New ARM Boards, Kernel Improvements Won Over December

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 January 2015 at 09:07 AM EST. Add A Comment
PHORONIX
While in the past few days have been many year-end recaps, here's our monthly look at the most popular Phoronix content over the past month for those that may have missed a few days of reading due to the holidays.

There were no breaks on Phoronix in December (as with any other month) and that yielded 251 original news articles and 22 featured-length, multi-page articles/reviews. The daily Phoronix news continues to be supported by Phoronix Premium subscribers. Those that share our news on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is also most appreciated.

The most popular news items on Phoronix for December 2014 include:

Hardkernel Launches $35 Development Board That Can Smash The RPi
Hardkernel has announced the latest ODROID ARM development board. The ODROID-C1 is a $35 single-board computer that is similar in size to the Raspberry Pi but with much greater hardware specifications.

Features Of The Linux 3.19 Kernel: Graphics & Disks Rule
The merge window is closed and 3.19-rc1 was released on Saturday, marking the end of new mainline Linux kernel features for 2014. Here's a rundown of the exciting new features of the Linux 3.19 kernel for what will become the first major kernel release of 2015.

The Linux 3.18 Kernel Brings Many Great Changes
The Linux 3.18 kernel is expected to be released this weekend and with this major update to the kernel are -- as usual -- an exciting number of changes and new features.

Pay For Faster Linux Kernel Performance? There's Patches For That
The "eXt73" patch-set aspires to yield faster kernel performance and better power efficiency. Independent benchmarks published of the eXt73 patch-set indicate faster performance out of the patched Linux kernel, but these patches do come at a cost for end-users.

After 10+ Years, NetworkManager Reaches v1.0
After more than ten years of development, Dan Williams of Red Hat has announced the release of NetworkManager 1.0. The NetworkManager 1.0 release is more than just bumping the version after waiting long enough, but there's many improvements too over NetworkManager 0.9!

HP To Launch Linux++ Operating System Next Year
Hewlett Packard is going to introduce their "revolutionary" new operating system next summer that's dubbed Linux++.

X.Org Hit Hard By A Large Batch Of Security Vulnerabilities
Last year a batch of X.Org libraries were hit by security vulnerabilities and the researcher who discovered these issues called X.Org security a disaster and even "it's worse than it looks". Today, a big batch of these X.Org vulnerabilities were made public. Many of these issues date back 20 years or more.

Linux 3.18 Kernel Released, But It Doesn't Fix That Odd Regression
As anticipated, Linus Torvalds officially released the Linux 3.18 kernel this Sunday evening.

Live Patching Support Planned For Linux 3.20/4.0 Kernel
It looks like for the Linux 3.20 kernel is when the new kernel live patching technology will be integrated to mainline.

Orange Pi Is The Latest Raspberry Pi Inspired ARM Board
The latest low-cost, Linux-friendly ARM single board computer is the Orange Pi that's trying to ride off the success of the Raspberry Pi.

The ten most popular featured articles were:

6-Way Winter 2014 Linux Distribution Comparison
With this week's launch of Fedora 21, here's a performance comparison of the new Fedora Linux release compared to the Arch-based Antergos rolling-release distribution, Debian GNU/Linux Jessie, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Linux 7, and Ubuntu 14.10.

AMD's Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver: 2014 Was Incredible
With this week having delivered our 2014 Catalyst Linux Graphics Benchmarks Year-In-Review that looked at the evolution of the AMD Catalyst Linux driver performance over this year, now it's time to see how the open-source Radeon driver performance has evolved.

17-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison With Civilization Beyond Earth
On Thursday, Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth was finally released for Linux. With being able to properly automate the benchmarking of CivBE on Linux, here's our first performance results out for this high-profile, turn-based strategy game for Steam on Linux. Seventeen AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were benchmarked for this article and the results are quite interesting.

AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver Brings Mixed Results For Linux Users
There are some significant performance improvements to find with this week's Linux version of the AMD Catalyst 14.12 "Omega" driver, but there's also some Linux OpenGL performance regressions to note too. Feedback from the Linux community as well to this new driver has been mixed.

AMD Kaveri: Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver
Last week when running Linux benchmarks of the AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver that is much improved over older versions of Catalyst on both Windows and Linux, plus running a fresh 12-way AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU comparison with the newest drivers, there were many Phoronix reader requests for some new AMD APU Linux numbers from this Omega driver. In this article are the Omega benchmark results for an AMD A10-7850K APU when testing both the open and closed-source drivers.

Habey MITX-6771: Mini-ITX Board With Quad-Core J1900 Bay Trail
While Habey may not be a household name to most Linux desktop users, they are known in the embedded world and do produce Linux-friendly systems and motherboards. Habey recently engaged with Phoronix and today we are checking out our first Habey motherboard: the MITX-6771 that's a mini-ITX motherboard with Intel Bay Trail quad-core SoC.

2014 Year-End NVIDIA Linux Benchmark Comparison
Yesterday I finished up my testing and publishing of results concerning the 2014 AMD Catalyst Linux Graphics Benchmarks while today's Christmas Day results are of the similar tests on the NVIDIA side. Our 2014 Christmas benchmarking is running tests on all of the major NVIDIA Linux driver releases of the year.

Cockpit In Fedora 21 Makes Linux Administration Easy
One of Red Hat's newest software projects was the Cockpit Management Console that was announced near the beginning of the year. With the Fedora 21 Server release due out tomorrow, Cockpit is shipped by default and is a great new service for easy, web-based administration of servers.

12-Way AMD Catalyst 14.12 vs. NVIDIA 346 Series Linux GPU Comparison
With this week's release of the AMD Catalyst 14.12 driver that brings some Linux performance improvements (particularly for the Radeon R9 290 of the hardware we've tested thus far) and new features, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing twelve AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards when using the latest proprietary graphics drivers. On the AMD side was the Catalyst 14.12 Linux release while on the NVIDIA side was their new NVIDIA 346.22 Linux beta.

AMD A10-7800 Kaveri: Radeon Gallium3D Improves, But Still Tough Catalyst Fight
It's been a while since last running any open-source vs. closed-source Linux graphics driver benchmarks with AMD Kaveri APUs, but with being busy adding some Kaveri systems to the new Linux test farm, I ran some fresh Linux GPU driver tests on an AMD A10-7800 system. Here's results on Ubuntu 14.10 -- plus with Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel -- while compared to the latest Catalyst binary blob.

Be sure to let me know what you'd like to see more of this month on Phoronix and further into 2015.
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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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