Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

The United States energy grid is composed of many moving and non-moving cyber security assets that all have to, to some degree, speak the same language. The language of machine-to-machine communications has become big business lately, however devices that control how the power gets from the plant to your light switch have been talking their talk for many years.

It might seem strange coming from the founder of OpenLogic, a company focused on helping others succeed with open source, but the fact is that closed source is better than open source in certain situations.

A few days back I delivered benchmark results of a 13-way graphics card comparison comparing the OpenGL gaming performance between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8.1. In that article there were multiple AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards tested using the binary drivers for each operating system. On Wednesday I then shared results with the Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to Catalyst on Linux and Windows while today are some of the early Nouveau results compared to the proprietary NVIDIA GPU drivers on Windows and Linux.

The latest company now offering low-cost ARM development boards for pushing their platform to ARM Linux and Android developers is VIA Technologies. VIA claims their new Springboard platform is "the fast path from prototype to production" and only costs $100 USD, but the specifications aren't all that impressive.

Toradex has launched a pair of Linux-ready SODIMM style computer-on-modules that incorporate the Freescale Vybrid SoC and start at as little as $26 in volume. The Colibri VF61 COM incorporates the Vybrid VF6xx SoC, which combines a 500MHz Cortex-A5 processor running Linux with a 167MHz Cortex-M4 microcontroller, while the low-cost Colibri VF50 COM uses the VF5x SoC model which omits the Cortex-M4 and runs at 400MHz.

Echelon Corp. announced an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) framework for peer-to-peer networking of embedded controllers. The IzoT multi-protocol stack is now available in an ARM-ready beta version and reference implementation optimized for the Linux-based Raspberry Pi SBC, and will soon be included in Marvell’s Easy Connect SDK for Marvell’s 88MC200 WiFi SoC.

Learn how to migrate your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x or 6.x instances safely from IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to IBM SoftLayer.

What are the ways we can give to an open source community without contributing code? A recent comment to an Opensource.com article a career in open source went something like that they wanted to contribute to open source but lacked coding skills. In fact, code contributions are very helpful and welcome for most open source projects, but there are a lot of other ways to contribute.

Opensource.com has a community moderator program, and I am proud to be a part of it. Recently we all met in person with the Opensource.com team in downtown Raleigh, NC at Red Hat Tower. One of our discussions centered around open source software for education, and Ruth Suehle, who leads Fedora's marketing team as well as writes for and advises Opensource.com, pointed out the wonders of Reveal.js, a new tool for preparing slide presentations. "It's what the cool kids are using," she said. And, boy was she right! A quick visit to the example presentations page is enough to persuade any skeptic.

Earlier this week I published an extensive set of results from thirteen discrete AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards benchmarking various OpenGL games and comparing the Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 performance when using the official AMD and NVIDIA drivers for each operating system. Those results were very interesting for both the AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, but now it's time to see how the Intel graphics are performing under Ubuntu and Windows 8.1 Pro x64. Making things even more interesting here is that Intel has only an open-source Linux driver and no closed-source solution.

ARM announced an embedded version of its ARMv8 architecture that will add virtualization and lightweight Linux support to the next of generation Cortex-R processors. The ARMv8-R architecture is 32-bit, but borrows features from the 64-bit ARMv8-A such as hardware-based virtualization and a more advanced MPU, enabling safety-critical embedded applications like automotive computers to run RTOSes, bare metal code, and Linux and Android on a single processor.

Mentor Graphics announced a small-footprint hypervisor designed for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and automotive telematics systems that use its Linux-, Android-, Nucleus-, and AUTOSAR-based automotive middleware. Mentor Embedded Hypervisor supports single- or multi-core AMP and SMP architectures, as well as ARM TrustZone security technology, and can partition devices and memory to prevent unauthorized access.

The Cinnamon Desktop project recently released version 2, a major overhaul of the desktop environment that's best known as the default option for Linux Mint's flagship release. Cinnamon 2.0 will be part of Linux Mint 16, "Petra", scheduled for release towards the end of November. The team behind Cinnamon plans to backport the 2.0 release for the Debian edition of Mint, as well as most recent LTS release: Linux Mint 13.

I recently announced a call to action for GNOME 3.10 Test Day for Fedora 20 on Facebook and I got a response that caused me to think about how everyone from the general public to developers submit and fix bugs for an open source project. This was the interaction..

Linux 3.0 was first released in July of 2011 and become the first 3 release after Linus Torvalds decided that Linux 2.6.40 was too big a number. The Long Term Linux kernel title, means that the 3.0.x cycle has a longer life than typical kernels. Long Term Linux kernel can live two years or more and currently the leading edge of long term kernels is the 3.10 kernel.

Last month NVIDIA announced they would begin providing open-source GPU documentation and ultimately supporting the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver project for their Linux desktop customers. NVIDIA released some basic documentation in that initial push and now they have followed up with a tiny bit more documentation.

Taiwan-based Gigastone announced the first U.S. release of the SmartBox, a $40 Linux-based mobile accessory that combines an SD card reader, a WiFi content streamer and personal wireless network, and a 2500mAh-strong battery charger. The SmartBox lacks its own internal storage or Internet access, but can wirelessly stream SD card content to up to six mobile devices via WiFi.

Avnet released two Linux-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) development kits that combine Xilinx ARM/FPGA Zynq-7000 SoCs with Analog Devices RF transceiver modules. The SDR Evaluation Kit uses the community-backed Zedboard SBC and supports 2.4 to 2.5GHz operation, while the more advanced SDR Systems Development Kit is based on a Xilinx ZC706 baseboard and spans the spectrum from 70MHz to 6GHz.

This week I featured the first Linux review of an AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics card in the form of an AMD Radeon R9 270X "Curacao XT" benchmarked on Ubuntu. If you're looking to buy a new graphics card for use on the Linux desktop but prefer NVIDIA hardware or buying a GPU isn't dependent upon the incomplete RadeonSI driver, being looked at today on Phoronix is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Kepler graphics card.