FOSDEM 2013: Lots Of Wine, X.Org & Micro-Kernels

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 11 February 2013 at 02:58 PM EST. Add A Comment
FREE SOFTWARE
With the publishing this morning of the article about the state of the HelenOS micro-kernel, all of my notes from this year's Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) have been published along with information on the other interesting tracks that happened during this event that brings thousands of open-source developers from around the world to Brussels, Belgium for one weekend. Here's a recap of all that happened at FOSDEM 2013.

Last week's FOSDEM was my fifth year going out to the land of Trappist beer and chocolate for this event, which is among the best gatherings in the world for Linux and open-source developers. The technical summary for this year's meetings are listed below.

First of all, if you found any of these FOSDEM 2013 summaries useful as you were not able to attend the conference in person, please do seriously 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. All of the below articles were written by your's truly along with doing the ad-hoc video recordings for the X.Org/Wayland/Graphics talks and the select Wine talks. Unfortunately the advertising campaigns this month have been slow and disappointing, so even with all of the articles/coverage, it really isn't even enough to cover the expenses of the travel and event this year.

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X.Org / Graphics:

Intel's Linux DRM Driver Plans For 2013 - Here's what's coming to Intel's open-source Linux DRM kernel driver this calendar year.

Intel Has 20~30 Full-Time Linux Graphics Developers - We finally have a public head-count for how many people Intel is paying to work on their open-source graphics driver... Meanwhile AMD has less than five and NVIDIA officially employs no one for the open-source driver work.

Intel To Improve "Out Of The Box" Linux Gaming - With Intel's increasing Linux developer head count, they want to tackle improving the out-of-the-box Linux gaming experience.

The Linux Graphics Driver Stack Remains Insecure - There's security problems with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, but there's ongoing work to fix these security problems with DRI/DRM.

Performance Counters Stuck For Linux GPU Drivers - But at least Intel is hoping to be able to expose some of their performance counters in their open-source driver stack.

Solaris 12 Might Finally Bring Radeon KMS Driver - Solaris 11 introduced a modern Intel KMS driver while Solaris 12 might finally bring a Radeon KMS driver. However, it's not publicly known yet when Oracle Solaris 12 will be released - or if anyone still be using Solaris at that point, at least on the desktop... There's no NVIDIA/Nouveau KMS plans since NVIDIA continues to provide their high-quality binary blob for Solaris (and BSD) operating systems.

An LLVM-Based Intel GPU 3D Driver Won't Come Soon - Last year Intel OTC talked up switching to an LLVM-based shader compiler for their OpenGL driver, but now it turns out they're sort of backtracking... They wanted to move to LLVM rather than maintaining their own compiler, but it turns out integrating LLVM is a pain in the butt. An LLVM-based Intel GPU compiler might come some day.

Freedreno Gallium3D Driver Might Be Merged Soon & Freedreno Gallium3D Shows Much Promise - Rob Clark is doing really great work on reverse-engineering Qualcomm's Adreno hardware to write an open-source driver. He hopes to have his Gallium3D driver merged soon.

NVIDIA Continues Backing Open-Source Tegra Driver & Open-Source NVIDIA Tegra Becoming More Exciting - The open-source NVIDIA Tegra ARM SoC graphics driver is showing signs of progress.

The Passing Of An Open-Source GPU Driver Developer - While in Brussels I found out that Oliver McFadden sadly passed away.

Lima Graphics Driver Can Beat ARM's Binary Blob - But it isn't actually a working driver yet and they are still relying upon the binary shader compiler.

Development Pace Of X.Org Is On The Decline - Is Wayland the future?

Handling Overlays & Input With Wayland's Weston - Wayland continues picking up new features to eventually succeed the X.Org Server.

The Linux Kernel Console Is Being Killed Off - CONFIG_VT is finally being knocked off the table.

BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers - BSD operating systems can't compete with the graphics driver support found on Linux.

Atomic Page-Flipping & Mode-Setting Get Ready For Linux - Mode-setting and page-flipping improvements are coming to a future Linux kernel release.

Wine:

Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps - Through Wine you can now begin to run Microsoft Windows applications directly on Google's Android.

Wine-Mono Isn't Too Fit For .NET - For the foreseeable future you're probably best off installing Microsoft's .NET framework when using Wine rather than relying upon this Mono fork.

Support For Running Windows Apps On ARM With Wine - Wine is beginning to go for an ARM play too for running Windows apps on ARM hardware.

Gaming On Wine: The Good & Bad Graphics Drivers - NVIDIA is good with their binary blob while AMD is generally bad either way you go.

Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features - A major feature release of Wine will come this year.

Other:

Microsoft Looking At Office For Linux In 2014 - Woohoo!

GNOME Wants To Sandbox Applications Too - GNOME developers are now getting inspired by Apple iOS.

Vincent Untz Goes Over The Direction Of GNOME - It's mostly the users not understanding...

Razor-qt Desktop Looks Towards v1.0, Qt 5 & Wayland - This Qt desktop is very lightweight and a nice non-GTK alternative to Xfce.

Enlightenment E18 Might Be Released This Year - It took a decade to get to E17, but E18 should come before Christmas, thanks to moving to major releases on an annual basis.

Operating Systems:

FreeBSD Works On C11, C++11 Support - FreeBSD is taking on the latest ISO standards of C++ and C.

GNU/Hurd Plans For A Future With USB, SATA, 64-Bit - Don't expect the GNU operating system to go mainstream anytime soon.

BHyVe: A New Hypervisor Coming To FreeBSD 10.0 - Virtualization support is improving in FreeBSD land.

Debian Is Still Being Made To Build With LLVM/Clang - Debian should eventually become compiler agnostic.

HelenOS Micro-Kernel OS Still Marching On - HelenOS is an interesting little operating system written from scratch that follows a micro-kernel design.
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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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