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.

What we have for this article are the benchmarks of an assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs (and the integrated HD Graphics of the Core i7 Devil's Canyon processor used for testing all the hardware) with the latest open-source graphics drivers using Linux 3.16 and Mesa 10.3-devel. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was running on the system with using the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for the latest kernel and the Oibaf PPA for the updated graphics drivers.

While the Radeon R9 290 series is now mature in the marketplace, the open-source Linux driver support has lagged. The Hawaii support had been broken for months (no working 3D on the open-source driver, but will work under the Catalyst Linux driver) and the few open-source AMD developers weren't tasked with fixing it over not being sure why it wasn't working and having no immediate business cases for fixing the support. Fortunately, with a bug comment made tonight, it seems things might be in order.

TinyGreenPC launched a Raspberry Pi and Linux based digital signage player that runs on just 7 Watts, and offers optional WiFi and an OPS interface.

The Pi Media Player is one of the most power-efficient signage players on the market, according to TinyGreenPC, a subsidiary of UK-based embedded manufacturer and distributor AndersDX. It helps that the 7 Watt, Raspian Linux-enabled signage player runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Fresh off the release of ACPI 5.1 by the UEFI Forum, Linux developers are updating their support against this latest revision to the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. In particular, ACPI 5.1 is supposed to help out ARM.

While accessing the ACPI/UEFI specifications still require jumping through some hoops, the ACPI 5.1 update is reported to fix major gaps in supporting ACPI on ARM. Hanjun Guo has already laid out patches for providing Linux ARM64 support compliant with the ACPI 5.1 specification. ACPI 5.1 has "major changes" to the MADT, FADT, GTDT, and _DSD for bettering up this non-x86 platform support.

Beginning in 2011, Red Hat began providing assistance to the fledgling Fedora ARM distribution. I was Red Hat’s project manager for this initiative. Back then it was a humble secondary architecture under the stewardship of Seneca College. Seneca was working on an OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi, a promising educational tool. Red Hat partnered with Seneca, provided resources to advance development and helped build a community, the open source way. Though Linux had been used on ARM for many years, kernel ports tended to exist in different source trees. Likewise, many userspace packages had been written without multi-core, thread-safe ARM code, so there was a lot of work to be done.

As the first part of an upcoming series of tests benchmarking the latest open-source and closed-source Linux graphics drivers for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, here's some benchmark results for several recent Radeon GPUs when tested on the current Git version of the Linux 3.16 kernel and a recent Mesa 10.3-devel snapshot.

Those wishing to see the Raspberry Pi B+ performance benchmarks with a Debian Linux host, the results are available from 1407220-BY-1407183GL47. To see how the results compare against your own Linux systems, with the Phoronix Test Suite you simply need to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1407220-BY-1407183GL47 to conduct a quick, fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison.

Hi all,

I’m sorry for the late announcement. Here’s a tentative schedule for the 3.5 release.

July 21: Branch for 3.5 release.

- All features should be near completion. Changes to complete existing features will be accepted until the end of testing phase I. But they should *not* be major (i.e., large) changes. If they are, they may be rejected.

Earlier this month AMD published an open-source HSA Linux driver for exploiting the potential of their much-promoted Heterogeneous System Architecture. This driver, now known as the "AMDKFD" driver, is up to its second revision and continues being analyzed by developers on the mailing list.

The aforelinked article goes over all the basic AMD HSA Linux driver details while its the AMD-specific HSA driver that's being worked on the most and discussed. Version two of the "AMDKFD" driver came out on Thursday and lives under the DRM Radeon GPU driver as the "AMDKFD" to provide the "HSA kernel driver for AMD Radeon devices."

DIY and gadget fans alike love the Raspberry Pi. Now, they'll have more to love with the new Raspberry Pi B+.

For the same $35 price as the original Model B, the Model B+ still uses the ARM-based Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, 512MB of RAM, and 700MHz low-power ARM1176JZ-F applications processor.

Just a very short time after Nouveau added support for OpenGL 4 indirect drawing, AMD developers have now added support for the related OpenGL 4.x extensions to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The extensions newly supported by the RadeonSI Gallium3D code in mainline Git is OpenGL 4.0's GL_ARB_draw_indirect and OpenGL 4.3's GL_ARB_multi_draw_indirect. This work is just about the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and not R600g. These extensions are also enabled for the Gallium3D Softpipe and LLVMpipe fallback drivers too, besides the Nouveau NVC0 and Intel i965 support too.

The X.Org Server 1.16 release has almost 35,000 lines of new/changed code, per Keith's notes. X.Org Server 1.16 is one of the more exciting releases in recent times and represents about six months of development work. X.Org Server 1.17 is now on the table for late this year or early 2015. X.Org Server 1.16 is codenamed Marionberry Pie.

Luc Verhaegen is out with another insightful blog post about ARM's "Midgard" architecture, ARM MPD still being rather closed-up, cites a recent Q/A about ARM's Jem Davies commenting on Linux drivers, and how ARM vendors hide behind Linaro.

The board runs Linux, and supports the Arduino integrated development environment, which is widely used to make robots and electronics. Galileo can be attached to PCs running Windows or Mac OS for electronics creation.

In the mean time Eben Upton and the team at the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be focussing on the software side of the Raspberry Pi, as well as the forthcoming Raspberry Pi touchscreen display. “There’s plenty of life in Raspberry Pi 1 and there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit on the software side. We’re still finding system level components that we can optimise that deliver really meaningful amounts of performance uplift for the user,” Upton explained.

From new cloud platforms, to changes in virtualization and container technologies, to how data is stored and transmitted, every innovation in the data center has a Linux-based or open source component, says Imad Sousou vice president of the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Intel Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

“To a great degree... the speed with which solutions can be brought online is the result of Linux and open source in the data center,” said Sousou, who is also on the OpenStack Foundation board of directors. “The amount of collaboration around the future of the data center is very encouraging.”

It's been quite a while since the previous driver release by AMD for the Linux platform and it looks like the company still isn't ready to promote a stable version. This means that the Linux users will have to contend with yet another Beta. At least it comes with a few fixes.

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.

Today, the Raspberry Pi foundation have announced the release of an updated version of the Raspberry Pi model B, known as the B+ (the official announcement is here). There have been a couple of tweaks to the design over the past couple of years, but this is the first major revision. The big news is that it still has the same CPU, SoC and memory (which means that it should run exactly the same software as the previous version). However, there have been a number of important improvements across various parts of the board.

RedHat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-grade Linux distribution, which is frequently used in corporate data centers as an operating system for NAS storage devices. From the performance point of view, the new Linux kernel and the new default file system may have a significant impact on a NAS storage device and therefore it is very important to understand how the newly released RedHat Enterprise Linux version 7.0 compares to the last stable version 6.5.