Following in the success of the Phoronix Test Suite, last month we launched Phoromatic as a remote test management system targeted for enterprise users of the Phoronix Test Suite that allows the automatic scheduling of tests, remote installation of new tests, and the management of multiple test systems all through an intuitive, easy-to-use web interface. Whether you are looking to build a test farm or just benchmark systems around the world, Phoromatic can turn this otherwise taxing work into a really easy process with turn-key deployment capabilities. As an extension of Phoromatic, we then wrote Phoromatic Tracker that is designed to track any software component (either on a timed or per-commit basis) and automatically execute a set of tests each time around all in an autonomous matter and then pump the data back to the Phoromatic server and showcase it on the Phoromatic Tracker interface...

Now that David Airlie's vga_switcheroo has went upstream in the Linux 2.6.34 kernel that provides hybrid graphics support and delayed GPU switching, David went on to look for something new to work on in his downtime when not busy with tasks at Red Hat. This new work is on GPU offloading / multi-GPU rendering...

Following the release of Fedora 13 Alpha this week we delivered Intel graphics benchmarks looking at the performance of an Intel Atom Netbook using the very latest kernel, DRM, and Mesa packages that Fedora is known for carrying. There are regressions in the Intel stack worth noting, but in this article, we are continuing in our Fedora 13 benchmarking by looking at the general system performance of the Linux desktop.

While we are still waiting for the hardware drivers to mature for Gallium3D (particularly the Nouveau stack for all NVIDIA GPUs, the Intel 965 driver, the ATI R300g driver to mature, and then the R600g driver to come about), VMware has been working on their a software rasterizer as well through a Gallium3D state tracker. This new software rasterizer looks like it's finally coming about and is already delivering great performance compared to Mesa's existing software rasterizer that is rather crippled...

Back in 2007 we reported on Valve looking for a senior software engineer to port their Windows-base games to Linux, then in 2008 we said the Source Engine would be coming to Linux based upon our sources (something that we still believe in), later that year we also found a few Linux libraries with the Left 4 Dead game...

Late last year we reviewed the Jetway NC92 Atom IPC motherboard that was a nice Mini ITX board with an Intel Atom N230 processor. A few weeks after that, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Pineview processors were shown off. The Atom N400 and D510 Pineview CPUs are only a moderate upgrade from the very common Diamondville Atoms, but the newer Atoms are beginning to work their way into more nettops and netbooks. Jetway is one of the vendors that was quick to design a new IPC motherboard that bears the Intel Atom D510 dual-core processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics and the NM10 Express Chipset.

The Khronos Group has been updating the OpenGL 3.x spec about every six months and with OpenGL 3.2 having been released last August, we expected OpenGL 3.3 would be announced soon and figured it may come this week during the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. Well, it did. Not only did Khronos releases the OpenGL 3.3 specification, but they have also went ahead and already released OpenGL 4.0!..

Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it's the first OS deploying Nouveau's Gallium3D driver (there's benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There's a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack...

It's been just a month since releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 and that was followed by the release of our PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 operating system, but since then work has been flowing into the next release of the Phoronix Test Suite and related benchmarking technologies. The next release, Phoronix Test Suite 2.6, is codenamed Lyngen and will be officially available in May. Today the first alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 is available...

When it comes to Intel's X.Org driver for Linux, xf86-video-intel, the most recent release was version 2.10 and it arrived in early January complete with Pineview (their next-generation Intel Atom systems) support, X-Video improvements, and various other features. The xf86-video-intel 2.11 driver is now emerging as their next quarterly update that brings in the KMS page-flipping and DRI2 swap events support. However, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is set to be released in April, will not be shipping with either of these drivers. Instead Canonical has decided to stick with the xf86-video-intel 2.9 driver that was released last September...

Following a one week delay, the first alpha release for Fedora 13 is now available. The final release of Fedora 13 is not due out until May, but this is the only development release of Goddard before this Red Hat Linux operating system reaches its beta stage...

Through Phoromatic you can easily build a benchmarking test farm with minimal effort and combined with Phoromatic Tracker you can monitor the performance of a given software or hardware component over the course of time. We used our own tools to launch a Linux kernel tracker that monitors the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We are also announcing another new, important public tracker coming soon, but first off, we needed a few more low-powered Intel Atom systems. We ended up purchasing two MSI Wind Box NetTops (the 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US) that are both based around an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor within a very low-profile enclosure. The MSI 6667BB-003US utilizes Intel GMA 950 graphics while the 6667BB-004US boasts an ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor. Here is our Linux look at these two Intel nettop computers.

Most Linux distributions this year will be switching over to the community-created Nouveau graphics driver stack now that there's mainline DRM support in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel and later releases that provides kernel mode-setting support and more. However, for those that have not yet made move to the Nouveau driver (or are running a *BSD or OpenSolaris where there is not yet the ported DRM) and are sticking it out with NVIDIA's rudimentary, feature-limited open-source driver, there is a new update out today. NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has just declared the xf86-video-nv 2.1.17 driver release...

Valve, the makers of the popular Half-Life and Counter-Strike franchises (along with numerous other titles) and the company behind the Steam software delivery system, have announced today that they are now bringing their games (including Steam) over to Mac OS X. Not only are they bringing these games over, but they intend to provide first-rate support for Apple's operating system...

Following a two week merge window following the release of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for the next kernel, to be known as the Linux 2.6.34 kernel...

OpenShot and PiTiVi have been capturing a lot of interest lately among those Linux users wishing for a reliable non-linear video editing application that is open-source and comparable in terms of features to those multi-media applications on other platforms. Yesterday the OpenShot crew announced their release of OpenShot 1.1, which moves this free software project one step forward...

Back in December we shared that a dinosaur game is coming to Linux known as Primal Carnage and it's using the Unigine engine. The Unigine engine is the most advanced game engine that we have seen available for Linux that offers incredible OpenGL graphics now with their Unigine Sanctuary and Tropics tests and also coming soon with Heaven and its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. The Unigine engine developers are also Linux friendly...

Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments are often referenced as being lighter-eight Linux desktop environments than KDE and GNOME, but what are the measurable performance differences between them? Curious how much of a quantitative impact the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops have on netbook systems, we carried out a small set of tests to look at the differences in memory usage, battery power consumption, and thermal performance.

There's a few months left until it's summertime in the northern hemisphere, but Google is already preparing for their annual Summer of Code (SoC) project as are their projects involved. X.Org will once again be part of the Summer of Code program where Google pays various student developers to work on different free software projects. While nothing is yet officially determined for the X.Org SoC work, there are some ideas expressed by the X.Org developers for any interested students...