04.03.14

Linux News: Systemd, Linux 3.14 Release, Future Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Systemd

• Systemd Is Working Towards Its Own Super Fast DHCP Server, Client

  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.

• Linux Kernel Developers Fed Up With Ridiculous Bugs In Systemd

  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 kGraft Live Patches Linux Kernel

  SUSE has released kGraft to the public, the technology it developed to deliver live runtime patching of the Linux kernel.

• Suse open-sources live updater for Linux kernel

  Kgraft, which allows live patching of the Linux kernel without downtime, is available under the GPLv3 license

Future Releases

• Universal Plane Support Set For Linux 3.15

• Linux 3.15 Squeezes In More ACPI / PM Improvements

• Old x86 Platforms To Be Removed With Linux 3.15

• Kernfs Is Updated To Be More Useful With Linux 3.15

• The Exciting Intel DRM Driver Changes For Linux 3.15

  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.

• Btrfs To Land A Lot Of Bug/Performance Fixes In Linux 3.15

  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.

• Link-Time Optimizations Near Reality For x86 Linux Kernel

  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.

• Libata Improvements Enhance AHCI On Linux 3.15

• Intel UMS Support To Be Eliminated In Linux 3.16 Kernel

  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.

• GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu: “Freedom Pi” is now available

• Linux 3.15 Kernel Gains EFI Mixed Mode Support

• Many Audio/Sound Improvements Land For Linux 3.15

Latest Release

• Linux 3.14 Release: No ‘Pi’ But a New ‘PIE’ Fights Bufferbloat

  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.

• Linux 3.14 Stabilizes ZRAM, Reduces Buffer Bloat

  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.

• The Linux 3.14 Kernel Has Been Released With Great Features

• Linux 3.14 kernel revision beefs up ARM, VM support

  Latest Linux kernel has baked-in support for more cutting-edge ARM and MIPS processors, adds hardware support for Xen paravirtualuzation

• Linux Kernel 3.14 Officially Released by Linus Torvalds

• The Linux 3.14 Kernel Will Likely Be Released Today

  While no official announcement has come down yet, the Linux 3.14 kernel will most likely be released in the hours ahead.

• Linux 3.14, Etherpad 1.4, Pass and an RGB/LED/Pi tutorial – Snippets

Kernel Level Misc.

• Intel Adds Initial Cherryview Support To Their Linux 3D Driver

• KTAP Dynamic Tracing Called For Merging Into Linux Kernel

  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.

• Facebook will trial Btrfs Linux file system in its data centres

  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.

• Per-Cgroup Swap File Support Proposed For Linux

  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

• XA Gallium3D Performance Improvements Published

  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.

• Natural Selection 2′s Direct3D HLSL To OpenGL GLSL Parser Open Sourced

• NVIDIA’s GeForce Driver On Ubuntu 14.04 Runs The Same As Windows 8.1

Benchmarks

• Benchmarking Numascale’s NumaConnect: 256 AMD Cores Connected

• Benchmarking VirtIO Performance Within DigitalOcean’s Cloud

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