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Links 13/12/2013: Linux (Kernel) News



Spanning over one week, grouped and clustered for convenience

KVM/QEMU/Xen



'Linux Experience'





  • openSUSE 13.1 vs Ubuntu 13.10: a friendly match
    I often hear the argument that Android is not Linux or Chrome OS is not Linux. Technically that’s not true. Linux is just the kernel and both these operating systems user Linux so they are Linux-based operating systems.

    What people are actually trying to say is they don’t get the same ‘Linux experience’ when they use these operating systems. What’s that Linux experience?




Kernel Version 3.12



  • Linux Kernel News


  • Linux Kernel 3.12.3 Is Now Available for Download


  • Linux Kernel 3.12.2 Is Now Available for Download
    Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, November 29, that the second maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.


  • Linux Kernel 3.12.4 Is Now Available for Download
    Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 8, that the fourth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.


  • Linux 3.13-rc3
    .. I'm still on a Friday release schedule, although I hope that changes soon - the reason I didn't drag this one out to Sunday is that it's already big enough, and I'll wait until things start calming down.

    Which they really should, at this point. Hint hint. I'll start shouting at people for sending me stuff that isn't appropriate as we're starting to get later into the release candidates.

    That said, it's not like rc3 is somehow unmanageably large or that anything particularly scary has happened. I'd have *liked* for it to be smaller, but I always do.. And nothing particularly nasty stands out here.

    The bulk here is drivers (net, scsi, sound, crypto..) and ARM DT stuff, but there's the usual randon stuff too, with arch updates (pa-risc, more ARM, x86) and some filesystem and networking updates.




Kernel Version 3.13





Jailhouse





Linux Foundation





Training



  • Outreach Program for Women Seeks New Linux Kernel Interns
    The interns who worked with The Linux Foundation as part of the FOSS Outreach Program for Women this summer come from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience, but they now have at least one thing in common (besides their gender). They can all add “Linux kernel hacker” to their resume.


  • A Summer Spent on the LLVM Clang Static Analyzer for the Linux Kernel


  • Training college students to contribute to the Linux kernel
    Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel.

    These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany.




Graphics Stack





  • Radeon Gallium3D MSAA Mesa 10.1 Git Benchmarks


  • NVIDIA's PTX Back-End For GCC Has Been Published
    As part of the work to bring OpenACC 2.0 and NVIDIA GPU support to GCC, a large set of patches were published this morning for adding NVIDIA's PTX back-end to the Free Software Foundation's compiler.


  • AMD APU vs. Radeon GPU Open-Source Comparison
    Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver. For end-users curious what the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU performance is comparable to when it comes to discrete Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D driver, here's some weekend comparison benchmarks.


  • MSM DRM Will Support New Hardware In Linux 3.14
    An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the "MSM" DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.
  • NVIDIA Helping Nouveau With Video Decoding
    While it isn't in the form of any complete documentation, a NVIDIA engineer has begun answering questions by the open-source Nouveau driver developers about video decoding with their H.264 engine.
  • New Wayland Live CD Has A Lot Of Features
    The oddly-named Wayland Live CD environment for checking out the next-generation Linux display stack has been updated. The Wayland Live CD ships with many enabled tool-kits, the latest Wayland code, Orbital and Hawaii support, KDE Frameworks Wayland programs, and other new native Wayland applications.
  • DRI3 Support Comes For X.Org GLAMOR
    As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.
  • Quad-Monitor AMD/NVIDIA Linux Gaming: What You Need To Know
  • How to start contributing to Mesa3D


  • Crystal HD Decodes New Linux Support Improvements
    A couple years ago Broadcom released the Crystal HD as a standalone hardware video decoder chip. While there's been an open-source Linux driver for the Crystal HD, we haven't heard much about it in recent months, but that changed this morning.


  • AMD APU On Linux: Gallium3D Can Be 80%+ As Fast As Catalyst
    After running earlier this week a 21-way graphics card comparison with Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, there were requests by some Phoronix readers to see some new APU performance numbers. For ending out November, here's new Catalyst vs. Gallium3D driver benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux for the AMD A10-6800K with its Radeon HD 8670D graphics. The results with the latest Linux kernel and Mesa are very positive towards the open-source AMD driver where in some tests the performance can nearly match Catalyst! For at least one Source Engine game, the open-source driver can now even run significantly faster than the binary driver.
  • Mesa 10.0 Release Brings OpenGL 3.3
    The 10.0 release was expected a few days back, but now it's finally happened via Intel's Ian Romanick with this brief announcement.


  • zRAM Is Still Hoping For A Promotion
    While zRAM has been part of the Linux kernel's staging area for a while now and this RAM-based compressed block device is used by Chrome OS and Android, it's struggling to get promoted to the main area of the kernel.


  • Intel's GL Windows Driver Pushes Further Ahead Of Linux
    Intel's Windows OpenGL driver continues to make progress in a more steadfast manner than the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. The latest achievement for the Intel Windows driver is OpenGL 4.2 compliance for Haswell.


  • Another Game Studio Backs AMD's Mantle API
    There's another game studio now backing AMD's Mantle graphics rendering API that aims to be faster and easier to implement for games than OpenGL. However, we're still waiting for AMD Mantle on Linux.


  • AMD "RadeonSI" Team Fortress 2 Is Now 75% Faster
    The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for AMD HD 7000 series GPUs and newer is now 75% faster for the Source Engine Team Fortress 2 game thanks to a new patch-set by Marek.


  • Ultra HD 4K Linux Graphics Card Testing
    If you've been eyeing a purchase of a 4K "Ultra HD" TV this holiday season and will be connecting it to a Linux system, here's the information that you need to know for getting started and some performance benchmarks to set the expectations for what you can expect. This article has a number of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks when running various Linux OpenGL workloads at a resolution of 3840 x 2160.


  • XDG-Shell Patches Get Moving For Wayland
    After a lot of mailing list discussions amongst developers that have a stake in Wayland and early patches sent out, the latest xdg-shell patches were formally distributed today on the developers' mailing list. The xdg-shell is a new protocol living outside of the core Wayland protocol.


Benchmarks





Btrfs



  • Btrfs hands-on: Exploring the error recovery features of the new Linux file system
    This is my final post in this series about the btrfs filesystem. The first in the series covered btrfs basics, the second was resizing, multiple volumes and devices, the third was RAID and Redundancy,and the fourth and most recent was subvolumes and snapshots.

    I think (and hope) that all of those together give a reasonable overview of what the btrfs filesystem is, what you can do with it, and how you can do some of those things. In this post I will wrap up a couple of loose ends - error recovery, and integration with other standard Linux utilities - and try to give a recap of the series as a whole. For complete and authoritative information, please refer to the Btrfs Wiki at kernel.org.


  • Btrfs hands on: My first experiments with a new Linux file system
    Btrfs is a new file system for Linux, one that is still very much in development. Although I wouldn't exactly describe it as "experimental" any more, it is, as stated in the Wiki at kernel.org, "a fast-moving target".

    It has also been said publicly that the basic format and structure of the filesystem should now be stable; it would only be changed in the future if some overriding reason or need is found.

    The point of all this should be clear — it is still very early days, and it is not recommended to use btrfs in critical systems of any kind.

    I leave it to the reader to decide how critical their systems are; for my own purposes, I will be using btrfs on several systems that I use as testbeds, some of which I carry with me and use for normal work on a daily basis, so it will get a "real" test, but I will not be using it on the primary systems that my partner and I use for home/work/business activities.




Misc.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
 
Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day