In preparation for the upcoming release of LLVM 3.3, here is an extensive round of C/C++ benchmarks from GCC 4.8.0, LLVM Clang 3.2, and LLVM Clang 3.3-rc1 to look at the Linux compiler performance. Benchmarks happened from three different systems bearing Intel Core i7 3960X, AMD FX-8350, and Intel Core i3 3217U processors for a diverse look at the performance.

Canonical's Kevin Gunn shared a status update for the advancements made by their team this week on the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 interface.

The release of LLVM 3.3 along with its sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and Compiler-RT is imminent. A second release candidate was posted just prior to the weekend to usher in some last minute testing.

The open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is beginning to work when it comes to running simple OpenCL programs on the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.

At the Tizen conference this week in San Francisco, Intel showed off an Intel Ultrabook running their next-generation Tizen 3.0 platform that's using a shell/desktop derived from GNOME 3.x.

Wine 1.5.31 has been released as the latest bi-weekly development milestone.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.