These regressions are a bit frightening but we are still in the process of conducting further tests -- both bare metal and in the public clouds -- to try to figure out more closely what's going on. However, for most users I wouldn't hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS since it will ultimately be needed for the longest support within enterprise environments, for desktop users there are plenty of new features, the hardware enablement is much better on 14.04 LTS, the open-source graphics stack is much better, and there's many other non-performance advantages in using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

A lot of work is ongoing in Collabora to make Wayland usable on Raspberry Pi. The main bottleneck to the task is the lack of a functional Wayland shell for the Pi. Or at least it was till now. Marco Barisione announced Maynard, Raspberry Pi’s own Wayland shell, in his blog.

The foundation of the new shell is Tiago Vignatti‘s gtk-shell which is extended to implement Maynard. It’s still a work in progress but the initial looks are stunning. The current course is a tiled approach as you can see from the image below.

For our latest AM1 platform testing with the Athlon 5350 Kabini APU is comparing its Radeon R3 Graphics against an assortment of discrete NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while running Ubuntu 14.04 Linux. For this comparison there's thirteen graphics processors being compared with the latest Linux GPU drivers.

• Opteron X Berlin runs Fedora Linux

  Berlin is the first 28nm-based CPU and APU product from AMD for the Opteron server market and this APU is supposed to replace Opteron 3300 series based on 4 to 8 Piledriver cores. Berlin has four Steamroller cores, but its APU supports HSA and it theoretically should be able to run some parallel computing applications much faster.

• AMD Shows Off x86 APU Server Running Fedora Linux

To complement the just-published Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, 13.10, and 14.04 LTS desktop benchmarks are results when running a variety of workstation and server oriented benchmarks.

From an Intel Core i7 4960X Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system were these open-source server/workstation benchmarks being tested on clean installs of 12.04.4 LTS, 13.10, and 14.04 LTS. The stock settings and options were used.

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With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS being released today, here's some fresh benchmarks comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit performance against Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS. In this article are desktop and gaming benchmarks comparing these versions of Ubuntu Linux.

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Following this week's 3.15-rc1 release, I ran some early tests of the Linux 3.15 kernel compared to the earlier kernel releases. In particular, the early Linux 3.15 Intel results were compared against the stable Linux 3.14 and 3.13 kernels. Testing was done from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system with HD Graphics 4600.

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NVidia GSync is proprietary technology found on supported NVidia cards that reduces tearing, stuttering, input lag, and other similar gaming problems by not having the monitor’s refresh rate be fixed but rather it’s a dynamic refresh rate that will scan out whenever the GPU is finished rendering. Till now, this feature was only limited to Windows 7, 8 & 8.1. But maybe due to the flurry by the developers to bring games to Linux and game engines being released on Linux, it could be anyone’s guess that NVidia thought it to be a good time to give Linux users the full feature package too. Add to that Valve pushing Steam machines and Steam OS and NVidia has all the more reason to give their much needed attention in bringing more features to Linux.

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BeagleBoard.org announced a slightly pricier Rev C version of the BeagleBone Black that doubles eMMC flash and switches from Angstrom to Debian Linux.

To celebrate the first birthday of the BeagleBone Black, BeagleBoard.org is shipping a new version of the open source hacker SBC called the Rev C. An update on the BeagleBone Black Wiki says the board will be slightly more expensive than the $45 Rev B, which will be phased out when the C version starts shipping May 5. The additional $10 to $15 pays for the only apparent hardware upgrade: a doubling of onboard eMMC flash to 4GB. The device will also ship with the more user-friendly Debian Linux instead of Angstrom.

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In the past months we presented the Arduino Yun and Arduino Galileo boards. Today we present you a new board, quite more powerful, but still Arduino compatible and powered with GNU/Linux. It’s an all Italian board called UDOO.
Indeed, now almost every month we see the birth of a new platform that integrates processors capable of hosting GNU/Linux with the Arduino architecture, in emulated form, or with a dedicated microcontroller. Now is the time to UDOO but we already see looming on the horizon the availability of Arduino Three, and who knows what other boards in the meantime.
UDOO project comes from the idea of the founders to provide a tool for digital learning: high computing power combined with the world of microcontrollers with maximum ease of use, will form a new generation of designers, makers and developers with the knowledge necessary to develop projects in the fields of digital / physical computing.

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Collabora has been doing a lot of contract work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation over the past year, including porting Wayland to work well on this low-end, low-cost ARM single-board computer. Developers and users have been after a lightweight desktop to use on the Wayland-powered Raspberry Pi but there hasn't been any yet with GNOME Shell and other Wayland-compatible desktops being too heavy (I guess they don't yet count Enlightenment's Wayland compositor or wasn't ready for their time-frame).

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It’s been hard to get the BeagleBone Black(BBB); limited production capabilities have fought with some big adoption stories. If you are unfamiliar with the BBB, its a small board computer in the same size factor as the Raspberry Pi, but with eMMC storage, micro-SD slot and lots of I/O pins – what it lacks in media player cores, it makes up for in clock speed.
Thats “hard to get” nature is about to change though according to a blog post. Production is being ramped up at CircuitCo where they are also upping the storage from 2GB to 4GB which will give more breathing space to the new Debian distribution being shipped on the eMMC of BeagleBones, replacing the previous default Angstrom Linux. The upgraded boards will be referred to as Rev C BBBs. The price will likely be going up to cover the extra memory and production ramp-up but with a back-orders for 150,000 units, CircuitCo are going to be busy.

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While the Radeon R9 290 has been out more than a half-year, the open-source support is still poor. In fact, when running the latest open-source code there still isn't hardware acceleration by default, and with distributions like Ubuntu 14.04 LTS there's only mode-setting support without any 2D/3D hardware acceleration. In my most recent R9 290 open-source testing, I installed Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64, then installed the Linux 3.14 kernel (and later, Linux 3.15 Git), followed by using the Oibaf PPA for Mesa 10.2-devel and xf86-video-ati Git.

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While a lot of exciting changes have been introduced, for the test system I used for this initial benchmarking (an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" with AMD Radeon graphics), the results weren't too interesting thus resulting just in this brief one-page article. In this initial benchmarking on the same hardware I compared the Linux performance of the 3.12, 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15-rc1 kernels for representing the latest-generation Intel CPU paired with a Radeon R9 270X graphics card on its open-source driver.

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Gumstix announced an “AeroCore” MAV (micro air vehicle) controller board that runs NuttX on a Cortex-M4 MCU, plus Linux on a Cortex-A9-based DuoVero COM.

The AeroCore MAV control board is principally run by a separately available Yocto Linux-based DuoVero Zephyr or DuoVero Crystal computer-on-module (COM) that plugs into the board. The AeroCore itself includes an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit (MCU), which is said to be directly interfaced with the DuoVero. The device is intended for developers of micro air vehicles such as tiny helicopters or quadrocopter drones.

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Our source added that the completion of Valve’s Steam Controller was the final piece that would precede the availability of most Steam Machines, which indicates that Steam Machines will also begin to release at the end of the year. The source also told PC Gamer that they expect “about 500” games to be natively playable on SteamOS by the end of this year, up from the current count of 382.

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For those wishing to test out the new Radeon code, Lauri's repositories for this work are this kernel repository and this Mesa repository. He said in an email this morning to me, "The code won't be changing beyond cleanups, there might be small edits to the thesis draft. As the main target was VRAM pressure, it will be pointless to test ioq3 games on 2 GB VRAM, for example - they will show no difference, as they fit completely into VRAM. You can use the radeon.vramlimit=256 kernel parameter to limit VRAM for testing different amounts. The kernel is fully backwards compatible with old mesa, so you should be able to compare just by changing mesa and the vram limit. I should note that there's a big ioq3 regression currently in mesa git[3], so if your comparison mesa is too far back, it could seem like it was caused by my work, when it's in reality in master too."

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For any early GTX 750 owners, before getting too excited, the support is very preliminary. For the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti graphics cards I tested them today on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 doing a clean install and then using the latest daily Linux 3.15 kernel package from the Ubuntu mainline kernel archive. With both graphics cards, the system booted up fine on Linux 3.15 with the Nouveau DRM driver taking care of the kernel mode-setting for this hardware. In fact, it mode-set correctly for dual-link DVI on a 30-inch Samsung 2560 x 1600 display for these two mid-range graphics cards.

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For those curious about the impact of modern compiler tuning CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when using the GCC 4.9 compiler with an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" processor, here are many benchmarks of many C/C++ code-bases when testing a variety of compiler optimization levels and other flags.

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There's stable release updates out this Sunday evening for the X.Org Server.

Matt Dew has announced the releases of xorg-server 1.14.6 and 1.15.1.

The X.Org Server 1.14.6 release has 15 fixes/changes over the 1.14.5 point release.

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