June 18, 2009 -- Yesterday the TTM memory manager and Radeon kernel mode-setting code entered the mainline Linux kernel Git tree, which means it will be part of the next Linux 2.6.31 kernel release. In the 2.6.31 series this new Radeon driver will be marked as "staging" as there is still some work left to be accomplished and further testing needs to be done with this driver and different Radeon graphics cards. One of the items that had not been addressed in this initial code push was much in the way of security, however, already that has partially changed.

Jerome Glisse, who has long been involved with the development of open-source ATI X.Org drivers and was the original developer behind the short-lived xf86-video-avivo driver, has submitted a command stream state checker for the Radeon DRM code. With the ATI GPU memory management being done within the kernel, there must be safeguards in place that prevent user-space processes from exploiting that by accessing system memory beyond its allowed GPU memory objects.

This command stream state checker currently supports the ATI R300, R400, and R500 generations of hardware. This code checks against color buffers, z-buffers, vertex buffers, and textures. Right now this newly-proposed code does not guard against 2D rendering states. With the additional overhead now of having to monitor the GPU's command stream to ensure that no commands are violating their memory rights, there is a performance cost. Jerome mentions that he is currently seeing about a 3% decrease in performance, but further optimization can still be done via caching support.

Jerome's R300-R500 series command state checker is just over 1,000 lines of code long and can be found on the DRI development list.

August 30, 2008 -- XDS 2008 is happening next week in Edinburgh, Scotland as the X.Org Foundation's second conference for the year. Since last week when last mentioning XDS 2008, there have been a few more attendee confirmations but it still looks like this event will be slightly underpopulated. The good news though is that the program is still getting more talks towards the last minute.

This three day affair will have at least three talks on X.Org input (improving input latency, introduction to pointer acceleration, and a summary), an X.Org Foundation update, a Radeon talk by Jerome Glisse, DRI2 version 2, Red Hat's Plymouth boot experience, the state of Gallium 3D, Gallium 3D on the Intel 915 series, run-time power management for graphics hardware, and graphics testing.

Jerome Glisse, the mastermind of the original open-source R500 (xf86-video-avivo) driver, will be talking about kernel-based mode-setting (KMS), memory management, cache coherency, command submission, and other topics as it pertains to open-source and ATI.

The DRI2 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2) talk is on the improvements made to DRI2 to make it not dependent on TTM and the removal of SAREA and and locks. This DRI2 work was committed to Mesa and the X Server yesterday.

For those out of the loop on Red Hat's Plymouth, it's a replacement for RHGB (Red Hat Graphical Boot) that will premiere with Fedora 10. Plymouth is much-improved over RHGB and it also takes advantage of kernel mode-setting to provide a pleasant experience for the end-user.

When it comes to the graphics testing talk, Intel's Gordon Jin will be talking about end-user testing with what Intel needs. I may also decide to give a talk on the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2.0 and performance profiling / testing.

The XDS 2008 program in its continually-revised form can be found on the X.Org Wiki. While the program is coming along, there is still under 30 people scheduled to be at this development summit. AMD's Alex Deucher will not be attending this event now that they're getting close to open-source R600/770 3D and John Bridgman will also not be attending. Additionally, Daniel Stone, who organized most of this event, won't be attending either.

During the X Developers' Summit next week expect coverage, photographs, and audio/video recordings on Phoronix.

June 04, 2008 -- Yesterday was NVIDIA's turn in the spotlight with the introduction of the GeForce 9 Mobile GPUs and Hybrid SLI. Today the attention turns to AMD with their new announcements coming out of Computex. AMD has introduced their next-generation notebook "Puma" platform, its fastest notebook graphics processor ever, an external graphics solution for notebooks, and PowerXpress improvements.

AMD's Puma Platform is made up of a dual-core Turion X2 Ultra (or Mobile Sempron), 802.11n wireless, Mobility Radeon HD 3000 graphics, M780 Chipset, DDR2-800 memory, and DASH 1.0 support. Puma can be read about in this press release.

Also announced this morning is AMD's highest-performing mobile graphics processor, which is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800. This GPU is compatible with the Puma platform CrossFireX, PCI Express 2.0, Avivo HD, PowerPlay, and other improvements. The Mobility Radeon HD 3800 should work with the Catalyst Linux driver already, or we would expect the support to arrive with Catalyst 8.6 later this month. Its press release is here.

The third announcement coming out of the AMD camp and is also a Puma-friendly technology is XGP. XGP, or External Graphics Platform, Technology is AMD's new external PCI Express 2.0 graphics platform. ATI XGP is designed around the Mobility Radeon HD 3800 and this external graphics solution is even compatible with CrossFireX. With XGP using PCI Express 2.0 and it having a bit extra bandwidth, AMD has even placed a few USB 2.0 connectors on the external chassis to allow consumers to connect a variety of devices. The graphics card is held in this external chassis while there is a "specially designed self-latching, easy-connecting PCIe 2.0 cable" for interfacing the graphics card with the Turion X2 Ultra notebook. AMD's XGP Technology is a bit similar to the ASUS XG Station, which was announced a year and a half ago. However, the external graphics solution from ASUS uses an Express Card interface. Read about XGP in this press release.

January 22, 2008 -- Luc Verhaegen has written an update on the X.Org mailing list regarding the X activity at FOSDEM 2008. Originally planned was an X.Org development house on the two days prior to the FOSDEM weekend, but that has been canceled. However, the X.Org development room is still on during the FOSDEM conference.

At FOSDEM will be eleven X.Org talks, while nine of the slots are already filled. Among the speakers are Jerome Glisse, Stephane Marchesin, John Bridgman, Egbert Eich, Keith Packard, and Keith Whitwell. Jerome Glisse, the original developer of the now defunct Avivo R500 driver, will be speaking on Radeon from DRM to Gallium3D and aiming for a Radeon kernel mode-setting demonstration. Meanwhile, on the NVIDIA community side, Stephane will be providing an update on the open-source Nouveau driver. John Bridgman will be providing an update on AMD's open-source work and pushing out community documentation, while Egbert will be talking about the RadeonHD driver.

Keith Packard's talk is entitled "Pain and redemption in X driver development", which should be entertaining. Last but certainly not least, Keith Whitwell will be providing a status update on Tungsten's Gallium3D architecture. Other planned talks will be about XCB, Metisse, and Project VGA.

FOSDEM is taking place February 23 and 24 in Brussels, Belgium. Phoronix will be providing coverage from FOSDEM '08 and you can be sure that we'll be covering most (if not all) of the X.Org talks. More information on the X.Org FOSDEM 2008 planning is available in Wiki form.

December 28, 2007 -- While we have already shared with you what we believe were the greatest Linux innovations of 2007, what were our most popular articles and news items? This year we have published 340 articles and 700 news items. Below is a list of the most popular pieces as ordered by hits.

ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser

The good folks over at ASUS have sent over the P5E3 Deluxe, which is based upon Intel's new X38 Chipset and continues in the usual ASUS fashion of pushing new (and often unexpected) innovations onto the motherboard. Without spoiling the review of this motherboard that will be published shortly, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is one of the most innovative motherboards we have seen to date and it packs one very exciting and unusual feature. Embedded onto the P5E3 Deluxe is a Linux environment that features a Firefox-rebranded web browser and the Skype VoIP client! Within five seconds of turning on this $360 USD gaming/enthusiast motherboard, you can be using Linux and surfing the Internet. On this motherboard the feature is known as ASUS Express Gate, which is powered by something called SplashTop. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop being created by DeviceVM. SplashTop isn't even launching for a few more days (October 10), but in this article we have more details on this embedded Linux environment as well as screenshots and our thoughts with what will hopefully come next for this Linux environment.

Ubuntu 7.10 + WINE vs. Windows XP

This week's release of Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" is a significant win for the free software community. Not only does this release incorporate an updated package set -- most notably with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and GNOME 2.20, but it also delivers on new desktop innovations from BulletProofX and displayconfig-gtk to Compiz Fusion being enabled by default on supported systems. However, for those business professionals and gamers that remain dependent on some Windows-only binary applications, the WINE (WINE Is Not An Emulator) project has been making some excellent headway into supporting Windows applications on the Linux desktop. With Ubuntu 7.10 and WINE 0.9.46 in hand, we had set out to compare the performance between Windows XP and Gutsy Gibbon with WINE on two popular DirectX benchmarks.

The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux

Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.

NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT 256MB

The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA's value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively-cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Without further ado, we present the world's first Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.

AMD 8.42 Driver Brings Fixes, AIGLX!

Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it's here for ATI hardware. Granted, if you were using an older ATI GPU with the open-source Radeon driver, you could have been benefiting from AIGLX already.

Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested

For this article we've decided to not only deliver power benchmarks from Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 7.04 to compare the tickless kernel effect, but we have went back and retested all of the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04, or also known as Hoary Hedgehog. With the past six Ubuntu releases we had tested the power consumption of a Lenovo laptop when running from its AC charger and off the battery, when the system was idling and then again under load. We had also monitored the temperature of the Intel Centrino mobile processor. You may be surprised by the results of Ubuntu's power usage.

ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista

Since AMD introduced their new Linux display driver last month, we have published a number of different articles looking at the Radeon performance across their different GPU product generations. This ATI/AMD Linux driver testing and exploration continued this month with the release of the 8.42 driver, which finally introduced AIGLX support for the fglrx driver. One area though we haven't yet analyzed is how their official Linux driver now compares to their much-optimized Windows Catalyst driver. Today, however, we will be looking just at that as we compare the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB performance under Linux and Microsoft Windows Vista.

AMD 8.41 Display Driver Preview

While many thought this day would never come or that it was some form of propaganda, it's coming and it's coming this month. The AMD fglrx 8.41 driver features a brand new underlying code-base that has been under development for well over a year. At Phoronix we have literally spent hundreds of hours using and testing this new driver, and to say the least it is truly a new experience on the ATI Linux front. The new driver delivers massive performance improvements, Radeon HD 2000 (R600) support, and a whole lot more. This article is the first of five articles that will be published today at Phoronix as we examine the new AMD Linux driver extensively on all fronts from seeing how it can handle the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card to going back to past graphics card families to show the dramatic performance improvements.

Linux vs. Windows Power Usage

Since publishing our Ubuntu power tests, where we had monitored the power consumption of the past six Ubuntu releases going back two years on a laptop, we've had repeated requests for a power comparison between Windows and different Linux distributions. Well, in this article are the first set of results from that testing. We've compared the power consumption of Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Fedora 7, and Ubuntu 7.10.

Fedora 7 KVM Virtualization How-To

By many the Linux world is regarded as being a scary or challenging place with tons of poorly engineered terminal commands and all sorts of difficulties to install and use a Linux distribution. While this is really not the case with modern day Linux, one of the areas where Linux has rapidly progressed is in the field of virtualization. Among the virtualization options are Xen, QEMU, QEMU with KVM, and VMWare. With Fedora 7 it's so easy to use KVM virtualization that you can start virtualizing your favorite operating system and barely even touch the keyboard! In this guide we will tell you how as we work on virtualizing a battery of operating systems from Microsoft Windows Vista to Mandrake 9.2.

The most popular news for 2007...

AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs
ATI R500/600 Driver For Solaris Coming?
AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs!
The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver
KDE 4.0 Beta 2 Released
X.Org 7.3 Release Gets Delayed, Again
The Degrading Quality Of X.Org Releases?
AMD Specs Already Help Avivo Driver
Silverlight To Support x86_64 Linux
X.Org 7.3 Gets Released

December 04, 2007 -- Jerome Glisse, the mastermind behind the open-source R500 Avivo driver, has published the first bits of code on his latest project: kernel mode-setting support for Radeon graphics cards. This latest work is supported by all Radeon product families except for the R500/600. In addition, also lacking is the CRTC2, TMDS, and LVDS support. On Jerome's TODO list is also separate GPU clock control support, suspend / resume, and AtomBIOS support. The Radeon kernel mode-setting support can be checked out via git from git://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/drm in the modesetting-radeon branch.

In the Radeon Kernel Mode-Setting announcement, Jerome Glisse mentioned his next challenge is to work on DRI2 and Gallium3D support for the Radeon R300/400 GPUs, which will hopefully be ready for demonstration at FOSDEM 2008.

October 17, 2007 -- Last week the RadeonHD development was rather slow with only 30 commits to their xf86-video-radeonhd git tree all week. However, the Novell developers have been making some good progress this week. Earlier this week there were a few fixes to the RadeonHD driver and AtomBIOS. Today so far there have been fifteen commits. These changes represent a number of fixes, adding additional queries, semantic changes, and one of the most notable commits is adding support for libpciaccess. The open-source R500 Avivo driver has supported libpciaccess for a while, but now it's finally coming to the RadeonHD driver. PCI rework/libpciaccess is the new generic PCI access library and is meant to be platform independent. As libpciaccess is relatively new, the RadeonHD driver hooks into libpciaccess but at the same time maintains backwards compatibility with older versions of X.Org. If XSERVER_LIBPCIACCESS is defined, the RadeonHD driver will take advance of this PCI library. The driver version has also been bumped to v0.0.2.

October 04, 2007 -- With the availability of the RadeonHD driver, Jerome Glisse (the xf86-video-avivo maintainer) has declared the X.Org Avivo driver dead, but that's not preventing some postmortem changes. There hasn't been any real activity with this open-source R500 driver in about two to three weeks when AMD's open specifications had helped the developers. Earlier this week, however, there was a fix in the Avivo CRTC mode-setting and today support for the Radeon HD 2300 was added. The Avivo driver doesn't support the R600 series, but the Radeon HD 2300 is actually based upon the R500 architecture. The Radeon HD 2300PRO simply worked by adding its PCI ID to the driver. Both of these commits are rather trivial and doesn't ignite any hopes that the Avivo driver may make a comeback (especially with the rapid progress of the RadeonHD driver).

October 02, 2007 -- Last month at the X Developer Summit in Cambridge, Eric Anholt, Adam Jackson, and Daniel Stone had talked about the future of X.Org releases for the next year. Over the weekend, Daniel Stone had updated the XDS 2007 Notes at X.org with the latest plans for X.Org 7.5. The current schedule for X.Org include the X server 1.4.1 release coming out on the first of November followed by X server 1.5.0 in March of 2008. Planned for X.Org 7.4 and X server 1.5 is XGE, XACE, RandR 1.3, PCI rework, XKB 2, _X_EXPORT, DRI memory manager, GLX 1.4, and Glucose.

XGE is the X Generic Event extension, which is required for MPX support, but these events can also be used by other extensions. The XACE framework is for handling security policy extensions. Parts of XACE have been in the server since X.Org 7.2 but it's not fully implemented and lacks the loadable security modules. For X.Org 7.4 there are XACE modules planned for at least SELinux and Solaris Trusted Extensions.

RandR 1.2 is currently the latest and greatest Reside and Rotate extension, but RandR 1.3 is planned for the future with GPU object support. RandR's GPU object is designed to be another layer between the X screen and the CRTCs. The PCI rework involves using the libpciaccess library, and some of the open-source X.Org drivers (such as the Avivo driver) already utilize this new library.

Next up is Glucose, which is an OpenGL based acceleration architecture that will be hooked into the X server and its acceleration is done using the same paths as XGL. Glucose is designed to work with AIGLX as it provides a convenient way of accelerating common rendering primitives.

Previously we reported that Multi-Pointer X Support would arrive for X.Org 7.4, however, according to the Wiki page that is now on the table for X.Org 7.5. Also planned for X.Org 7.5 is pushing Distributed Multihead X (DMX) up to DIX. Multi-Pointer X Support provides multiple cursor and keyboard support in X. MPX does allow for multi-pointer interaction with legacy applications while also allows for new and more innovative applications.

Like any software project, these current features planned for X.Org are tentative and subject to change and is just some of the work going into X.Org. At the same time, there has been concerns over the degrading quality of X.Org releases so hopefully X.Org 7.4/7.5 will mark the beginning of greater quality assurance work prior to the release. Additional details can be found from the XDS 2007 Notes.

September 18, 2007 -- The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs. However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series. This open-source support does include the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card. Inside our labs we tried out the Radeon HD 2900XT with the RadeonHD driver on Fedora 7 and it's certainly great to see this progress. The driver still has a climbing road a head, but this driver is already a leap in the right direction.

September 17, 2007 -- Not only is AMD providing the open-source community with their ATI GPU specifications, but they have also been partnering with Novell on the development of a new open-source display driver. We've been telling you about AMD's open-source work all month, and today the new driver is finally available for download. It is still very much a work in progress and isn't much further along than the open-source R500 Avivo driver. However, this new driver does support the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) family. This new X.Org driver is called RadeonHD and in this article we have some initial information to share with additional articles coming later in the day.

September 14, 2007 -- Three days from now the new AMD-sponsored R500/600 driver being written by Novell should be unveiled, but in the meantime it's not stopping developers from continuing further work on the open-source Avivo driver. In the past two days there have been twenty-two commits to the Avivo driver's git repository. These commits fix TMDS register names and other changes based upon AMD's released specifications. As we have already shared with you before, the days of the Avivo driver are limited but the code will remain available after the new AMD open-source driver is out. We've been asked to no longer link to the FreeDesktop.org gitweb as it causes a "Phoronix Effect" with traffic that is apparently too much for their gitweb server to handle. However, hopefully you know the URL anyways so you can check out the latest open-source R500/600 driver code.

September 12, 2007 -- While the days of the Avivo driver are likely limited with the new open-source R500/600 driver, this driver has already improved marginally thanks to the publicly released RV630/M56 specifications. There wasn't a commit to the Avivo driver since two weeks ago, but Matthew Garrett took care of the AVIVO_VGA_MYSTERY registers with their real names and values thanks to this new documentation. The AVIVO_VGA_MYSTERY changes can be read about here. The new open-source driver that's being written so far by Novell should be released next week. In the meantime, be sure to check out the specifications (well, if 900+ pages of GPU register specifications interest you).

September 06, 2007 -- It's been a glorious past couple of months for ATI Radeon X1000 owners that have had very basic open-source support provided by the Avivo display driver. However, it looks like the open-source Avivo driver will soon be going away to a bit-bucket heaven. If AMD sticks to their word, Jerome Glisse (the Avivo lead developer) will discontinue all work on the xf86-video-avivo driver. In fact, he said he "kind of stopped doing real work on it" already and is partially the reason why the Avivo v0.1 driver hasn't been released. He is, however, looking forward to contributing to a new yet to be named open-source driver. Jerome is doing this because he believes AMD is starting to truly work with the open-source community. We will disclose more information on the new open-source driver in just a few hours.

August 30, 2007 -- Back in April of 2006, a proprietary driver from ATI that had supported the Radeon X1000 "R500" product family had finally greeted Linux users. This driver, v8.24.8, had supported the entire desktop and mobile Radeon X1000 lineup with 3D support and even Avivo video playback capabilities. For the six months prior, Linux users were stuck in the dark without any Linux support for the R500 series while the ATI Windows Catalyst customers had support that was continually improved. Of course, back in 2006 there was no open-source R500 driver either. Over the past 16 months with R500 support in the fglrx driver, the features have continually improved with an AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux, support for the newer R500 graphics cards, and there are far less bugs in the driver now then there was in the past. However, these changes really have not affected the performance as it has stayed the same for the most part with minimal improvements. In this article today we are going back to test the original 8.24.8 display driver and compare it directly against the latest driver available as of today, the 8.40.4 fglrx release.

August 28, 2007 -- Dodji Seketeli and Jerome Glisse have completed porting the open-source "Avivo" R500 driver to libpciaccess, the new PCI infrastructure. Libpciaccess allows X.Org to access the PCI bus and devices with platform independence. Keith Packard has documented on the X.Org Wiki how to implement this new PCI infrastructure with X.Org graphics drivers. The git commit marking the completion of the libpciaccess changes for the Avivo driver can be viewed via gitweb.

August 21, 2007 -- Earlier today we told you about a TMDS fix to address some of the display issues present with the open-source "Avivo" R500 driver. Based upon the feedback in our ATI Linux forum this latest work was successful in eliminating some of the TMDS problems. Work has, however, continued in the day with additional fixes. Some bits of the Avivo driver code was cleaned up and the driver can now differentiate between connected digital and analog monitors, a BIOS initialization bit with TMDS_CNTL, and improving TMDS TMDS 0x7880 knowledge. The Avivo utility has also been updated with the latest TMDS register changes. Grab the latest source and technical changes from FreeDesktop.org and stop by the open-source forums for any troubleshooting or to report on the Avivo driver successes and failures.

Jerome Glisse has mentioned to Phoronix that the Avivo 0.1.0 release will not be released until he or other X.Org developers can fix some wrong color problems, clocking abnormalities, and other similar TMDS issues.

August 21, 2007 -- Yesterday we told you about TMDS fixes for the Avivo driver to hopefully correct display-related problems. Well, a bug crept into the system when the TMDS1 registers were being adjusted when it should have been the TMDS2 registers. This bug was corrected this morning so check out the latest development code if you're still running into problems. Report your results in our open-source ATI/AMD forum with the results, where the lead Avivo developer is an active member of the Phoronix community.