Showing headlines posted by Ridcully

Yesterday I posted benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver looking at the open-source driver performance for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards. The performance is comparatively very poor right now compared to earlier generations of AMD Radeon hardware that is better supported. But how does the open-source performance compare between the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and the NVIDIA GeForce 400/500/6000 "Fermi" and "Kepler" on Nouveau? Here's benchmarks.

The LXDE-based derivative of Ubuntu Linux has no plans to be using Mir, regardless of XMir or not.

The in-kernel DRM graphics driver changes lined up for the Linux 3.11 kernel are possibly the biggest set of Direct Rendering Manager changes ever, but it looks unlikely that the VIA KMS driver will be merged for this release.

For those curious about how the system performance is impacted by applying compiler optimizations to the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU, here's some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux...

Xfce 4.12 still hasn't been released yet and it's running months behind schedule. Xfce 4.12 will be a major update to the lightweight desktop that's becoming an increasingly used alternative to Unity and the GNOME Shell. Here's an update on some of the completed features.

A Qt Labs project in years prior was QtOpenCL, a Qt module to provide extension classes for QtCore and QtOpenGL to take advantage of OpenCL GPGPU posssibilities. QtOpenCL though hasn't been touched in a couple years and is still living in a Qt4 world. Fortunately, work on QtOpenCL may be restarted.

Launched in May was the Qt for Tizen project to bring the vibrant Qt5 tool-kit to the Tizen open-source Linux platform. After its first alpha release last month, the Qt for Tizen developers have made a heck of a lot of progress and already released Qt for Tizen Alpha 2. The Qt for Tizen Alpha 2 release was done today and is now based upon the Qt 5.2 Alpha and is recognized by the Qt community as an official community-based work-in-progress Qt port.

Out of band authentication — communicating with a customer outside of his mobile banking app to verify his identity or a specific transaction — is a generally respected means of deflecting mobile banking fraud. But RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Center on Monday found and reported on a Trojan called Bugat that has been updated to hijack out-of-band authentication codes sent to bank customers via SMS.

Android malware really is everywhere, but you can keep yourself safe by following some simple rules. It's weird. Linux, which is Android's foundation, has almost no malware to speak of. Trend Micro, however, predicts that there may be as many as a million Android malware threats by the end of the year. What's going on here?

The pull request for the Radeon DRM graphics driver changes for the Linux 3.11 kernel has been submitted. The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver changes in this next kernel development cycle include dynamic power management (including ASPM) and support for Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" graphics processors as the most prominent changes.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) announced a ruggedized Mini-ITX motherboard based on an AMD A6-5200 Kabini system-on-chip processor, which integrates four 2GHz Jaguar CPU cores plus a Radeon HD 8400 GPU. The KBN-I/5200 offers PCIe and mini-PCIe expansion, along with interfaces for dual SATA, HDMI, VGA, serial, gigabit Ethernet, six USB ports, and more.

Maker Machine is a mobile makerspace that brings 3D printers, DIY robotics, and interactive art to primary schools, libraries, museums and youth clubs. The project is currently fundraising for a tour of Australia to bring our workshop to schools around the country. Started by myself and Sam Nikolsky, two Melbourne Industrial Designers, Maker Machine transforms the traditional classroom into a high tech workshop.

Earlier this month we found out NVIDIA was bringing their driver to ARM -- following an announcement that NVIDIA would begin licensing Kepler graphics to SoC vendors -- and now they have done their first public release of the ARMv7 binary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

Since Valve's Linux gaming announcements last year, many game modders have been looking for Source SDK to be supported under Linux. Valve today released Source SDK 2013 and it now supports Linux as well as OS X.

Beyond the exciting Radeon DRM driver changes that includes the long-awaited dynamic power management support and also initial support for the HD 8000 "Sea Islands" hardware, there will also be a new DRM driver to premiere with the Linux 3.11 kernel.

Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 aren't doing well, but Microsoft can still make out with some help from Intel and Windows 8.1 If its great ARM experiment doesn't work out, supporting Microsoft's key applications on Android and iOS won't hurt. This is not your dad's Microsoft. In the last few months Microsoft has been refocusing on Web services and devices instead of its mobile operating systems, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 (WP8). Neither OS have been cutting the mustard in the market.

Originally Canonical was planning to ship their Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the desktop and in Ubuntu 13.10 still be using an X.Org Server outside of mobile devices. However, it's been announced today that with Ubuntu 13.10 they will now be using Mir by default...

Japanese firm Systena Corp. announced the first Tizen-based tablet, which also appears to be the first Tizen product of any kind. The unnamed Systena Tizen tablet offers high-end features including a 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip, 2GB of RAM, and a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display. The Systena tablet offers robust specs that come close to matching the most powerful Android tablets currently on the market.

More Mir news today besides the surprise announcement that Canonical is now planning to use the Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 13.10, there's some other interesting news involving Mir benchmarking, the Mir 0.0.5 release, and Kubuntu avoiding Mir/XMir and reaffirming their commitment to X.Org and Wayland.

Intel released version 1.2.0 of libva and libva-intel-driver over the night. The updated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) now has support for MPEG-2 encoding along with new H.264 profile encoding API support.