Drivers & Drama Dominated Linux Talk In July

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 31 July 2014 at 09:24 PM EDT. 6 Comments
PHORONIX
With the end of July comes our monthly recap about the most popular events and tests that took place on Phoronix.

This month on Phoronix there were 213 published news items and 15 published featured-length articles. This is a drop compared to usual with most months seeing myself writing more than 300 news articles and at least 30 multi-page, featured articles. However, at the end of June I moved from Chicago to Indiana and am still in the process of setting up my new office, which is why this month has been lighter than normal but still a healthy amount of content. Motivation and burn out also remain problems with the excessive number of those blocking ads on the site that I've invested in for over the past ten years.

Expect the counts to pick back up in August when the new office is hopefully back to being fully operation compared to currently just having a few computers sprawled about rather than 20+ systems live. Once the back-office is fully operation, it will pick up even greater due to my new home office being multiple times larger and with greater electrical capacity for being able to handle more in terms of automated Phoromatic test farms, etc.

If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware tests and interesting news published at Phoronix, please view Phoronix without using AdBlock, consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, PayPal tips are tremendously appreciated, or Bitcoin tips are also welcome to 1HefBsdstoALrbV3a3cLsVv5b5YLPLLvWn. Thanks for your support!

With that said, the most popular news included:

Linus Torvalds On GCC 4.9: Pure & Utter Crap
Linus Torvalds' latest tirade is over the GCC 4.9 code compiler.

Qualcomm DMCA Notice Takes Down 100+ Git Repositories
Qualcomm has forced GitHub to take down over 100 Git repositories over alleged copyright infringement.

The Tour Of Linus Torvalds' Home Office
Seemingly popular on the Internet today is the Linux Foundation produced video that shows off the home office of Linus Torvalds.

Manjaro Linux Developers Experience A Mass Exodus [Updated]
It seems all of the Manjaro Linux developers might have parted way with the distribution's development except for the project leader.

MicroXwin Creators Have A PC That Runs Debian & Android Together
The company behind MicroXwin, a kernel-based X Windows implementation that claims to be the smallest and fastest X implementation, has come up with a unified Linux distribution that runs Android and Debian/Ubuntu applications simultaneously.

Lennart: The State & Future Of Systemd
Lennart Poettering gave a talk recently in Beijing about the state of systemd and its future ahead.

Grand Theft Auto Running On Direct3D Natively On Linux Shows Gallium3D Potential
As a follow on from today's Nouveau vs. NVIDIA OpenGL driver benchmarking results that were published earlier today on Phoronix, in the comments an interesting video was pointed out of Grand Theft Auto IV using Direct3D 9.x natively under Linux.

Next-Gen OpenGL To Be Announced Next Month
The Khronos Group has shared details about their BoF sessions to be hosted next month during SIGGRAPH and it includes detailing the next-generation OpenGL / OpenGL ES specifications.

A New Video Has Us Real Excited About The New UT For Linux
Epic Games has posted another video about their upcoming free Unreal Tournament game that is natively supporting Linux.

The Latest Distro Trying For Commercial Success Uses Arch & Wayland
A new Linux distribution under development is among the latest dreaming of commercial success in hopes of finally conquering the Linux desktop and having their OS pre-installed on systems being sold in brick and mortar stores.

The most popular Phoronix articles for July were meanwhile:

Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air
As it's been some months since last running any Linux vs. Mac OS X performance benchmarks, up today are benchmarks of the latest OS X 10.9.4 release on a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air compared to running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the same hardware with also upgrading against the Linux 3.16 development kernel.

Intel Pentium G3258 On Linux
Up for review today on Phoronix is the Pentium G3258, the new processor Intel put out in celebration of their Pentium brand turning 20 years old. This new Pentium G3258 processor costs under $100 USD and comes unlocked for offering quite a bit overclocking potential while this Pentium CPU can be used by current Intel 8 and 9 Series Chipsets. Here's our first benchmarks of the Intel Pentium G3258 using Ubuntu Linux.

Preview: Benchmarking CentOS 7.0 & Scientific Linux 7.0
CentOS 7.0 was released this week and that came just days after the first alpha of Scientific Linux 7, both of which are based upon last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. With these new community-based EL7 releases coming about, it's time for some fresh Enterprise Linux benchmarking and performance monitoring on Phoronix.

Linux 3.16 File-System Tests On A Hard Drive
In complementing the earlier Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD (and the later Btrfs testing), here are benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs from the Linux 3.15 and 3.16 kernels being compared from a traditional rotating hard drive.

Testing Btrfs On The Linux 3.16 Kernel
When running my initial Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD I had to skip over Btrfs due to initial problems with the experimental kernel code. Fortunately, Btrfs has been fixed-up in Linux 3.16 and can now serve for some benchmarking.

X.Org Server 1.16 Officially Released With Terrific Features
After a last minute delay earlier this month, Keith Packard of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has officially announced the X.Org Server 1.16 release. XWayland and other changes make xorg-server 1.16 a super exciting release!

The Power Consumption & Efficiency Of Open-Source GPU Drivers
Complementing yesterday's Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau benchmarks using the very latest open-source driver code, here's some power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and thermal numbers when using an assortment of graphics processors on the latest open-source drivers.

Nouveau vs. Radeon vs. Intel Tests On Linux 3.16, Mesa 10.3-devel
As the second part of our Linux graphics testing this week after a Radeon R600/RadeonSI performance update with the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel are some comparative numbers that include Intel's Haswell HD Graphics and various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the Nouveau driver.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week