Links 13/12/2013: Linux (Kernel) News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
Spanning over one week, grouped and clustered for convenience
KVM/QEMU/Xen
-
Linux has many hypervisors, such as Xen, and it's supported by more, such as Azure, but it also has its own built-in hypervisor: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Unfortunately, KVM only works on Intel and AMD processors. Earlier this year, IBM announced that it would be adding KVM support to its Power architecture, and now we know that it will be appearing sometime in 2014.
-
QEMU 1.7.0-rc2 was released yesterday and if all goes according to plan the official QEMU 1.7 release will happen on Wednesday. This next QEMU emulator update that's also relied upon by Linux KVM will bring some exciting improvements.
'Linux Experience'
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
.. 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
-
The /dev/random changes went in for the Linux 3.13 kernel and this pull request was even interesting for the very promising next kernel release. While not in Linux 3.13, it's mentioned the Linux kernel might also end up taking a security feature from the FreeBSD playbook.
-
A second pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.13 kernel that provides further updates to the often less than desirable ACPI and power management code.
Submitted (and pulled) two weeks ago were already big ACPI and PM updates for this next Linux kernel release. However, Rafael Wysocki has now sent in a second ACPI/PM update for Linux 3.13 that's queued up some more changes then and right ahead of the 3.13-rc1 tagging.
-
Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few hours ago, November 20, that the first maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
-
This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments to the Discussion page. There's a blog that reports on the main changes to the forecast. You can view it directly or use a feed reader to subscribe to the blog feed. You can also subscribe directly to the changes feed for this page to see feed all forecast edits.
-
For those keeping track of Linux 3.13 kernel activity, another DRM subsystem pull update was submitted during this merge window.
Jailhouse
-
We are happy to announce the Jailhouse project, now also to a broader community!
Linux Foundation
-
This past summer marked Moscow-based developer Anton Kirilenko's third Google Summer of Code internship with The Linux Foundation. That's three summers, three different projects and mentors, and three totally different experiences with Linux and open source software.
-
Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, more commonly referred to as KVM, is one of the most popular open-source virtualization technologies in use today. Both IBM and Red Hat use it as the basis for their Linux virtualization technologies, and it is the most widely used virtualization technology in the OpenStack cloud as well.
KVM was originally written by Israeli software developer Avi Kivity while he was working at Qumranet. Qumranet was acquired by Red Hat for $107 million in 2008.
Training
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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 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.
-
The Linux Foundation launched the 100 Linux Video Tutorials campaign last January and today an update was posted. According to Jennifer Cloer nearly 100 videos have been submitted but she said, " We need your help to reach 100 Linux video tutorials in January." The collection boasts 83 submissions so far.
-
Windows might be the majority, but a big part of that is because the laptop manufacturers expend little to no effort on the alternative. Meanwhile, 50% of their customers would be happier running Linux if it was well setup!
-
KTAP version 0.4 is now available as the script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Not Just Slow News But Also Late News (Julian Assange Landing in Thailand)
- Why did AP take so long (nearly a week) to release these?
- [Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
- How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
- Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
- Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
- Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
- Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
- Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
- So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
- This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
- Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
-
- 100% Slop/Spam From linuxsecurity.com
- This is the kind of stuff that's killing the Web faster
- Gemini Links 30/06/2024: Murdoch and Ideal OS
- Links for the day
- Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
- Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
- In the First 6 Months of 2024 Thailand Moved to GNU/Linux, Not to Windows Vista 11
- maybe users moved from Vista 10 and 11 to GNU/Linux, seeing where Microsoft was heading with forced hardware "upgrades"
- Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
- Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
- Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
- Obligatory meme too
- Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
- Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
- [Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
- Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
- Destination 'Five Percent'
- We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
- A Crisis of Online Journalism
- Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
- Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
- openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
- Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
- 4 new stories
- Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
- outrage included
- GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
- Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
- Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
- "Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
- 'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
- looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
- Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
- Links for the day
- Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
- mostly redhat.com
- Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
- Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
- Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
- Seychelles cannot be considered poor
- Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
- "Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
- About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
- The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
- 20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
- We are hoping to bring more original stories
- Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
- This is not happening only in Germany
- Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
- It uses buzzwords where none are needed
- [Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
- It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
- Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
- linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
- Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
- retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
- Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
- From over 99% to just over 7%
- In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
- Not even counting Chromebooks
- LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
- an appeal to recover some of these talks
- Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
- Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
- Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
- "the "smiling faces" behind it."
- Android at 90% or More in Chad
- Windows below 2%
- David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
- "a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
- Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
- And probably at a symbolic capacity only
- Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
- Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
- Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
- uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
- Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
- the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
- Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
- in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
- What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
- Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024
- Links 28/06/2024: Kangaroo Courts and Patents Spam, EFF Still Fighting for CPC's TikTok (a Digital Weapon)
- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
- Links for the day
- [Meme] In 50 Years...
- Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
- Only About 1 in 8 Russian Windows Users is Using Vista 11
- it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
- Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/06/2024: Christmas Prematurely, Self-hosting
- Links for the day
- IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
- almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
- Vista 11 is Doomed and Despite Lack of Adoption Microsoft Already Speaks of Vapourware ("12")
- "Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
- ChromeOS Reaches Highest Share in Years at the World's Most Populous Nation, Windows Now at All-Time Low of 13%
- We're talking about India today
- [Video] "It Is Incredible That Julian Assange Survives"
- There was a positive and mutual relationship between Wikileaks and Dr Jill Stein
- Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
- Who's going to hold them accountable now?
- Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
- I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
- [Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
- predating indefinite detention
- IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
- The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
- "I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
- Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
- State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
- Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
- GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
- Android rising a lot this year, too
- [Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
- Work more; Get less
- Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
- SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
- Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
- Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
- RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock