The xf86-video-openchrome driver has seen its first proper release in quite a while. The xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905 release has support for new hardware and features.

The initial code push has taken place for the Lima Project, which is the open-source ARM Mali graphics driver that's under development.

For the past few years VMware has been improving the graphics acceleration support that is available via their virtualization platform. VMware -- through their 2008 acquisition of Tungsten Graphics -- has effectively re-written their graphics driver for their virtual "SVGA II" GPU to take advantage of the Gallium3D driver architecture, a new acceleration architecture, and many other improvements. This work has finally come together and is now working rather nicely.

Google's Chrome web-browser is now up to version 18 beta and this latest release features greater GPU acceleration to speed-up your web-browsing experience, but there's a few caveats.

While Canonical dropped official support for Kubuntu, this morning Mark Shuttleworth announced a new Ubuntu spin: Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix.

oVirt, the open-source virtualization infrastructure and management platform, just had its first release.

Here's another reason to celebrate today besides the release of Wayland 0.85: Mesa 8.0 has been officially released! Mesa 8.0 is what brings OpenGL 3.0 compliance to several open-source graphics drivers, advances the Gallium3D architecture, brings many new features, and a heck of a lot of other changes that materialized over the past six months.

Kristian Høgsberg has just announced Wayland 0.85 and Weston 0.85, which mark the first official releases of Wayland and its reference compositor, respectively.

Nearly all of the X.Org/Wayland coverage from last week's FOSDEM 2012 event is available on Phoronix. There's one other Phoronix point to make from FOSDEM 2012... For those that don't know, openSUSE is in the beer business. Yes, the Linux project does really sell openSUSE beer.

VGEM, the Virtual GEM provider for the Linux kernel, is still being developed and a new version has been published.

Red Hat's SPICE project that's used in KVM/QEMU virtualization environments is working towards better graphics support, which also includes work on a DRM driver and Gallium3D component for offering 3D acceleration support within guest virtual machines.

Keith Packard talked last weekend at FOSDEM about the imminent X.Org Server 1.12, the succeeding X.Org Server 1.13 release, and plans for bridging the X-to-Wayland migration.

The Linux 3.3 kernel is now up to its third RC release and is fairly in shape.

Now that the Radeon R600 tiling patches are done, Jerome Glisse has moved to updating the out-of-tree Hierarchical Z patches for the Radeon HD 2000 through 6000 series.

For those wondering what the Nouveau project has been up to with their open-source NVIDIA efforts via reverse-engineering besides the working OpenCL support, they have been setting their eyes on video decoding and other areas.

It is going on a year since showing how Unity, Compiz, GNOME Shell & KWin affect graphics/gaming performance, so here is an updated 2012 look. In this article are a variety of OpenGL benchmarks run under the current latest desktops as will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce. AMD and NVIDIA graphics were tested with both the latest closed and open-source drivers.

Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more.

The Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux distribution is out now with version 8 of their operating system. Besides many package updates and other new features, it's morphed into what the lead maintainer is calling the first "extreme-rolling release" distribution.

X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2.

ReactOS, the open-source operating system project that's been aspiring to be Microsoft Windows NT binary compatible for more than a decade, is out with a major release -- the first in nearly one year.

There's some more exciting Intel news to report this week that will please plenty of Linux and open-source fans: Intel is planning to drop their use of Imagination Technologies PowerVR graphics within future-generation SoCs.

The Fedora / Red Hat developers working on the Beefy Miracle are tentatively moving ahead with their plan to use Btrfs as the default Linux file-system for Fedora 17 and beyond.

For those Linux enthusiasts interested in the Wayland Display Server, here's a video recording of an interesting technical discussion worth watching.

Support for Intel's Lynx Point chipset has been landing in recent days within various patches spread across many different projects, but more is on the way for Intel Haswell's landing.

Besides the Intel chatter, Nouveau banging on OpenCL, Coreboot's less than interesting laptop, one of the other exciting meetings this past weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM was about DMA-BUF. DMA-BUF will help a range of Linux hardware drivers from embedded devices to multi-GPU desktops.

After the forthcoming 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" release, Canonical will no longer be sponsoring the Kubuntu derivative and will be dropping support for this KDE-based alternative.

There's another big accomplishment within the open-source graphics camp: Nouveau developers now having an initial working OpenCL implementation for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware on the driver that the Linux community developed themselves via reverse-engineering without NVIDIA's support.

Last week NVIDIA released a new beta Linux driver that is supportive of X.Org Server 1.12.

Xonotic, the open-source multi-platform game that succeeded Nexuiz, is finally moving closer to its 1.0 release.

The proper solution to the Linux kernel ASPM power regression will finally be landing in the stable Linux 3.2 kernel series.

While the Ivy Bridge launch is still a number of weeks out, Intel will soon be publishing their initial hardware enablement code for next year's Haswell micro-architecture.

With the Mesa 8.0 release right around the corner, in recent weeks there have been a number of benchmarks on Phoronix looking at this latest open-source OpenGL library and its drivers, including Gallium3D. In this article though are new benchmarks from one of the areas not explored yet: the Intel Gallium3D driver performance.

Unfortunately there isn't much to get excited over yet when it comes to using Coreboot on laptops.

Eric Anholt of Intel spoke on Saturday at FOSDEM 2012 in Belgium about the state of the Intel Linux graphics driver user-space and some of their future plans.

A few days ago I wrote that the Wayland Display Server is preparing for a stable 1.0 release and now this weekend from FOSDEM new information has been learned.

FreeBSD still lacks mainline support for kernel mode-setting (KMS) on modern hardware, but at least it's still being worked on.

A discussion has been started about a next-generation API for Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization.

Clive Crous, the new CEO of Linux Game Publishing following the resignation of founder and CEO Michael Simms, has issued a message to Linux gamers concerning the future of LGP.

Sparked from a posting earlier this week about Compiz likely being dropped from Fedora 17, some are wondering whether Compiz is effectively dead.

Jerome Glisse, the Red Hat developer commonly working on the open-source Radeon graphics driver, has announced that he believes the R600 Gallium3D tiling support is complete.

Along with the discussion around a rolling-release version of Fedora Linux, having been discussed recently has been the possibility of providing Ubuntu's Unity desktop as an alternative desktop environment for Fedora. This is obviously a topic that gets some riled up.

For open-source fans, here's the first shots of Limare running, in advance of the official announcement this weekend.

This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support.

While Fedora 17 has a massive amount of features to look forward to, updates to Compiz is likely not on the agenda. In the coming days, Compiz and its related packages for this compositing window manager are likely to be removed from the Fedora 17 package-list.

After hitting an RC state last week, a second release candidate of Wine 1.4 is now available.

Last week I delivered benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 12.04 is ARM-ing up for better performance with ARM-based hardware and detailed some of the plans Canonical has for this architecture going forward. While those benchmarks last week illustrated some significant performance improvements with the Ubuntu 12.04 stack -- in large part due to the switch to hard floating-point support -- the gains are not over. In fact, there are already some striking improvements if using the Texas Instruments OMAP4460 SoC as found on the PandaBoard ES.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" Alpha 2 is now available for testing. This second development release incorporates many package updates and other changes to this next Ubuntu Long-Term Support release.

While RC6 support remains off-by-default as Intel developers are faced by RC6-related bugs affecting a small minority of Sandy Bridge users, this power-savings feature is not limited to only Intel mobile graphics. As discovered at Phoronix, RC6 can manage to boost the graphics performance beyond just extending your battery life. The RC6 performance boost is also quite visible on Intel Sandy Bridge desktop hardware too.

There's now a GStreamer plug-in to utilize OpenCL within this popular Linux video framework so that an OpenCL kernel can be applied against a video stream.

The other Wayland-related news yesterday besides the surprise announcement that the Wayland 1.0 stable release is approaching was the first-shot attempt at "weston-launch", an easy launcher for the demo Weston compositor.

Way back in 2006 I tested out the SilverStone TJ08, which ended up being a very nice compact enclosure and right on-par with SilverStone's other beautiful Temjin cases. More than a half-decade has passed and now SilverStone is out with the TJ08-E, which evolves the chassis by providing improved cooling performance and other minor refinements.

Many were talking yesterday about why the forthcoming $25/$35 Raspberry Pi system won't ship in kit form, but of more interest to Phoronix readers out of that blog post would be the details concerning their Linux graphics driver stack and what they will be supporting.