Windows, Wine, Intel, Compilers Top February

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 28 February 2013 at 09:09 PM EST. Add A Comment
PHORONIX
With February coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular content this month on Phoronix.

First of all, this month on Phoronix.com there were 254 news articles and 23 featured-length articles, which equates to over nine Linux/open-source/hardware news stories per day and nearly one original featured length article per day whether it be Linux benchmarks, a hardware review, or other original content in a multi-page manner. Over 99% of the content on Phoronix.com continues to be written by your's truly. You'll be hard-pressed to find this much original Linux content on any web-site, let alone written by one person. This puts the total at more than 8,000 news articles and over 2,200 original Linux hardware reviews/Linux driver investigations/etc since founding the site nearly nine years ago.

With that said, it's time for the usual public service announcement, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for viewing multi-page articles on a single page and without any advertisements, disabling AdBlock, and/or making a PayPal tip/donation. Phoronix.com is funded solely through these means, namely web advertisements, so please be considerate of them. Also follow Phoronix on Facebook and on Twitter with @Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel.

Of the 254 news articles this month, the most popular ones were:

Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps
A port of the Wine software to Google's Android platform is being worked on.

Microsoft Looking At Office For Linux In 2014
It seems thanks to the increasing market-share of Android devices and the rise of Linux on the desktop thanks to the many commercial Linux gaming initiatives that have been shared in recent months, Microsoft is being forced to take a serious look at Linux and a meaningful look at releasing their popular Office software for Linux in 2014.

The Linux Kernel Console Is Being Killed Off
David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

Intel Has 20~30 Full-Time Linux Graphics Developers
It was revealed today at the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) that Intel through their Open-Source Technology Center is currently over two dozen full-time graphics driver developers. They're also looking to hiring more developers.

LibreOffice 4.0 Released With Immense Changes
The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0 this morning.

Ubuntu Allegedly To Have Its Own X, Wayland Alternative
There's been talk already this morning in the forums, Twitter, and via email to Phoronix that Canonical is allegedly developing its own display server rather than using X.Org/X11 or Wayland.

Features Coming In For The Linux 3.9 Kernel
While the Linux 3.8 kernel hasn't even been released yet, several of the noteworthy features slated to be merged for the Linux 3.9 kernel are already known.

Google Engineer Reworks Direct I/O In Linux Kernel
A Google engineer working on Linux, Kent Overstreet, has reworked the Linux DIO (Direct I/O) code so that it's "vastly simpler" while also being faster for at least some test cases.

Meanwhile, the most popular original Phoronix articles for February were:

Benchmarking Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS To Ubuntu 13.04
For seeing how far the Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved over the past five years, in this article are benchmarks looking at the performance of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS through a recent Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot from an aging AMD quad-core system.

NVIDIA/AMD OpenGL Benchmarks Of Unigine Valley
Continuing in the exclusive coverage of the yet-to-be-released Unigine Valley, here are some initial performance results for this visually-amazing multi-platform tech demo / benchmarks when using the OpenGL 3.2 Core renderer on Ubuntu Linux. A range of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were used for this initial testing of Unigine Valley. There's also benchmarks in this article of Unigine Heaven 4.0, which was just released yesterday.

F2FS File-System Shows Hope, Runs Against Btrfs & EXT4
Being released soon is the Linux 3.8 kernel and one of its many new features is the introduction of the F2FS file-system. The "Flash-Friendly File-System" was developed by Samsung and is showing promise as a new Linux file-system designed around the characteristics of flash-based storage devices. In this article are the first benchmarks of F2FS compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases
In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

Benchmarking The New Optimization Level In GCC 4.8
GCC 4.8 is set to introduce a new optimization level that provides fast compilation performance and decent run-time performance of the resulting binary while still providing a superior debugging experience. Here are benchmarks of this new GCC general optimization level (-Og) compared to the other long-standing compiler optimization levels.

Radeon DRM GPU Driver Performance: Linux 3.4 To 3.8
Last week benchmarks were delivered on Phoronix that showed the Intel DRM GPU driver performance between the Linux 3.2 and 3.8 kernels. In this article are similar benchmarks of the Radeon DRM driver in recent kernel releases using AMD graphics hardware but going back only to the Linux 3.4 kernel due to show-stopping issues.

EXT4 Still Leads Over Btrfs File-System On Linux 3.8
With the final release of the Linux 3.8 kernel coming in the very near future, here are file-system benchmarks of EXT4 and Btrfs on the Linux 3.8 development code compared to recent Linux kernel releases.

FreeBSD 9.1: LLVM/Clang Battling GCC
With LLVM/Clang having become the default FreeBSD x86 compiler as of last year and the recent FreeBSD 9.1 release shipping not only LLVM/Clang but also the libc++ library, new benchmarks were carried out of FreeBSD 9.1 looking at its two stock compilers.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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