Linux 3.14-rc5

The Hectic Pace Of Linux Kernel Development

That’s pretty good support. I’ve had very little breakage despite the hectic pace of updates. I was taking ~30 minutes almost weekely to build a kernel with a configuration similar to that in the Debian kernel. That was a bit onerous so I did a “make localmodconfig” Create a config based on current config and loaded modules (lsmod). Disables any module option that is not needed for the loaded modules.”

LTSI v3.10 is Now Released

Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) Kernel Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman this week released LTSI-3.10.

This latest version, released on Feb. 24, has brought more than 2,500 additional patches on top of the 3.10 Stable Kernel maintained by the kernel community.

SUSE Labs Director Talks Live Kernel Patching with kGraft

The code, set to be released in March, doesn't patch kernel code in-place but rather uses an ftrace-like approach to replace whole functions in the Linux kernel with fixed variants, said Pavlik. SUSE then plans to submit it to the Linux kernel community for upstream integration.

AMD updates driver and programming tools roadmap for supporting HSA features in Kaveri

Today AMD is expected to release a beta driver for Windows that exposes some shared memory extensions to OpenCL. Currently, AMD ships an OpenCL 1.2 implementation for Kaveri. OpenCL 1.2 standard by itself does not really expose shared memory features properly but OpenCL 2.0 will have more robust support. AMD does not have a full OpenCL 2.0 driver yet, but today they will be providing some of the 2.0 functionality as extensions in their current OpenCL 1.2 driver. I don't have the details on the exact extensions supported, and I will update the article when I do.

[Systemd] Formalizing Backports

Zbigniew and Colin have now set up a new git repo with a "stable" branch where these are backported to selected versions, to share some work between the distributions which happen to stabilize on these versions.

AMD Launches Catalyst 14.2 Beta Drivers; Talks Linux

AMD's Catalyst 14.2 beta drivers are now available. AMD is also making changes to the X.ORG 'radeon' repository.

Likely Radeon Gallium3D Regression On Linux 3.14 + Mesa 10.2

Radeon Gallium3D Performance Gets Close To Catalyst On Ubuntu 14.04

With the open-source graphics driver stack found in the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Mesa 10.1 + Linux 3.13), the performance of the community-developed Radeon Gallium3D driver is now close to that of the official AMD Catalyst driver for recent generations of Radeon graphics cards. In several OpenGL tests the "RadeonSI" driver can even run 80% the speed of AMD's official Catalyst Linux driver.

Intel Works On RandR Implementation For Wayland's Weston

The latest work by Intel employees on Wayland is adding an RandR protocol, similar to the X RandR protocol, to the Weston compositor.

Intel Broadwell Gets A Temporary DRM Branch

For distribution vendors or those fortunate to have early access to Intel's forthcoming Broadwell processors, there's a temporary DRM kernel driver branch that provides new features and changes over what's currently found in the upstream Linux kernel or the drm-intel development branch.

Mesa 10.1 RC3 Arrives Before Final Version Next Week

GLX_MESA_query_renderer Support Comes To All Drivers

Broadcom Open-Sources VideoCore IV 3D Graphics Stack

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 750 Is A Great $120 Linux Graphics Card

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 is a great value graphics card for $120 that delivers great mid-range performance while its performance-per-Watt is exceptional. If you don't mind using binary graphics drivers, the GTX 750 based upon NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture with the GM107 is worth checking out.

Enlightenment's Evas Gains A DRM Display Engine

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries' Evas canvas library now has a DRM engine for interfacing directly with the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager drivers

X.Org To Participate In Google Summer of Code 2014

The X.Org Foundation has been accepted this year by Google as a Summer of Code organization so interested student developers can contribute to the X.Org Server, Mesa, Wayland, and related projects while being paid for their summer work.

Weston Work Still Ongoing For A Fullscreen Shell Protocol

For a while now there's been work happening to come up with a fullscreen shell protocol for Wayland's Weston to address some interesting use-cases. With this protocol, clients run entirely full-screen as the only client exposed to the user.

eVGA GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" On Ubuntu Linux

More Mesa 10.2 + Linux 3.14 Benchmarks On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Btrfs File-System Mount Option Testing From Linux 3.14

Btrfs was tested with its default mount options from a solid-state drive and then tested separately with the following mount options (and reformatting and reinstalling the tests in-between),,,