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While we are still waiting on open-source support for the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards that were released last month, today AMD is releasing their initial open-source support for their Ontario hardware. AMD's Ontario is their low-powered Fusion processor designed for use in netbooks and other such devices. This dual-core chip with integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics is only starting to ship now, but the open-source support for this first AMD Fusion chip is now available to Linux users, complete with 3D support.

LLVM 2.8 was released last month with the Clang compiler having feature-complete C++ support, enhancements to the DragonEgg GCC plug-in, a near feature-complete alternative to libstdc++, a drop-in system assembler, ARM code-generation improvements, and many other changes. With there being great interest in the Low-Level Virtual Machine, we have conducted a large LLVM-focused compiler comparison at Phoronix of GCC with versions 4.2.1 through 4.6-20101030, GCC 4.5.1 using the DragonEgg 2.8 plug-in, LLVM-GCC with LLVM 2.8 and GCC 4.2, and lastly with Clang on LLVM 2.8.

While we have conducted studies related to the Linux kernel performance in the past such as benchmarking up to twelve kernel releases, going out the door this morning are the results from the largest-ever Linux kernel comparison conducted at Phoronix, and very likely the largest ever of its kind regardless of source. Every major Linux kernel release from Linux 2.6.12, which was released in mid-2005, up through the latest Linux 2.6.37 development code was tested. This represents the past five years of the Linux kernel and shows how the performance has evolved over the past 25 stable kernel releases and the most recent 2.6.37 development kernel.

It's a pity Luca Barbieri or any Mesa / Gallium3D developers are not at Oktoberfest as they are deserving of more than a few Maß of Augustiner. In fact, today a new Gallium3D state tracker was pushed into Mesa and it's perhaps the most interesting state tracker for this open-source graphics driver architecture yet. It's a state tracker that exposes Microsoft's DirectX 10/11 API on Linux! And it's already working and can be hooked into Wine!

AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.

Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an "I am alive" ping to Canonical on a daily basis.

As was mentioned in last Friday's article, Which Is Faster: Debian Linux or FreeBSD, tests of FreeBSD atop the ZFS file-system (rather than UFS2+S) are currently underway and those results are expected to be published in full later this week as the ZFS disk performance is compared directly to UFS2+S, UFS2+J, and also Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems. Today though we have a few ZFS performance numbers to share as we look at the performance of the new CAM-ATA sub-system on FreeBSD.

Two months ago we published our initial benchmarks of LLVMpipe, the Gallium3D driver that accelerated commands on the CPU rather than any GPU and unlike other Linux software rasterizers is much faster due to leveraging LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) on the back-end. Since then we have published new ATI Gallium3D driver benchmarks and yesterday put out Nouveau Gallium3D driver benchmarks, so today we are providing updated LLVMpipe driver results to show how well Gallium3D's LLVMpipe driver can accelerate your OpenGL games with a modern processor.

In recent weeks we have published a number of benchmarks showcasing the ATI Gallium3D driver that supports the R300-R500 graphics processors as this open-source driver has been maturing at such an exciting rate with impressive changes and measurable performance gains over a short period of time. This ATI Gallium3D driver in most instances is outperforming the classic Radeon Mesa driver that supports up through the ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards. However, how is the Nouveau driver maturing that supports NVIDIA's wide-range of GeForce graphics cards? In February we published some Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks, but now we have a fresh set of numbers from three different NVIDIA graphics cards and we also compare the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.

Yesterday we reported that Ubuntu 10.10 gained Btrfs installation support and since then we have been trying out this Btrfs support in Ubuntu "Maverick Meerkat" and have a fresh set of Btrfs benchmarks to serve up.

Born out of the demise of Loki Software in 2001 was Linux Game Publishing, but now a decade later the fate of LGP is not looking good for the company that has ported about two dozen game titles to Linux.

It has been two years since the ATI Radeon HD 4800 (RV770) series launched so we have gone back since that monumental hardware launch and have re-tested each Catalyst driver release since then to see how the performance has changed for the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. The Catalyst driver has certainly matured over the course of two years in speeding up the OpenGL performance with this hardware along with bringing new features to their proprietary driver, but it is not exactly smooth sailing.

Last month we looked at the cost of running Compiz by means of looking at how the window manager affected the frame-rate of several different games and whether compositing was used. We also tested out several different drivers and pieces of hardware. When Compiz was running rather than GNOME's Metacity it often caused a measurable drop in the OpenGL performance and then we later found this to be the case too with KDE's KWin. Today we are seeing if and how using Mutter, the window manager for the GNOME 3.0 desktop that uses Clutter-based compositing, will affect the performance of several different open-source games.

Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles.

While Linux has long been talked about as being a faster operating system than Microsoft Windows, in 2010 is this still the case? It seems every time we deliver new benchmarks of the EXT4 file-system it's actually getting slower, recent Linux kernel releases have not been delivering any major performance enhancements for desktop users, the open-source Linux graphics drivers are still no match to the proprietary drivers, and "bloated and huge" is how Linus Torvalds described the Linux kernel last year. This is all while Windows 7 was released last year, which many view as Microsoft's best operating system release to date. Even after using it a fair amount the past few months in preparation for this about-to-be-shared work, it is actually not too bad and is a huge improvement over Windows Vista, but is it really faster than Ubuntu Linux? We have used six uniquely different systems and ran Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x86_64 on each of them with a set of 55 tests (actually, more than 165 if considering that each test is usually run at least three times for accuracy) per installation.

We have our hands on the bash launcher used by Valve's Steam client for Mac OS X that was recently announced -- along with the Source Engine for OS X -- and is currently in closed beta. While such scripts are usually insignificant, there is something interesting within it and that is explicit support for Linux.

With the recent release of GCC 4.5 and the forthcoming release of LLVM 2.7 that is expected in the coming days, we have decided to see how the performance of GCC compares to that of LLVM. For this testing we have results from GCC 4.3/4.4/4.5 compared to LLVM with its GCC front-end (LLVM-GCC) and against Clang, which is the native C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine.

Last week we shared that we were benchmarking Ubuntu's current and past LTS releases and began by running graphics benchmarks looking at how the proprietary drivers from the past compare to open-source drivers from the present, but now we have our assortment of system benchmarks to publish from the Long-Term Support releases of Ubuntu 6.06.1, Ubuntu 8.04.4, and an Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot. In this article, we are looking at how Ubuntu's performance has evolved over the past four years.

Last week AMD launched the FirePro V8800, which is their first workstation graphics card derived from an ATI Evergreen graphics processor and designed to be a step-up from the previously reviewed FirePro V8700 and FirePro V8750. The AMD FirePro V8800 features 2GB of GDDR5 video memory with 147.2 GB/s of bandwidth, 1600 Stream processors, four DisplayPort outputs, ATI Eyefinity support, DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.0 support, OpenCL 1.0 capable, a full 30-bit display pipeline, Multi-View display support, and much. We have now carried out our Linux testing of this new ultra high-end workstation graphics card and have the results to share this morning.