intel x86 competition? In this article are some results from Ubuntu 12.04 comparing the ARM performance to some Intel Core, Pentium, and Atom hardware.

Intel quietly released a new version of MeeGo for netbooks last week.

After looking at the merges that went into the major Mesa 8.0 release, Ian Romanick has called for some changes in handling the merging of feature work for future versions of Mesa.

For those wanting to see another polarized discussion taking place within the Fedora camp, similar to the Fedora rolling-release discussion, drop by the mailing list.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 was officially released in December, and even CentOS 6.2 was released quickly, but the Scientific Linux version of RHEL 6.2 was quite slow this time around. Finally, however, Scientific Linux 6.2 is now officially available.

The MythTV code-base has now been forked by one of its lead developers. The new MythTV, which is focusing upon modernizing this open-source video recorder / player so it can better compete with the competition, is called Torc.

AMD today launched the Radeon HD 7570/7770 graphics cards as the latest GPUs built on the GCN architecture. Unfortunately there still is not any open-source support for the Radeon HD 7000 series hardware nor has AMD sent out any review samples to Phoronix. But there is some other Catalyst Linux news to share.

For those interested in the whole UEFI situation concerning "Secure Boot" and how it will affect Linux when more hardware vendors begin promoting it with Microsoft Windows 8, Matthew Garrett has written about some of the myths for Secure Boot.

New patches have turned up for the Intel Linux kernel DRM driver to implement hardware context support.

Besides video decoding, re-clocking / performance improvements, OpenCL, and other areas, the Nouveau driver still has room to advance when it comes to 2D performance.