Linux News: Systemd, Linux 3.14 Release, Future Releases
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-03 11:38:39 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-03 11:38:39 UTC
Systemd
Systemd has been working on network support for this leading open-source init system. As part of this, systemd developers have now achieved support for obtaining a network connection in less than one millisecond... With that said, systemd developers are working towards having DHCP client and server capabilities built into the init system for having a super-fast booting OS and quicker network connections when resuming the system.
When systemd sees "debug" as part of the kernel command-line, it will spit out so much informaiton about the system that it fails to boot... The init system just collapses the system with too much information being sent to the dmesg when seeing the debug option as part of the kernel command-line parameter. Within the systemd bug report it was suggested for systemd not to look for a simple "debug" string to go into its debug mode but perhaps something like "systemd.debug" or other namespaced alternatives. The debug kernel command-line parameter has been used by upstream Linux kernel developers for many years. However, upstream systemd developers don't agree about changing their debug code detection. Kay Sievers of Red Hat wrote, "Generic terms are generic, not the first user owns them."
kGraft
SUSE has released kGraft to the public, the technology it developed to deliver live runtime patching of the Linux kernel.
Kgraft, which allows live patching of the Linux kernel without downtime, is available under the GPLv3 license
Future Releases
The highlights covered by Daniel for "neat" i915 DRM 3.15 changes include per-process address space support (currently limited to Ivy Bridge and Haswell but Bay Trail and Broadwell support is coming), fine-grained display power domain handling, runtime power management infrastructure work, support for inheriting the firmware frame-buffer as another step in Fastboot support, a lot of Broadwell patches, improved support for frame-buffer compression, 5.4GHz DIsplayPort support, generic DisplayPort aux helpers, and large cursor support to benefit HiDPI displays. For Intel's 4K display support, they now support 5.4GHz DisplayPort but they don't yet support multi-stream support (MST) as most 4K DisplayPort screens expose themselves as two displays to the driver.
There's many bug and performance fixes that landed while some corruption fixes and other patches will land later in the 3.15 merge window. The Btrfs code was also changed to avoid using its own async threads in favor of regular kernel work-queues, in hopes of using more generic code, but it might affect the file-system's performance.
Hopefully the Linux kernel LTO support will finish up in the Linux 3.15 kernel otherwise Linux 3.16 so we can move onward with some benchmarks of an LTO-optimized Linux kernel to see the performance wins at the cost of greater compile times and memory usage during the compilation process. It's worth noting that with the upcoming GCC 4.9 are also some significant link-time optimization enhancements.
With the Linux 3.14 kernel that was released over the night, Intel UMS support was deprecated. Intel hasn't maintained their user-space mode-setting support on Linux in about a half-decade with pushing everything these days through kernel-based mode-setting. The Radeon and Nouveau drivers have also become completely dependent upon kernel mode-setting too, with user-space mode-setting these days mostly being left to really old X.Org drivers without a DRM/KMS module. Modern Linux distributions are also beginning to drop support for these old GPUs.
Latest Release
After adding an extra release candidate to solidify the final result -- to the tune of a week's delay -- Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Sunday unleashed version 3.14 of the Linux kernel.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, formally released the Linux 3.14 kernel March 30. The new 3.14 Linux kernel follows the Linux 3.13 kernel that was released in January. Given that the new kernel carries the release number 3.14, which is a number that is also well-known as the mathematical Pi constant, there was early speculation that Torvalds might name the new kernel Pi. It's something that Torvalds shot down early on in the Linux 3.14 development process.
Latest Linux kernel has baked-in support for more cutting-edge ARM and MIPS processors, adds hardware support for Xen paravirtualuzation
While no official announcement has come down yet, the Linux 3.14 kernel will most likely be released in the hours ahead.
Kernel Level Misc.
Jovi Zhangwei, the lead KTAP developer, has posted the 28 patches implementing KTAP on the Linux kernel mailing list and is looking for code review in hopes it will be accepted into the mainline Linux kernel. KTAP is a script-based dynamic tracing tool that has a powerful scripting language, a register-based interpreter, is considered lightweight, and supports multiple architectures. The currently supported architectures for KTAP include x86/x86_64, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS.
Linux kernel block maintainer, Btrfs lead developer and new Facebook employee Chris Mason revealed the news at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley on Thursday, Phoronix reported. Mason said that Facebook will trial Btrfs in its "web tier" servers, explaining that's the easiest tier to recover if necessary, though we imagine Facebook might ask the NSA for its backup copy in the event of disaster.
This small but important change would support a cgroup to swap to a particular file as setup by a new control file. This change is to allow the limiting of cgroups to a given swap file without being able to thrash the entire system's swap file. With this set of three patches, individual cgroups can be limited in their swap capacity.
Graphics Stack
While most of the open-source driver efforts around accelerating 2D with OpenGL are centered on GLAMOR, a set of patches were published today that provide performance improvements to the XA Gallium3D state tracker that also accelerate 2D using 3D driver code.
Benchmarks
Recent Techrights' Posts
- The Word About the Upcoming Talk by Richard Stallman - Scheduled for Friday This Week - Has Spread ("The Cost of Freedom," Lausanne, Switzerland)
- So the word is spreading
-
- Android (or AOSP) is More Free Than iOS, Both in Practice (as OEM Bundles) Both Are User-Hostile
- In a perfect world, people would choose and deploy software that is entirely made up of reciprocally-licensed bits
- Neuroscience of Consciousness Paper: Why Social Control Media and Proprietary Spyware Harm Your Health
- "Software Freedom turns out to be good for your health"
- Access to the Source Code of the Programs You're Using Matters (Even If You're Not a Coder and Cannot Fix Bugs)
- Companies like Microsoft tell us that full access to all the code isn't important
- Guardian Digital (linuxsecurity.com) Publishes Fake Articles About Linux and About (for) 'Linux' Foundation Openwashing
- Brittany Day is at it again
- Links 14/01/2025: LA Crisis and EU, UK Respond to "X.com" Threat From South African Oligarch
- Links for the day
- "AI Music" is Not Music and It's Hardly "AI" Either
- Synthetic garbage is a solution in search of a problem
- Webspam in BetaNews
- Not only is it marketing SPAM
- [Meme] 13 Years a Slave of Microsoft
- Might makes right?
- Gemini Links 14/01/2025: The Gemtext Print Hurdle and New Game: Fill!
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 13, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, January 13, 2025
- Links 13/01/2025: Conflicts, Prisoner Exchange, and Homes on Fire
- Links for the day
- Angola: Microsoft Windows Falls Below 10%
- Microsoft has a really bad 2024 in Africa
- [Meme] Twitter ("X") Has Been Grooming Radicals Since 2022
- Musk's very own "grooming gang"
- [Meme] What Free Speech Ought to Mean
- It does not sound like RMS suggests anything other than quitting social control media
- Gemini Links 13/01/2025: RestFest, Yule, and Deedum
- Links for the day
- Modern Web Browsers as Web Censorship Software
- We continue to recommend Geminispace
- Two Weeks From Now Dr. Richard Stallman Speaks at The Summit of Future 2025 (India)
- he will be giving a "Keynote Address" in India
- Microsoft is Tight With Money: It's About the Salaries ('Cost' of the Workers)
- a question of cost, not skill
- Google Got People Sort of Addicted to Android So It Can Cash in (Services, App Store, Advertising) Decades Later
- This is not software freedom
- The Free Software Foundation Reaches 370k Dollars in Funding, Due Date is January 17th When Richard Stallman is Guest of Honour in Lausanne (Switzerland)
- Even fellow board members seem unaware of it
- Record Lows for Windows (Microsoft) in Botswana
- The market share of Vista 11 is seen as going down
- Preserving Deleted Articles About Bill Gates Talking Like a Drug Dealer About Computer Users
- Now it's 2025. Different challenge.
- Links 13/01/2025: Disinformation, Social Control Media Actively Promoting Nazism, and Catchup With Ukraine
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Front Group Starts the Year by Championing Underage (or Child) Labour
- the fake 'FSF'
- TPM Boosters Inside Debian (TPM Isn't About Security, It is About Control Over Users and Their Machines)
- We're not rushing to any conclusions
- Aaron Swartz Died 12 Years Ago After a Vicious Government Campaign to Stop Him
- The Aaron Swartz story is a reminder of the importance of having verifiable/verified information out there for the general public to see
- Links 13/01/2025: GitLab Enshittification and Minimalism and Efficiency with Gemini Protocol
- Links for the day
- Links 13/01/2025: Hardware, Health, and Conflicts
- Links for the day
- Chatbots Are Not Data-Driven, They're Human-Censored and Rely on Wage Slaves (and Sometimes Unpaid Volunteers)
- This is the Microsoft wage slavery
- Microsoft Appears to Have Fallen to Only 15% in Maldives
- This is a problem for Microsoft
- Rumours of IBM Canada Layoffs
- We'll keep a vigilant eye on this
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, January 12, 2025
- Bots Covering Debian Releases
- It would be quite safe to guess that chatbots were at least partly leveraged for that text
- Gemini Links 12/01/2025: No Country For Old Men, Burned Homes, and "Planet P is Clean"
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Brittany Day and Brian Fagioli Are Still at It, Googlebombing "Linux" With LLM Slop (Taking Away Traffic From the Articles They're Plagiarising)
- Some more sites that used to cover GNU/Linux have turned into slopfarms
- Links 12/01/2025: Microsoft Admits It's Laying Off Staff Only Where Staff is "Expensive" (Race to the Bottom)
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Being High on Drugs Isn't Happiness (Likewise, Being a "Star" in Social Control Media is Temporary)
- Many entities - or people - will regret telling everybody "follow me on Twitter"
- [Meme] They Say That RMS Says the "F" Word (Freedom) Too Much...
- About 32.7k US dollars are now left for the FSF to raise (in 6 days)
- Links 12/01/2025: More Sanctions Against Russia, SCOTUS Signals Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban Will Stay
- Links for the day
- [Meme] A Jihad Against Servers the User Controls
- We need to strive for and work towards greater control by users over "their" servers
- Microsoft Azure-Only Bugs in "Linux" Can "Compromise the System."
- From ubuntu.com and linux.org a few days ago
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, January 11, 2025
- Gemini Links 12/01/2025: DHL Express Does Not Deliver, Oddmuse Update
- Links for the day