Kernel (Linux) News: A Week's News in a Nutshell

Linux

The Imaging Sources announces Linux supports for its cameras
The Imaging Source has announced the immediate availability of open source Linux support for all of its cameras.

Linux Kernel 3.12.17 LTS Officially Released
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.12.x branch, you should consider an update to this build. Keep in mind that this is an LTS release, which means that it's going to be around for a very long time. If you feel adventurous, you can ditch this LTS branch and go for the latest 3.14 version.

Hamachi Graphical Frontend Haguichi 1.0.24 Now Has Systemd and Upstart Support
This is not the big update that everyone has been waiting for, but at least there are a few things that will definitely catch your eye. For example, support has been added for systemd and upstart to control the Hamachi service, the network list is now immediately updated after going online or offline in a network, and the update interval count is now reset after each manual update.

File Systems

Linux 3.15

ACPI & Power Management Get More Updates In Linux 3.15
A second Git pull request has been made for the ACPI and power management code within the kernel for Linux 3.15.

LTO Support Coming To Linux 3.15, Making For A Faster Kernel
Earlier in April I wrote about link-time optimization support for the kernel nearing reality. LTO support for the Linux kernel has been in the works since 2012 but only with Linux 3.15 will it become a mainline possibility. Link-Time Optimizations via GCC and other compilers allow for various compile-time optimizations to be applied across the binary as a whole. Enabling link-time optimizations can yield some significant performance improvements but results in much slower compile times and with large programs can cause problems due to the size of optimizing the complete binary at once.

Graphics Stack

Upgraded Kernel & Mesa Yield A Big Boost For Athlon R3 Graphics
With OpenArena the frame-rate went from just 8 FPS on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 19 FPS when using the Linux 3.14 kernel. Linux 3.14 allows for the R3 Graphics to re-clock to their highest performance state compared to Linux 3.13 where DPM isn't enabled by default for GCN GPUs. When going to Mesa 10.2-devel that will be officially released in about one month, the frame-rate rose to 25 FPS... That's over a three-fold performance improvement when pulling in the bleeding edge latest code.

Wayland

Intel Developers Continue Work On The Weston RandR Protocol
Intel developers continue experimenting with a Resize and Rotate protocol extension for Wayland's Weston compositor that was originally designed for the X.Org Server.

Intel

Intel Publishes Full Linux Driver Support For Cherryview
The "Cherryview" Atom processors feature "Gen8" graphics (Broadwell) capabilities, there's three display pipes, three HDMI/DisplayPort/EmbeddedDisplayPort ports, two MIPI DSI display ports, and VGA support has been dropped from Cherryview.

AMD

Updated AMD Microcode Fixes The R7 260X, Other "SI" GPUs
Alex Deucher sent out a set of three patches today to update the microcode used by the AMD "Southern Islands" graphics processors.
AMD Releases The Radeon R9 295X
As expected AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 295X graphics card this morning as the "world's fastest" for those with $1500 USD to spare.

AMD Brings Back Semprons & Athlons With The 2014 AM1 Platform
After much information being made public in March concerning AMD's AM1 platform that delivers socketed APUs for low-cost desktop systems, the first of these new socketed APUs are shipping today under the restored Athlon and Sempron branding. We've been fortunate enough to have one of the new Athlon AM1 APUs at Phoronix for a few days of testing.

Gallium3D

Gallium3D's HUD Gains More Features For R600g, RadeonSI
The Gallium3D HUD has gain some new reporting capabilities for the Radeon Gallium3D R600 and RadeonSI drivers.

X.Org

X.Org Server 1.16 Merge Window Closes, Pre-Release Issued
Keith wrote on the mailing list, "With this, the 1.16 merge window comes to a close. Thanks to everyone who contributed a huge pile of fixes and new features! We're a week behind schedule; Kristian was a bit late with Xwayland, and that included a driver-visible API change that needed fixing (this appears to have been my fault originally)."

NVIDIA

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