Linux Kernel 3.13 Officially Released with Support for NFC Payments

Today, January 19, Linus Torvalds has proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 3.13, which brings major improvements, numerous new and updated drivers, as well as a dozen of new features.

The 3.13 kernel is out

This release includes nftables, the successor of iptables, a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs, a power capping framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices, improved squashfs performance, AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic Radeon GPU switching, improved NUMA performance, improved performance with hugepage workloads, TCP Fast Open enabled by default, support for NFC payments, support for the High-availability Seamless Redundancy protocol, new drivers and many other small improvements.

SCHED_DEADLINE To Be Added To Linux 3.14 Kernel

The first 3.14 pull request worth pointing out on Phoronix are the scheduler changes sent in by Ingo Molnar. The most notable change with this pull is the initial implementation of SCHED_DEADLINE. SCHED_DEADLINE is a new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel that's been in development for several years and has undergone numerous revisions. SCHED_DEADLINE implements the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling algorithm.

Intel Merrifield MID Support Landing In Linux 3.14

The Intel MID (Mobile Internet Device) platform updates for the Linux 3.14 kernel include supporting Merrifield and Clovertrail platforms. Clovertrail has been around for a while but Merrifield is Intel's new smart-phone architecture focused on Android. Merrifield has a 22nm Atom SoC and it's expected to start appearing this quarter.

Linux 3.14 Officializes Broadwell, Deprecates Legacy UMS

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center blogged on Wednesday about the major changes queued up for the Linux 3.14 kernel as it concerns their DRM kernel graphics driver. The main changes for Intel DRM in Linux 3.14 include runtime D3 support, wwatermark computation / frame-buffer compression fixes, a rewrite of the low-level backlight code, work on full PPGTT support, Bay Trail Atom improvements, and a kernel option to disable legacy fbdev support.

Linux Kernel 3.12.8 Is Now Available for Download

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced a few hours ago, January 15, that the eight maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

Kdbus Details

Intel vs. AMD Performance-Per-Watt On Ubuntu 14.04 Linux

To complement the many Intel vs. AMD CPU/APU Linux benchmarks published earlier this week as part of our AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU coverage, here's some results mostly examining the performance-per-Watt and overall system power consumption of the many different Intel and AMD processors running Ubuntu Linux.

Linux Kernel's Sysfs Logic Turns Into "Kernfs" For 3.14

Kernfs is the sysfs logic that in turn can be taken advantage of by other subsystems in need of a virtual file-system with handling for device connect/disconnect, dynamic creation, and other attributes.

Wayland and Weston 1.3.93 (1.4 RC)

We're getting close to the 1.4.0 release date - well, actually that was supposed to be Jan 16, but we ended up slipping a week to get a more solid first beta (1.3.92) out. We tagged that Jan 10 and here's 1.3.93, aka second beta or release candidate:

Linux Graphics News

2013 has been a dramatic and controversial year for graphics in Linux, yet actual changes to the overall graphics stack have so far been more incremental than revolutionary. But with us closing in on several Linux distributions' Long-Term Support releases this is to be expected, as stability weighs stronger than novelty among consumers of these products. This next summer may be a safer window for distros to undertake major transitions; we should expect to see major graphics system transitions in desktop distros at that point. The landing of XWayland support in the X server can be seen as an early indicator of a Wayland desktop future, since it's a crucial prerequisite.

New Intel Broadwell Backends Land In Mesa

Some open-source Intel Linux developers have been busy this weekend to ensure the Broadwell open-source driver enablement work will be ready for when the hardware ships in a few months time so it won't be like the poor open-source Kaveri driver.

Intel Graphics Driver Installer 1.0.3 For Ubuntu/Fedora

The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users

The Linux 3.13 kernel that will be released in the very near future is very worth the upgrade if you are a RadeonSI user -- in particular, the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer on the Gallium3D Linux graphics driver -- but other open-source graphics driver users as well may also see nice improvements in the new kernel release. Here's some benchmarks showing off the gains found with the Linux 3.13 kernel for Radeon HD and R9 graphics cards.

AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7 Graphics Comparison

The latest benchmarks of the AMD A10-7850K APU to share on Phoronix and to complement yesterday's Windows vs. Linux OpenGL comparison are benchmarks of the APU's Radeon R7 Graphics compared to numerous AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

RadeonSI GLAMOR 2D Performance vs. Catalyst

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver continues making much headway as the modern open-source AMD Gallium3D Linux graphics driver along with the GLAMOR library it depends upon for 2D acceleration, the 2D performance of the Linux desktop is still quite poor compared to the proprietary Catalyst driver.