Summary: News about Linux, accumulated and sorted over the past days for easier digestion

Linux 3.14

• An Overview Of The Linux 3.14 Kernel Features

  With yesterday's release of the Linux 3.14-rc1, here's a look at the top features that were merged for introduction in the Linux 3.14 kernel.
  
  The mentioned features are what I've found most interesting about this next major kernel release to date based upon the dozens of articles I've already authored on Phoronix about Linux 3.14, my testing already of 3.14 development code on multiple systems, analytics via Anzwix, etc.





• Linux 3.14 To Make AMD R600/700 OpenGL GS Possible

  In a fixes pull request sent in by Red Hat's David Airlie last night, a handful of DRM driver bugs were corrected. Additionally, there's an update to the command submission (CS) parser for the R600 and R700 generation GPUs (the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 4000 series hardware) to support setting up the OpenGL Geometry Shader rings. The Evergreen GPUs and newer already has this GS support within their CS parser.





• Linux Top 3: Linux 3.14 is Not a Piece of Pi

  "I realize that as a number, 3.14 looks familiar to people, and I had naming requests related to that. But that's simply not how the nonsense kernel names work," Torvalds wrote. "You can console yourself with the fact that the name doesn't actually show up anywhere, and nobody really cares. So any pi-related name you make up will be *quite* as relevant as the one in the main Makefile, so don't get depressed."





• Kernel prepatch 3.14-rc1

• Download Linux Kernel 3.14 Release Candidate 1

  Linux kernel 3.14 RC1 includes updated drivers, architecture updates (ARM mostly, x86, PowerPC, s390, mips, and ia64), core kernel improvements, networking, mm, tooling, etc.





• Linux 3.14-rc1 announced; Torvalds says codename has nothing to do with 'Pi





• Btrfs Gets Big Changes, Features In Linux 3.14 Kernel

  While the EXT4 changes and XFS alterations for the Linux 3.14 kernel weren't too exciting, the Btrfs file-system update was submitted today for Linux 3.14 and it's definitely exciting.





• Linux 3.14 Supports MIPS' Latest CPU Core

  These latest MIPS designs, which were announced back in 2012, are described as "the interAptiv is a power-efficient multi-core microprocessor for use in system-on-chip (SoC) applications. The interAptiv combines a multi-threading pipeline with a coherence manager to deliver improved computational throughput and power efficiency. The interAptiv can contain one to four MIPS32R3 interAptiv cores, system level coherence manager with L2 cache, optional coherent I/O port, and optional floating point unit."

Linux 3.13

• Intel Haswell Memory Scaling With Ubuntu 14.04 + Linux 3.13

  After the recent tests of AMD's Kaveri APU with DDR3-800MHz to DDR3-2133MHz Linux memory testing and following up with AMD Kaveri DDR3-2400MHz testing on Ubuntu Linux, many Phoronix readers followed up with a request of new memory testing done on the Intel side. In this article are benchmarks of a Core i5 Haswell CPU looking at the CPU and graphics performance impact with memory frequency scaling on Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.





• Linux Kernel 3.13 Gets Its First Update

  The first update for the stable Linux kernel 3.13 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman just a few minutes ago, starting the maintenance cycle for this new branch.

LLVM/Clang

• Clang's Competition For GCC On Intel Haswell

  After a few days ago showing LLVM Clang 3.4 running very well on AMD's Kaveri APU, here are some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.2, the latest GCC 4.9 development snapshot, and LLVM Clang 3.4 from an Intel Core i5 "Haswell" system running Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.

• LLVM Still Working On Linux Kernel Support

  A group of developers remain hard at work on the LLVMLinux project to build the mainline Linux kernel on x86 and ARM with the Clang compiler.





• [LLVMdev] LLVM/Clang on Sparc644

  Thanks to Jakob's work on Sparcv9 ABI in Clang and recent changes to Sparc code generator, I am happy to announce that Clang can self host itself on Linux/Sparc64 and on FreeBSD/Sparc64.





• Clang Is Now Self-Hosting On Linux/FreeBSD SPARC64

Graphics Stack

• Gallium3D's Freedreno Driver Gets A New Compiler

  Rob Clark has landed a new shader compiler into his Freedreno Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm's Adreno A3xx hardware.





• NVIDIA pledges more support for Linux open source 'Nouveau' driver





• AMD Open-Sources VCE Video Encode Engine Code

  AMD is doing another large and important open-source graphics driver code drop this morning. This morning AMD is publishing their VCE code that allows for hardware-based video encoding.
  
  Since last year AMD has provided open-source UVD support for video decoding on modern Radeon GPUs. There still isn't any open-source UVD1 support (only UVD 2.0 and newer), but now AMD has turned its focus to open-source hardware-accelerated video encoding.





• freedreno/a3xx/compiler: new compiler

  The new compiler generates a dependency graph of instructions, including a few meta-instructions to handle PHI and preserve some extra information needed for register assignment, etc.





• AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta For Linux

  Many people where worried about some Steam Machines using AMD graphics, I was too, but considering they are applying direct fixes for SteamOS as detailed below I don't think we will have to worry too much.





• AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Available Now. Now, Chewie, NOW!

Benchmarks

• Manjaro vs. Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. OpenSUSE Benchmarks

  The latest Linux distribution benchmarks to share at Phoronix are a comparison of Manjaro Linux 0.8.8, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development state, openSUSE 13.1, and Fedora 20. All tests were done from an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell system to look at the current state of various Linux distributions when it comes to various areas of open-source performance.





• Intel Linux 3.3 To Linux 3.13 Kernel Benchmarks

  The latest kernel benchmarking that happened at Phoronix was testing every major Linux kernel release from Linux 3.3 through the latest stable Linux 3.13 release from an Intel Sandy Bridge system to see how the kernel performance has evolved during the hardware's lifetime for key subsystems.

Misc.

• Who writes Linux? Corporations, more than ever





• Tux3 Still Has Some Bugs Before Being Mainlined

  Daniel Phillips, a lead Tux3 developer, wrote to the kernel mailing list on Monday and acknowledged that it's been a long time coming for Tux3... We covered Tux3 back in 2008 as the Tux2 successor that was never merged due to licensing issues and then it had been quite some time without any news on Tux3, until it was resurrected in early 2013.





• Linus Torvalds and other developers are leaving Bitcoins on the table

  I reached out to Tip4Commit to find out just how many people were not collecting tips. One of its creators, Arsen Gasparyan, got back to me with some data. He shared with me that, as of last week, Tip4Commit supported 337 GitHub projects, for which 9,076 tips have been earned (a tip is earned when a pull request for a commit on a supported project is accepted), totaling about 3.34 Ƀ (worth about $2,650 at today's Bitcoin exchange rate of $793.20). However, only 1.956 Ƀ has been received by 67 users, meaning 1.384 Ƀ, a little under $1,100 or about 40% of the value of all tips, has gone unclaimed.