Happy Holidays & What's Popular So Far This Month

Of the 215 news items and 18 featured articles published so far this December, here's a look at the most popular content this month.

In case you haven't been able to keep up with your daily Phoronix reading this month due to the holidays...The most popular news stories month-to-date, which is averaging ~8.6 postings per day this month, were:

A New Project To Run Mac OS X Binaries On Linux
While there is the Wine project to run native Windows binaries on Linux (and other platforms), there's a new open-source project that's emerging for running Apple OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner.

The 3.8 Kernel Is An Amazing Gift To Linux Users
While we are just a few days into the Linux 3.8 kernel merge window and there's still a number of pull requests that have yet to appear for this next kernel development cycle with new features, there's already a ton of exciting work. If you missed the horde of Phoronix articles in the past few days covering the prominent features, here's a recap showing why this Linux kernel being developed over the holidays is a great gift for its users.

THQ Is Looking At Bringing Their Games To Linux
THQ, the American game company responsible for a great deal of computer games and was the company behind the recent controversial Humble Bundle, is currently evaluating the market for bringing their titles to Linux.

The Linux 3.8 Kernel Can Save A Lot Of RAM
For certain workloads with the Linux 3.8 kernel the physical memory usage is lowered by a significant amount thanks to improvements within this kernel that's presently under development.

Gabe Talks More About Valve's Next-Gen Linux Console
The Video Game Awards happened on Friday night in California. During the event, Gabe Newell of Valve commented a bit more on their next-generation console / living room PC plans. To no surprise, Linux plays a big role.

Ryan Gordon On Valve's Steam, Linux Porting
Here's some interesting comments from Ryan "Icculus" Gordon about the latest state of Linux gaming and what's ahead.

An Overview Of The Linux 3.7 Kernel
With the release of the Linux 3.7 kernel being imminent (it might even be out today), here's an overview of the features and highlights of this 2012 holiday release of the Linux kernel.

The First Unreal Engine 3 Game Ships For Linux
While Epic Games hasn't allowed for Unreal Tournament 3 to be released for Linux, the first native Linux game using Unreal Engine 3 was released today. Yes, Unreal Engine 3 for Linux.

The most popular featured articles included:

AMD Radeon Performance Preview On Linux 3.8
With word this week that there's some performance improvements for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver to be found with the Linux 3.8 kernel as a result of the a-synchronous DMA engine support, some very early benchmarks of the "drm-next" code were done from five different AMD Radeon graphics cards. In extreme cases, the open-source graphics driver can deliver 10x higher OpenGL frame-rates with the experimental kernel.

Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Comparison: 6 Desktops, 5 Driver/GPUs
In this article are benchmarks of six different desktops (Unity, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and LXDE) on five different GPU/driver configurations (Radeon, Catalyst, Intel, NVIDIA, and Nouveau) running the very latest Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" development packages to look at the latest state of the Ubuntu Linux gaming OpenGL performance.

There's Another Linux Kernel Power Problem
After last year discovering a major Linux kernel power regression that was widely debated until the Phoronix test automation software bisected the problem to get to the bottom of the situation, there's more active power regressions today on the Linux desktop. As I've mentioned on Twitter and in other articles in weeks prior there's a few regressions, but one of them for at least some notebooks is causing a very significant increase in power consumption. This situation that remains unresolved as of the Linux 3.7 kernel can cause the system to be going through about 20% more power.

DragonFlyBSD, CentOS, Ubuntu, Solaris Benchmarks
For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of the DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Solaris Express, and OpenIndiana operating systems.

Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" Linux Kernel Comparison
Up today are benchmarks comparing the Intel open-source Linux kernel graphics (DRM) driver performance on recent releases with the HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics processor as found on the Intel Core i7 3770K processor.

Debian Linux vs. Debian kFreeBSD With Squeeze & Wheezy
The latest benchmarking adventures at Phoronix.com have been exploring the performance of Debian GNU/Linux versus Debian GNU/kFreeBSD when using the latest Debian 6.0.6 "Squeeze" images as well as the latest Debian "Wheezy" testing images.

FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 Benchmarked Against Linux, Solaris, BSD
While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 "Isotope" release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

Mesa 9.0 vs. Mesa 9.1-devel On Intel Sandy Bridge
For those Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPU owners with integrated HD 2000/3000 graphics, here are some benchmarks showing the performance of the current Mesa 9.1-devel Git code compared to the stable Mesa 9.0 release. There are a few performance improvements to be found for this open-source Intel Linux graphics driver.

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