Summary: Roundup of Linux (kernel) news from the past few days, including some rather exciting announcements

• Download Linux Kernel 3.14 Release Candidate 4





• Linux 3.14-rc4

  Hey, things are looking pretty normal, and rc4 is smaller than rc3, so I'm happy.
  
  The biggest patch in here (accounting for about a sixth of the total) is just DaveJ re-indenting a reiserfs file. Ignoring that whitespace cleanup, the rest is mostly the usual mix of drivers, networking and some architecture updates.
  
  Nothing big, and nothing that looks particularly scary.
  
  So get to it, and test it all out.





• Linux Jobs Report: Linux Pros Work For the Love of Linux, Cutting-Edge Tech

• Linux Kernel 3.13.4 Brings ARM64 (AArch64) Improvements

  Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, February 20, that Linux kernels 3.13.4, 3.12.12, 3.10.31 LTS, and 3.4.81 LTS are now available for download.





• Systemd 209 Is A Massive Release, Readies Kdbus

  Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 209 and once again it's another massive release with stuffing more features into the init system, including preparing the user-space side for the kernel D-Bus implementation.





• OpenDaylight: Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network





• Minimal Linux setup for kernel development

  This example can be used to setup a minimal Linux installation for any task. In this tutorial however I am going to use kernel development as an example. Since the process I have used in the past have been from sporadic sources, I wanted to consolidate the information for my own need. This tutorial is the result of that effort. So that next time if I feel like doing something kernel related, I don’t have to start over again.

Graphics Stack

• AMD Press Talks Up Major Open-Source Linux Driver Features

  Good news: AMD's press / global communications team is finally talking up their open-source Linux graphics driver features. Bad news: they appear to still need lots of training over their own Linux graphics drivers. Or is there some Linux driver shake-up happening? Here's some of what they are promoting right now with the AMD Linux graphics driver.





• The NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti Maxwell Continues Running Great On Linux

  Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.





• Wayland's Weston Adds Support For The Minimize Button

  Wayland clients running on the Weston compositor now have support for the minimize button.
  
  Clients using an XDG shell surface now support the state of being minimized with this Git commit on Tuesday.





• Wayland multi-touch gets touchpad support





• Broadwell Now Officially Enabled With Intel Mesa

  Broadwell support has been a work-in-progress on Linux for many months and most of the hardware enablement is complete. The Mesa driver has had mainline support for Intel Broadwell graphics for some time now, but only today is it being enabled by default and not hidden behind the Intel preliminary hardware support flag. The latest Broadwell work was with this commit and other changes.

Benchmarks

• Linux 3.14 File-System HDD Benchmarks

  Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.





• It Should Now Be Easier To Benchmark Steam Linux Games





• PC-BSD 10.0 vs. PC-BSD 9.2 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 Benchmarks

  After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.





• Ars walkthrough: Using the ZFS next-gen filesystem on Linux

  In my last article on next-gen filesystems, we did something in between a generic high altitude overview of next-gen filesystems and a walkthrough of some of btrfs' features and usage. This time, we're going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin. That's the most current Long Term Service (LTS) Ubuntu release.