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.

Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

Earlier this month I delivered Radeon DRM driver benchmarks and Nouveau DRM driver benchmarks from the in-development Linux 3.10 kernel. Being published this Friday evening are now Intel Ivy Bridge graphics benchmarks from the Linux 3.10 kernel compared to the earlier releases going back to Linux 3.5.

By default the Linux kernel uses the "ondemand" CPU frequency governor for achieving maximum clock frequency when system load is high and a lower clock frequency when the system is idle. However, it turns out that for at least modern Intel CPUs, this is likely no longer the case. This default kernel choice may lead to poor battery life and performance for modern Linux systems.

Just days after the Mozilla Firefox 21 release, the first beta of the next Firefox 22 release is now available.

The openSUSE development community has announced the immediate release of the first milestone release of openSUSE 13.1. This is the distribution's first development release ahead of their plans to ship 13.1 final in November.

The SolidRun CuBox is advertised as the "world's smallest desktop computer" with a size of just two-inches cubed (5cm). The CuBox is powered by an ARM PJ4 800MHz SoC and now it has available an open-source DRM Linux graphics driver.

LLVM continues to show its adaptability with the innovative compiler infrastructure now being used by JADE, the Just-In-Time Adaptive Decoder Engine. JADE is an LLVM-powered generic video decoder.

Curious to see how the performance of the open-source ATI/AMD Linux graphics driver is evolving for aging hardware, a new round of OpenGL benchmarks were carried out on the once-popular ATI Radeon HD 4870 "RV770" graphics card. The performance was compared between the Mesa 7.11, 8.0, 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2-devel Git releases from an Ubuntu Linux system to see how the performance has changed for this driver in the past two years.

Yesterday evening I mentioned Ubuntu Linux developers would be discussing replacing Mozilla Firefox with Google Chromium as the default web-browser in Ubuntu 13.10. After the discussion today, it looks like this may very well happen.

As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical's next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.

KDE's Krita painting application back in the day was one of the first to support an OpenGL-accelerated canvas. After their GL support fell behind, it's now been brought up to speed by porting their graphics rendering code-paths to supporting an OpenGL 3.1 Core Profile and OpenGL ES 2.0.

For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical's next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.

The first release candidate of the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 15 distribution is now available. Linux Mint 15 incorporates the latest MATE and Cinnamon desktop improvements along with offering their Linux desktop users some new tools.

GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10.

In an effort to make Enlightenment E17 available through the openSUSE installer and DVD, the lightweight LXDE desktop environment may be pushed away.

After KVM virtualization was brought to ARM last year with the ARM Cortex-A15 SoCs supporting hardware virtualization, support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) SoCs is being prepared.

SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a "sliding drawer" user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript.

The second development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira open-source benchmarking platform is now available for Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, and Windows operating systems.

Linux developers are considering this week replacing Mozilla Firefox with Chromium, Google's open-source version of their Chrome web-browser, for the Ubuntu 13.10 release.

With one week to go until the soft feature freeze for KDE 4.11, there's a better idea for the features that are likely to come to the next major release of the KDE Plasma desktop.

Arch Linux replaced MySQL with MariaDB, openSUSE gutted MySQL, Fedora replaced MySQL, and now Ubuntu Linux is looking to continue the trend.

While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.

Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit to begin working out Ubuntu 13.10 plans were more discussions surrounding the distribution's proposed new packaging system.

One month after the release of X3: Terran Conflict for Linux, Egosoft has now released X3: Albion Prelude.

Released today was a new version of the DRM library and adjoining Mesa changes to address MSAA texture issues affecting AMD Radeon Evergreen and Cayman graphics hardware running the open-source Gallium3D driver.

Version 2.0 of PyPy, an alternative implementation of the Python language, has been released.

Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical's Mir Display Server from the beginning. He's now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.

Last month it was the X.Org Server with a noted security vulnerability and now this time around it's the Linux kernel.

A beta release of the Ubuntu SDK is currently slated for availability in July. Other plans for the Ubuntu SDK were also expressed today during this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit.

A video has been posted to show off Unity-Next (Unity 8.x) running atop the Mir Display Server in its early development form atop an Apple Retina MacBook Pro with Intel HD graphics.

There's a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place this week to begin drafting plans for Ubuntu 13.10. This morning the initial road-map for the X.Org / Mesa graphics and display stack were discussed for the next Ubuntu Linux release.

The first beta release of the Qt 5.1 tool-kit is now available. As the first major update to the Qt5 platform, this release comes with plenty of new features for developers and end-users.

One of the exciting features of LLVM 3.3 that is due out next month is the final integration of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end. This LLVM back-end is needed for supporting Gallium3D OpenCL on AMD Radeon graphics hardware, "RadeonSI" HD 7000/8000 series support, and can optionally be used as the Radeon Gallium3D driver's shader compiler. In this article are some benchmarks of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end from LLVM 3.3-rc1 when using several different AMD Radeon HD graphics cards and seeing how the LLVM compiler back-end affects the OpenGL graphics performance.

NVIDIA's proprietary driver and the open-source Gallium3D Linux graphics drivers -- namely now the open-source Radeon UVD support -- are using VDPAU as their accelerated video playback API. Meanwhile, Intel still continues to invest heavily in VA-API as their preferred video acceleration API for Linux. An exciting set of 42 patches to improve VA-API was published on Monday.

Support for sub-surfaces has been merged into mainline Wayland after the protocol work and other changes for this exciting new feature has been in development for several months. Sub-surfaces by itself isn't too exciting to end-users but will benefit application developers in enhancing the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.

With the merge window on the feature-rich Linux 3.10 kernel having been closed, the usual roundabout of Phoronix benchmarking of the Linux kernel has commenced. In our initial testing of the F2FS file-system on Linux 3.10, however, yields negative performance changes.

Ubuntu Brainstorm served as a way for the Ubuntu community to nominate new ideas for the Linux operating system, comment on these ideas, and vote on the ideas should you find them interesting and worthwhile. However, now it looks like Ubuntu Brainstorm is going to be eliminated.

While the official release announcement has not yet come down, as usual, the early binaries for the next Firefox release are now available. The Mozilla Firefox 21.0 release that's now available from FTP servers features numerous new features.

After more than one year since the release of the Go 1.0 programming language by Google, Go 1.1 has been unveiled as the first major update to the programming language.

The open-source AMD Linux graphics driver now boasts support for AMD's next-generation "Hainan" GPU products, a.k.a. the Radeon HD 8800 series.

Colord 1.0.0 has been released as the system service/daemon that makes it easy and straight forward for managing/installing/creating color profiles for managing colors on Linux input and output devices.

The first beta of the PostgreSQL 9.3 open-source database software is available. This beta release is feature-complete for PostgreSQL 9.3 with several major features.

Curious about the top contributors to the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver, Ben Widawsky of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center did some analysis.

Matthias Klumpp has written about the current state of PackageKit, AppStream, and Listaller for cross-Linux distribution package management and installation.

Timothree Besset, perhaps better known amongst Linux gamers as "TTimo" and the former main "Linux guy" at id Software, has announced es_core. The purpose of es_core is to provide an experimental framework for low-latency, high-FPS multi-player games.

The Linux 3.10 kernel is going to be massive with the just-released "-rc1" version being the biggest in the last several years (or perhaps ever), according to Linus Torvalds. This massive change-rate is based at least according to commit count and potentially actual lines too.

FurMark, TessMark, and other advanced OpenGL 2.1/3.2/4.0 benchmarks are now available via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.