Pipelight, X.Org, exFAT & Wayland Topped This Month

This month on Phoronix there were 246 news stories and 20 featured articles written by your's truly. Of all that Linux and open-source content with an enthusiast hardware focus, Wayland, X.Org, exFAT, the Pipelight Netflix implementation, and the Linux 3.11 kernel were among the interesting events covered.

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Also highly appreciated are PayPal tips to help run this site along with associated costs like hardware purchases and other necessary expenditures for running the largest Linux hardware/enthusiast site on the web. The 246 news stories (an average of nearly eight items per day) and 20 featured articles/reviews (almost one per day) were all tirelessly written by me through much dedication and commitment for the Linux community. Thank you for at least considering a PayPal contribution or Phoronix Premium subscription. You can also like us on Facebook or follow @MichaelLarabel and @Phoronix on Twitter.

The most popular news items in August included:

X.Org Foundation Loses Its 501(c)(3) Status
The X.Org Foundation has lost its 501(c)(3) non-profit status and is now seeking new options, including possibly joining a larger organization.

The Most Exciting Linux 3.11 Kernel Features
With the Linux 3.11 kernel due to be released in the coming weeks, here's an overview of the most exciting changes for this next major Linux kernel update.

Valgrind Finds Thousands Of Potential Issues With Mesa
An open-source developer has spotted thousands of potential memory problems with Mesa when using Valgrind.

Samsung Properly Open-Sources exFAT File-System
Back in June, Phoronix was the first to report of a native exFAT file-system implementation for Linux that appeared on GitHub. It later turned out that Samsung accidentally leaked their exFAT source code. The solution has now been corrected with Samsung formally open-sourcing their exFAT source code.

Orbital: A New Shell For Wayland's Weston
Orbital is a plugin/client for Wayland's Weston compositor that provides a custom shell for the next-generation display server. Orbital is made using Qt 5 and Qt Quick 2.

Pipelight: A Way To Get Netflix On Linux
Pipelight is a new open-source project for getting Microsoft Silverlight applications to run within web-browsers on Linux, including the widely sought after Netflix Player on Linux.

ZFS File-System Tests On The Linux 3.10 Kernel
Using the latest ZFS On Linux support, the ZFS file-system was benchmarked from the Linux 3.10 stable kernel and compared to the Linux file-system competition.

Wine 1.7.0 Released, Starts Again With The Changes
With Wine 1.6 having been released two weeks ago with 10,000+ changes, we're now out of the code freeze and Wine 1.8 development has begun. Wine 1.7.0 was released today as the first version in this new development series.

Meanwhile, the most popular in-house featured articles were:

10-Way Linux File-System Comparison On Linux 3.10
On the latest Linux 3.10 stable kernel we have taken ten common Linux file-systems and generated an interesting performance comparisons. The Linux file-systems being tested in this article include XFS, Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, F2FS, and ZFS.

AMD Radeon GPUs Run Great With Linux 3.11 Kernel, Mesa 9.3-devel
While the Linux 3.11 kernel hasn't even been officially released yet, on Phoronix we have already published a number of Radeon DPM benchmarks, the new dynamic power management code coming to the open-source driver. Early Phoronix tests of Radeon DPM have yielded performance improvements and great improvements for power/thermal use. In this article are new Linux 3.11 + Mesa Git benchmarks from a variety of AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards.

System76 Gazelle Pro: An Intel Haswell Laptop With Ubuntu Linux
System76 recently sent over their Haswell-based Gazelle Professional laptop that sports HD Graphics 4600, a fancy Intel SSD, 8GB of system memory, and a beautiful HD display. This Haswell Linux laptop has already been used for testing within a few Phoronix articles while now is a full look at this Ubuntu laptop along with some comparison performance tests.

AMD Gallium3D & Catalyst Drivers Compete Against Windows
While this week we published benchmarks that showed how NVIDIA's Linux driver can compete with Windows 8 -- when using the closed-source drivers and not the open-source Nouveau solution -- and that even the FreeBSD NVIDIA performance is competitive, this isn't the case for AMD's drivers. From the same Core i7 Haswell system as used for the NVIDIA testing, AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested on Windows 8 and Linux. It wasn't a surprise that the open-source Radeon Gallium3D was much slower than Catalyst, but took us off guard a bit was that the Linux Catalyst driver does take some noticeable performance hits over the Microsoft Windows driver in some OpenGL workloads.

Intel Haswell Laptop Impact When Running XMir
Now that Mir is living in the Ubuntu 13.10 archive, new Phoronix benchmarks have been conducted to look at the current performance impact of routing the graphics through XMir rather than running an X.Org Server directly on Ubuntu Linux. For this latest XMir testing, the System76 Gazelle Professional laptop with an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" CPU sporting Intel HD Graphics was benchmarked for 2D and 3D environments.

AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Driver Becomes More Competitive
The "R600" Gallium3D driver that provides open-source 3D/OpenGL Linux graphics support for AMD GPUs up through the Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards is becoming increasingly competitive. The open-source AMD stack isn't yet ready to overtake the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver in terms of raw performance or OpenGL compliance, but a lot of ground has been made up in recent months.

AMD Gallium3D Performance Is Much Better Than Two Years Ago
With the imminent release of Mesa 9.2, out this morning are Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver benchmarks comparing Mesa Git master (9.3-devel) to Mesa 9.2 Git, Mesa 9.1.6, Mesa 9.0.3, Mesa 8.0.5, and Mesa 7.11.2. These are the past two years worth of Mesa releases and testing occurred on an ATI Radeon HD 4890 (RV790XT) graphics card.

System76 Gazelle Pro: Ubuntu 13.04 vs. 13.10
System76 recently sent out their Gazelle Professional laptop that's been updated with a mobile Intel Core i7 "Haswell" processor. We're still in the process of fully reviewing this Haswell laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu 13.04 and comparing it to the range of Intel notebook competition, but for this weekend article are some basic Ubuntu 13.04 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 performance benchmarks.