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System76, which specializes in Ubuntu Linux laptops, desktops, and servers, is introducing two new Ubuntu laptops for gamers and office and home workers: the Galago UltraPro and the Gazelle Professional. Games have always been available on Linux, but with Steam now supporting Linux, gaming has never been bigger on Linux. To power up those games, the UltraPro comes with a 4th Generation 2GHz Intel Core i7-4750HQ processor with 4 cores. For graphics, the powerful laptop comes with Intel Iris Pro graphics backed by 128MBs of eDRAM.

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so on. Thus, moving the hottest data structures from a locked to a lock-free design can improve software performance in multicore environments significantly.

A summary of this week's KDE Commit-Digest.

Installed as a layer above Hadoop, the open-source Pydoop package enables Python scripts to do big data work easily. In this article, I explore Pydoop, which provides a simple Python API for Hadoop.

Deciso announced a Linux-supported, AMD-based board, also available as a 19-inch rackmount networking appliance. The Netboard A10 and Netboard A10 Rack Appliance are built around a quad-core, 1.65GHz AMD Embedded GX-416RA G-Series SoC, and offer up to 8GB RAM, an open source Coreboot BIOS, four GigE ports, and I/O including USB, serial, SATA, and DisplayPort connections.

Up this morning are benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, the version of the Debian operating system that ships the GNU user-land but replaces the Linux kernel from that of FreeBSD 9.0. Last December I ran the benchmarks for the extensive Debian Linux vs. Debian kFreeBSD With Squeeze & Wheezy testing. The results today remain largely the same but another round of benchmarks was carried out on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop using the official Debian 7.0 release images that were released at the beginning of May.

This past week Canonical developers made a little more progress on their Mir Display Server stack and the next-generation Unity desktop interface. When it comes to Canonical's Wayland alternative for Ubuntu, last week they added LLTng trace-points to Mir, finished modifications to Mir to allow for performance analysis, and added/packaged a Mir stress testing tool. This week they will be aiming for continued Unity 8 integration, Android composition bypass support, and starting work on Mir-Mir support and supporting Mir-Mir in LightDM (running a shell on the system compositor).

To complement the Intel Haswell Linux OpenGL benchmarks that we have been publishing on Phoronix for the past week, up today are some Intel Linux 2D performance benchmarks of Haswell with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The 2D performance is comparing Intel's default UXA accelerated code-paths against the experimental SNA acceleration back-end.

The fifth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available. Unfortunately, the changes merged in the past week continue to be too great to be to Torvalds' liking. The Linux 3.10-rc5 changes are scattered throughout the various subsystems to address various outstanding problems, but Linus hopes the 3.10-rc6 and later RCs will only be about fixing serious regressions.

It's been over one year of waiting for Xonotic 1.0. The popular open-source game's 1.0 release still isn't here, but Xonotic 0.7 has been released this weekend. Xonotic 0.7 brings forward a lot of in-game updates, including a new QuakeC compiler. Xonotic 0.7 features "massive" updates to the game modes, animation blending improvements, more competitive features, mapping updates, better handling of in-game messages, and more.

For the past week on Phoronix since the public debut of Intel's Haswell processors there has been a lot of coverage. The CPU performance is generally great but the Haswell Linux graphics support is still a work-in-progress even though its performance has already evolved a lot. This Sunday there are some extra Core i7 4770K benchmarks.

For those that didn't realize, the LLVM/Clang 3.3 release is running a bit behind schedule, but the wait should be worth it with this hefty upgrade. For those unfamiliar with what's exciting about this major compiler infrastructure update, read the best features of LLVM / Clang 3.3 -- there's 64-bit ARM support, the AMD R600 GPU back-end, vectorizer work, CPU support improvements, and much more. There's plenty of other LLVM 3.3 coverage on Phoronix along with Clang 3.3, including compiler performance benchmarks.

The Linux 3.10 kernel is slowly getting ready for release in the coming weeks. If you haven't been closely following Phoronix in the past few months of Linux 3.10 feature development, this article contains a brief overview of some of the best and most interesting features to be found in the next version of the Linux kernel.

It looks like with the Linux 3.11 kernel there is finally the potential for the VIA DRM graphics driver that's long been in development to enter the mainline kernel source tree. The driver is totally complete but we wanted to merge it so people with newer hardware that has HDMI/DVI-D support can be able to run X windows. Your xorg driver does not implement HDMI/DVI in UMS mode and we don't have the resources to do this work. Basic TTM/GEM is supported but currently you can't run any acceleration with the command queue. Over the next 6 months this should be implemented.

The visually-amazing Unigine Engine now supports asynchronous Terrain data streaming and other new functionality. Beyond supporting terrain data streaming in a fully asynchronous manner now, other terrain improvements were made. Additionally, there's now a landscape plug-in for creating huge seamless scenes with a virtually unlimited number of terrain objects, each up to 16385 x 16385 in size.

Void Linux is a rolling-release Linux distribution that focuses upon speed, reliability, and flexibility. Void Linux is built from scratch, deploys its own XBPS package manager, and builds upon existing packages like systemd and DKMS. Void Linux with its package manager, XBPS, currently has over 3,000 packages for x86, x86_64, and ARMv6 hard-float architectures. With this from-scratch distribution, systemd is used as the system/session manager, a simplified DKMS is used for third-party kernel modules, RAMdisk images are made by Dracut, and there's realtime VM-based package building for this rolling release distribution.

As the first point release since the exciting release of Wayland/Weston 1.1, important bug-fixes have landed for the display protocol's reference compositor. There weren't any worthwhile Wayland changes to warrant a 1.1.1 release, but Weston 1.1.1 was tagged last night by Kristian Høgsberg. Some of the prominent bug-fixes for Weston 1.1.1 are for monitor hot-plugging, evdev crashes, missing DPMS issue, and other changes.

Although it's difficult for me to look at this piece's title and not think of mutant felines, it doesn't make the statement any less true. If you've ever used the tail command on log files, you'll instantly appreciate multitail. My friend (and LJ reader) Nick Danger introduced me to multitail, and I can't believe how useful it is. multitail will "tail" multiple files, split the screen to display them, notify of log file changes and so on. One of my favorite features is rather than show 100 lines of repeated log, it shows the line only once, and it says, "line repeats 100 times"—simple, but awesome.

The first release candidate for Wine 1.6 was announced today, which marks the beginning of the code freeze for the next release. Squeezing in before the code freeze is GLSL support for fixed-function vertex shaders and other changes. The prominent Wine 1.6-rc1 changes also include: New implementation of the typelib creation support; Support for desktop launchers in virtual desktop mode; Fixes for Japanese vertical text; New Croatian translation; and Various bug fixes.

After delivering the Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux this week already, which focused mostly on the processor performance, in this article are the first benchmarks of the Haswell OpenGL Linux performance. Testing was of the Intel HD Graphics 4600 graphics core found on the i7-4770K, which under Linux is supported by Intel's open-source driver.