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
- IBM is "Taking the PIP" (Piss), People 'Retire' 'Voluntarily' to "Focus on Family"
- IBM has a billion bucks for 'the butcher', but not a million dollars for critical projects and initiatives in Free software
- It Should be Uncontroversial to Say That Social Control Media is a Weapon
- Democracy is not compatible with the likes of Kapo-Berg and MElon controlling public discourse of billions
- Debian: Plagiarism OK, Just be "Responsible" About It
- The result isn't the worst, but it's not good either
- Don't Let Them Kill Activism
- Are the oligarchs shutting the lid on activism and whistleblowers?
- Michael Catanzaro's Latest Blog Post Affirms Rumours of Red Hat Changes and RAs/PIPs at IBM
- reading between the lines, IBM is "spitting out" Red Hat staff
-
- Links 29/08/2026: Microsoft GitHub Outage (Again), "Displaying Ads Directly on Your Monitor", and "Election Deniers Could Soon Control Elections"
- Links for the day
- Misuse of Bots (Now Sold as "Agents", "Hey Hi", "Automation", and "Efficiency")
- They even try to rebrand robotics as "hey hi" and try to sell slop as "work"
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 165 Out of 200: Two Years Since My Wife and I Sued
- In early September 2024 we hit back
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, August 28, 2026
- Gemini Links 29/08/2026: Death Notice, Systems Biology, and Gopher
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: Chatbot Pushers Admit They're Used Heavily for Social Engineering Scams, Strong Backlash Against "Smart Glasses" (CCTV on Legs)
- Links for the day
- If Linux Was Written in Rust, 80% or More of Linux Developers Would Not Understand It (Same If It's Composed by LLM Slop)
- The licence (GPL) is not enough when there are ways to bypass it
- Gemini Links 28/08/2026: Absurd Tomodachi Summer, Screen Piggery, and Jugulans 1.0.3 Released
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: "UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem" and "Growth at All Costs is Cancer"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 164 Out of 200: Patent Troll SLAPPs, Defamation Trolls, and Stranglers From America
- You start to wonder if the core issue is insecurity
- Rumours of More PIPs and Layoffs at Confluent Just Months After IBM Bought It
- It is meanwhile apparent IBM will have mass layoffs next week (September)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 27, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 27, 2026
- After Many Waves of PIPs (Silent Layoffs) IBM Makes Non-Silent Layoffs, Effective Next Week (September)
- What we heard is turning out to be true
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Haiku OS, Digital Resistance, and Staying Offline
- Links for the day
- Links 27/08/2026: Facebook to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion to Cover Up Known Harms, Nepal Landslide Kills Many
- Links for the day
- The Register MS Has Just Published Paid Spam That Says "AI" 19 Times
- 1.5 hours ago
- Mainstream Media is Paid to Link "AI" Criticism/Boosting to Jeffrey Epstein Enablers, in Effect Showing How Corrupt This Media Became
- Many readers will have noticed what was a paid-for PR campaign of a global scale
- RSS is King: Why Having Subscribers or Followers in Sites You Neither Own Nor Control is Loss of Autonomy and Search is Mostly Slop (Plagiarising Sites, Not Linking to Them)
- Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
- Claims of Tens of Thousands of 'Silent Layoffs' at IBM (and Red Hat)
- Looking at recent activity in thelayoff.com, about 80% of the comments and posts are about PIPs
- Links 27/08/2026: "Flock’s CEO Is Lying to Cops" and Microsoft's GitHub Actions Breaks Down Again (Too Many Layoffs, Loss of Knowledge)
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux and ChromeOS at Over 13% in Bahamas
- Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
- Richard Stallman Complains That Linux Gives a Bad Name to GNU and Asks for Feedback on What's Wrong with Systemd (and Wayland)
- Maybe some people want to send him a detailed, polite explanation
- GNU/Linux Does Not Need Social Control Media to Succeed
- When it comes to Social Control Media, Richard Stallman was right
- Increasing Focus on Patent Injustices
- We'll soon cover the EPO a lot more
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 163 Out of 200: Attack on Computer Science and on Computer Security (or Associating Back Doors and Kill Switches With "Security")
- Nowadays there are many who pretend to be security professionals
- There's No "Next XBox"
- Nothing comes ahead except layoffs and price hikes
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Conditioning, Lagrange 1.21, and Computer Games
- Links for the day