Phoronix

GNU/Linux & Solaris Hardware Reviews

This Week: Benchmarks, Graphics, Enlightenment
This week at Phoronix we did our usual roundabout with X.Org / Linux graphics news coverage along with sharing new work on our benchmarking software, and we also broke the news that Samsung is sponsoring the development of Enlightenment. Another popular story was that Fedora 13 may support system rollbacks via Btrfs. Our graphics coverage this week consisted of a new GLX extension for Clutter/Mutter, VMware releasing its virtual Gallium3D driver, how the X stack in Ubuntu 10.04 may look, Catalyst 9.11 for Linux, X Server 1.7.2 RC2, and lastly was word of a new Radeon DRM power savings patch. Other news this week included Adobe releasing a Flash Player 10.1 beta for Linux along with word that Adobe AIR 2.0 is coming, some comments on the Radeon HD 5970 for Linux, CrossOver Games 8.1 released, the second GNOME 2.30 development release, the Linux 2.6.32 kernel is nearing, and Fedora 12 made it out the door. When it came to our very popular automated testing software, the Phoronix Test Suite, this week we released Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 (codenamed "Bardu") to the world...

The GStreamer, Cairo Video Hackfest Results
Last month we talked about a hackfest to improve Linux video playback that came about after a GNOME developer began work on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer and looking at other ways to leverage hardware acceleration within this major open-source multimedia framework. This Linux video meeting started in Barcelona on Thursday and is ending today, with some accomplishments. Some of the code that has been (and continues to be) worked on is merging YUV support into Cairo/Pixman, a GLX Multi-thread extension, merging gst-plugins-cairo, XRenderPutImage/XV to Pixmap support, VA-API support for GStreamer, and getting the GStreamer Cairo plug-in to work on the Nokia N900...

A New Patch For Radeon DRM Power Savings
While OpenGL acceleration and GPU-assisted video playback are often most viewed as the areas that are severely lacking for the open-source Linux graphics drivers in comparison to what the binary-only ATI/NVIDIA drivers offer, another area that has not yet caught up to speed with the binary competition is power management. For years (going back to 2005) AMD has implemented PowerPlay support in their fglrx driver for dynamically clocking the GPU and memory clocks along with adjusting the voltages accordingly, based upon the user's input and then later generations of PowerPlay are more dynamic in nature...

Phorogit Turns Two, Happy Birthday
Today marks the two-year anniversary of the creation of Phorogit.com. Phorogit is the Git repository that is sponsored by Phoronix Media to house the development of a few free software projects. The two most prominent projects currently housed at Phorogit are the ATI Catalyst Linux driver packaging scripts (fglrx-packaging.git) and the Phoronix Test Suite (phoronix-test-suite.git)...

libvdpau, libva Both Updated Today
In hopes of pushing VDPAU beyond just being a NVIDIA Unix driver technology and to make it an open standard for Linux video driver developers wishing to provide HD video acceleration on Linux via the GPU, NVIDIA released a standalone VDPAU library back in September and have been trying to push some VDPAU bits for DRI2. Today NVIDIA has updated its standalone VDPAU library, libvdpau, which is now at version 0.3. This library update supports versioning to the drivers, configurable install directory support, libvdpau_trace, and documentation updates...

Intel Linux Graphics Shine With Fedora 12
Intel's Linux graphics driver stack is often at the forefront of X.Org / Mesa innovations, from Intel being the first driver having in-kernel video memory management to being the first driver with mainline kernel mode-setting support to even being the driver that often first receives support for new OpenGL extensions in Mesa. The Intel Linux driver stack can be attributed with many firsts, but continually pushing this driver while putting out quarterly timed releases has led to some pains. Earlier this year in fact the driver stack was rather buggy -- especially in Ubuntu 9.04 -- that impaired many users with stability issues, performance problems, and other headaches. Most of the regressions from overhauling the Linux driver stack have been resolved, but where is the driver stack at now? The Intel stack in Ubuntu 9.10 is performing rather well, but where it's more important is its status within Fedora as more of the bleeding-edge graphics packages are pulled into this release that often don't make it into other distributions until months later when they roll out their next releases. To see where the Intel Linux graphics are at in Fedora 12, we ran the same set of benchmarks in the Fedora 10, 11, and 12 releases with an Intel G43 IGP.

Fedora 13 May Support Btrfs System Rollbacks
Fedora 12 was just released this week, but features for Fedora 13 have been in planning long before this release made it out the door. In fact, it was last month that we began talking about features for Fedora 13...

X Server 1.7.2 RC2 Released With 15 Fixes
X Server 1.7.2 is scheduled to be released a week from Friday, so in preparations for that, Peter Hutterer has just pushed out the second release candidate for this minor point release. X Server 1.7.2 RC2 is made up of 15 fixes (mostly for XQuartz) since the RC1 release that arrived earlier this month. There's nothing real exciting in this release beyond addressing bugs as most developers are now focused on X Server 1.8, which will be released in March...

Benchmarking Mobile Phones & Devices
It was just a week ago that we confirmed the Phoronix Test Suite is being ported to Windows, then on Monday delivered Phoronix Test Suite 2.2, and a day after that announced a major advancement for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" and that was image quality comparison and analysis support to take our benchmarking software to the next level. Today we are continuing on this roll by announcing the Phoronix Test Suite is coming to mobile phones! To assist those in optimizing their software on mobile phones and devices for not only the pure performance but also matters like monitoring the battery power consumption, the Phoronix Test Suite has made the jump into the mobile space. As of the latest Lenvik code now found in the Phoronix Test Suite Git tree, Palm's webOS platform is now supported and the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 can run on the Palm Pre and should be able to handle other webOS and Optware devices too...

The Linux 2.6.32 Kernel Is Near, RC8 Released
Linus Torvalds this afternoon put out the Linux 2.6.32-rc8 kernel release. The Linux 2.6.32 kernel, which brings 3D DRM and KMS support for ATI R600/700 GPUs, new wireless drivers, an improved VIA frame-buffer, and other improvements, is getting ready for release...

The Second GNOME 2.30 Development Release
While GNOME 2.30 will not be the release that goes on to become GNOME 3.0 (instead it will be GNOME 2.32 in September that grabs the "3.0" tag), the second development release for the 2.30 series is now available. This new GNOME 2.30 development release goes by the version number 2.29.2. Among the changes to be found in GNOME 2.29.2 include Evince now supporting PDF File Attachment Annotations, gcalctool now has a command-line version called gcalccmd of this GNOME Calculator, GDM has picked up many enhancements, a Moblin front-end for gnome-bluetooth, and Tomboy now supports Ubuntu One...

How The X Stack In Ubuntu 10.04 LTS May Look
Canonical's Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codenamed Lucid Lynx) is taking place this week in Texas, but happening right now on the Ubuntu-X mailing list is a discussion about what the X.Org plans are for Ubuntu Lucid. Bryce Harrington, Canonical's principal X leader, has shared his views about the X.Org package set for Ubuntu 10.04. As far as the X Server goes, Bryce believes it is a question between the 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8 releases...

Unigine Engine Picks Up Physical Cloth Effects
While we are still waiting on the release of Unigine Heaven for Linux, the Unigine Corp developers continue advancing this multi-platform game engine. The latest code being worked on for this engine adds support for physical cloth along with physical wind that impacts physical cloth areas...

CrossOver Games 8.1 Released, Supports L4D2
CodeWeavers had released CrossOver Games 8.0 back in September, but now this morning they have put out CrossOver Games 8.1. The main addition in CrossOver Games 8.1 is support for Left 4 Dead 2, the much-anticipated Windows game created by Valve Corporation that was actually just released yesterday as the sequel to Left 4 Dead...

AMD Releases The Radeon HD 5970 2GB
Today AMD finally lifted the lid on Hemlock, their new ultra high-end dual-GPU graphics card that is being marketed as the Radeon HD 5970 (similar to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 but now for the Evergreen GPU family). The Radeon HD 5970 has 3200 stream processors (1600 per Cypress GPU), a combined 2GB of GDDR5 video memory, and AMD Eyefinity support for driving three displays simultaneously...

Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks
Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2. As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Samsung Sponsors The Development Of Enlightenment
Back in June Enlightenment E16 reached version 1.0.0 and then a few weeks later there was an E17 development snapshot released, but there hasn't been a whole lot of news out of the Enlightenment camp over the past year. In fact, most new Linux users have likely never even heard of the Enlightenment...

AMD Catalyst 9.11 For Linux Released
AMD has today pushed out their Catalyst 9.11 Linux driver. This release contains support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and initial support for OpenSuSE 11.2 along with a handful of minor bug-fixes...

Going Beyond Just Measuring Frame Rates
Yesterday marked the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 and it was the best version yet with the addition of many new exciting and useful features. While this release was gratifying, there are much greater plans for the Phoronix Test Suite going into the next decade. It has already been shared that Windows support is coming, but there are other huge features coming too as soon as Q1'2010. Up to this point, most of the tests and the design of pts-core (the Phoronix Test Suite engine) have been focused on quantitative benchmarks with many of the tests spitting out a frame-rate, time, or some other measurement. However, now being supported in the Phoronix Test Suite is the ability to produce abstract results, such as screenshots used for image quality comparisons. The Phoronix Test Suite can now track the image quality of various test profiles (such as OpenGL games) across hardware configurations, drivers, and more. All of this is still leveraged upon the existing Phoronix Test Suite framework and our design philosophies so that even image quality comparisons can be carried out autonomously, the ability to compare many results side-by-side, support for carrying out these tests remotely via Phoromatic, and the ability to share your abstract results with others via Phoronix Global. Now not only can you be sure you are satisfied with the quantitative frame-rate of the hardware you have -- or are about to purchase -- but you have a plethora of options for looking at the qualitative performance too.

Fedora 12 Released To The Wild
It's one of the last major distribution updates coming out this year, but Fedora 12 (codenamed "Constantine") is now available. Fedora 12 features performance improvements, Ogg Theora 1.1 support, graphics improvements (including ATI kernel mode-setting by default), many virtualization improvements, PulseAudio improvements, Multi-Pointer X with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7, and many other new features. The Fedora 12 release announcement can be read on the Fedora Wiki while the various spins of Fedora 12 can be downloaded at FedoraProject.org...

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta For Linux
Last night Adobe pushed out their first beta release for Adobe Flash Player 10.1. Alongside the Windows and Mac OS X beta releases was a 32-bit Linux build, but the 64-bit build isn't yet available so those users will need to be use the earlier 64-bit beta...

VMware Releases Its New Gallium3D Driver
Last Friday during the Gallium3D workshop we learned that the Tungsten Graphics developers that were bought out by VMware have been working on a virtual Gallium3D driver that would be used by guest operating systems running within VMware's virtualization platform. This is especially interesting considering that it will allow virtualized guests to have accelerated access to X11, OpenGL, OpenCL, X-Video, XvMC, and all sorts of other possibilities that's just limited by what's supported by the available state trackers. This afternoon Jakob Bornecrantz has pushed out this initial Gallium3D driver for use in VMware guests...

Mutter/Clutter Work Leads To New GLX Extension
Following a meeting last week between Jesse Barnes, Chris Wilson, and Kristian Høgsberg with developers working on the Clutter tool-kit and GNOME's Mutter window manager, there is a new GLX extension that has been proposed as a result. Jesse Barnes has announced their work on the GLX_INTEL_swap_event extension, which helps GLX integrate better with glib style event loops. GLX_INTEL_swap_event basically notifies the client when a buffer swap has been completed...

Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Released
Continuing in the tradition of providing feature-rich, quarterly updates to the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Media has announced the immediate availability of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 (codenamed "Bardu"). Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 continues to expand the capabilities and feature set for this open-source testing framework with the introduction of many new features, a new graphical user-interface, numerous new test profiles and suites, and a public beta of the Phoromatic remote test management system.

This Week: Fedora 13, Gallium3D, Reiser4
Some of the notable news items we covered this week at Phoronix included a new GRUB 2.0 release, Mesa / Gallium3D coming to Android netbooks, exclusive word from a former Namesys employee that Reiser4 may go after mainline Linux inclusion in 2010, GNOME 3.0 being officially delayed to September, and a virtual Gallium3D driver coming for VMware. Some of the other interesting events this week included Khronos launching OpenWF, Fedora 13 codenames, a new PulseAudio release, VirtualBox 3.1 bringing teleportation support and other improvements, a Unigine Heaven status update, Intel and AMD making up for their past legal battles, MPlayer now supporting most Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs, and Wine 1.1.33 gaining more Direct3D 10 functionality. Other Linux graphics topics talked about this week besides VMware's virtual Gallium3D driver that should be very interesting for virtualization is the state of Gallium3D and its future, a talk about the Wayland Display Server, NVIDIA updated two of its legacy drivers, an overhaul of Mesa's GLSL compiler, and the ATI R300 Gallium3D DRI support being done. Featured articles at Phoronix this week included a review of the OCZ Agility EX SSD that uses SLC memory and performs remarkably well, benchmarks of EXT3, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and ReiserFS using a 32GB USB flash drive, and a review of the SilverStone Raven RV02 chassis. When it comes to our popular benchmarking/testing software, the Phoronix Test Suite we shared this week that PTS Lenvik will run on Windows 7 and released PTS Bardu Beta 3 with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.0 "Bardu" officially arriving this week. Lastly, before calling it a week, we would like to remind everyone that our 2009 Linux Graphics Survey is currently taking place for the month of November...

Kristian Talks About The Wayland Display Server
A few weeks back there was the Linux Plumbers Conference and one of talks was hosted by Kristian Høgsberg where he talked about his Wayland project. We were the first to publicly talk about the Wayland Display Server when it was in its very infancy at being an alternative to the X Server...

A New Game Comes To Linux And It's Not A FPS
While quality native Linux games are rather in short supply, those that do end up coming out of the professional game studios end up being first-person shooters, just look at Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Cold War, Unreal Tournament 2004, etc. Even on the open-source side there are many first-person shooters from Nexuiz to Warsow to many others...

The State Of Gallium3D, Its Future, Etc
VMware hosted a Gallium3D workshop today at its headquarters in California (and via teleconference too) where the former Tungsten Graphics developers talked about all that they have been working on with Gallium3D, the current state of this graphics driver architecture, and what's to come. The biggest news coming out of this workshop is word that a virtual Gallium3D driver is coming, which will allow Gallium3D to run within a virtualized environment...