Links 18/11/2013: Linux (Kernel) News Roundup
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-11-18 14:37:53 UTC
- Modified: 2013-11-18 14:37:53 UTC
Recruitment
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The foundation thinks that a natural way of promoting the participation of younger people in the Linux kernel development is to reach out to colleges and universities to host training activities where students and faculty learn the ropes of how to contribute to the kernel.
Version 3.13
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There's many exciting Linux 3.13 kernel features already, but we have another one to talk about today. In the input subsystem update for 3.13, support for the Neonode zForce has been added, an interesting touch-screen technology based on infrared light fields.
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The Kernel-based Virtual Machine updates for the Linux 3.13 kernel were filed today and includes a fair amount of improvements for virtualization on PowerPC hardware, but there's also some x86 improvements too.
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While the merge window for the Linux 3.13 kernel isn't even over yet, this next major kernel update is already looking to be rather exciting with a number of new features.
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For those in need of a high-performance specially-optimized file-system for flash storage devices, the F2FS file-system developed at Samsung has seen more "major enhancements" queued up for the Linux 3.13 kernel.
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The merge window hasn't even officially opened yet on the Linux 3.13 kernel but it's already super exciting and I can't wait for the new code to start hitting mainline and to benchmark these massive changes to the Linux kernel. Here's just a few things to expect so far but it's already gearing up to be a super exciting release and perhaps the best of 2013.
More Development
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AMD has just published a new set of Linux kernel patches, revealing Linux support for a Cryptographic Coprocessor (AMD CCP).
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The btrfs-progs user-space component to the Btrfs file-system has seen a number of commits in recent weeks. Beyond lots of code improvements and bug-fixes, the default meta-data block size was changed for the Btrfs mkfs command.
Events
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The 3.12 Linux kernel release this week brought with it many new features including multi-threaded RAID5 support in the MD subsystem, the addition of render nodes, and TSO sizing.
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The Linux Foundation is preparing to host its third LinuxCon Europe and this year for the first time will also host CloudOpen in Europe. The combination of the two events along with a variety of other co-located events taking place next week represents the largest gathering of Linux and open cloud professionals in Europe. From KVM Forum & oVirt Workshop to Xen Project Developer Summit and Yocto Developer Day to the Open Compute Engineering Workshop, there is something for everyone.
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Linux Foundation Training scholarship winner Abdelghani Ouchabane is a senior software developer at eZono, a medical device startup in Germany that uses Linux to build its software and systems. He's worked on a range of Linux projects over the past five years in this job, including kernel module and driver configuration, system and server configuration, and networking, he said. He's also contributed to many open source projects including Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Meego, Tizen and Debian.
Graphics Stack
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Yesterday there was news that OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support was coming to GCC complete with GPU acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs. While it was exciting on the surface, it appears that this work may be poisonous and could have a very tough time making it upstream.
The news yesterday was about Oak Ridge, Mentor Graphics, and NVIDIA working to add OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support to the GCC compiler for C and Fortran. GCC right now doesn't have any support for OpenACC, even the older versions of the specification, and the patches thus far haven't fully exploited the GPU potential besides converting OpenACC to OpenCL or another implementation that just runs OpenACC over OpenMP on the CPU. Mentor Graphics is now responsible for bringing OpenACC 2.0 with NVIDIA GPU support to the GNU Compiler Collection.
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The xf86-video-freedreno X.Org driver for providing support for Qualcomm's Adreno/Snapdragon graphics hardware has reached version 1.0 in its first stable release.
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After the support has been within Wayland's Weston reference compositor for several months, developers have now added sub-surfaces support to the Wayland core protocol itself. Wayland sub-surfaces can make for efficient use of video players and windowed OpenGL games on Wayland.
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Interesting in the Wayland camp this week has been lots of discussions about the XDG-Shell proposal but besides that, a patch-set just appeared that finally adds alt-tab support to Wayland's Weston compositor and also updates the exposay feature.
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As part of the recent Radeon Rx 200 series and Hawaii GPU launch, AMD also unveiled Mantle as a new graphics rendering API to compete with OpenGL and Direct3D. AMD claims Mantle is easier, faster, and all-around better than OpenGL for game engines and other purposes. This week AMD has renewed their push that they want to see Mantle on Linux and other platforms.
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The xf86-video-intel 3.0 driver is still on the way and Intel OTC's Chris Wilson has put out today its latest development release that has stability fixes, including further TearFree updates.
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If you are after a low-end graphics card for use on Linux, up for review today is the Zotac GeForce GT 610 Synergy 1GB graphics card that sells for less than $50 USD. The results in this Linux hardware review compare the GT 610 to a range of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards using the proprietary drivers under Ubuntu Linux. Even if you're not interested in the GT 610, this article makes for a nice 12-way Linux graphics card comparison with the very latest AMD/NVIDIA GPU drivers.
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If you're curious about the state of the Qt5-powered Hawaii Desktop running natively on Wayland, a new video has been uploaded that nicely shows off this new Linux desktop alternative that's designed around Wayland.
Benchmarks
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For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve's Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve's Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?
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Last week AMD released the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card. The R9 290 is a cut-down R9 290X and sells for just $399 USD. Here are the first Linux benchmarks of the AMD R9 290 using Ubuntu 13.10!
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09, Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 have been pitted against each other in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Linux performance benchmark results are now available.
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This testing isn't too different from other open vs. closed-source GPU driver benchmarks run recently on Phoronix but is a fresh look and with some different tests. The Catalyst driver in use was the latest publicly available (Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 - OpenGL 4.3.12614 - fglrx 13.25.5) and the open-source version was Mesa 10.0-devel with an xf86-video-ati Git snapshot. The Linux 3.12 kernel was used throughout all testing and DPM was enabled for the Radeon Linux driver.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Linux and the Freedom Paradox
- Linux is losing freedom if some external actors who only use Microsoft tools for development wrest control
- Watch the FSF Party Live (via Livestream)
- It's in WebM format, which is widely supported by now
- Advocacy of Software Freedom Changed, LUGs Became Less Relevant
- The way we see it, support groups like LUGs sort of outlived their usefulness when it became easier to install GNU/Linux
- For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
- Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
- Compromised by NVIDIA Proprietary Library
- Meanwhile in Boston there are "[r]oundtable talk with FSF volunteers (both in-person and online)"
- How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
- A rough summary
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- The Free Software Foundation's Livestream Has Ended, Video/s Might be Online Next
- I've asked whether they'll upload video of some of the event; I still wait for an answer
- The Register MS Does Not Know the Difference Between Microsoft GitHub and GitLab
- At the time of writing (October 5) the article from "Thu 2 Oct 2025" remains uncorrected
- "Bullshit Generators" (What RMS Calls LLMs) and Fake Images Already Target the FSF
- Why does Google News promote fake articles about the FSF while omitting all the real ones?
- Software Patents as a Bubble
- Don't invest resources in hype; if you detect a bubble, run away from it
- Links 05/10/2025: Political Leftovers, Climate Change, and Security Incidents
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 04, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 04, 2025
- When Microsoft "Integrates" Something With "AI" It Means It's Losing Money and Is Generally Hopeless
- how did Bing fare after 36 months of LLM slop being hyped up as "replacement" for search?
- Most Certificates Don't Improve Security, They Mostly Increase Downtime (for No Good Reason)
- The 'Gemini sites' (capsules) are a growing force
- The statCounter Site Has Data Integrity Problems
- Maybe we'll get back to statCounter when its data becomes more "stable" again
- 10 Ways to Combat Software Patents
- software patents are loathed also by proprietary software developers
- "Just a Little Bit of Meat..."
- Free software "absolutism" is not a radical stance, more so if the only "radical" belief the user possesses is that he or she must be in control of his or her software, and by extension his or her computer
- Red Hat is Ignoring the Free Software Community, It's a "Fortune 1000" Vendor
- Red Hat's blog also participates a lot in promoting of Wall Street's latest pump-and-dump "AI" scheme
- Free Software Foundation Party Has Begun
- We shall be focusing a lot on software patents today
- Former Head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Lina Khan Knows Whatever Microsoft Touches Will Die
- Just like Skype (as recently as months ago) [...] When Microsoft grabs things, or when it buys things, it almost never ends well
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles About LibreOffice in Austria and Wine 10.16
- very short
- Links 04/10/2025: "attempted Coup" Noted in Facebook, Russia Kills Journalists via Drones
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Anesthesia and Baudpunk
- Links for the day
- Links 04/10/2025: "Privacy Harm Is Harm", Criticism Outlawed in US
- Links for the day
- Garmin Uses Linux for Some of the Garmin Products, Now It's Sued by Strava Using Software Patents
- Software patents should never have been granted in the first place
- Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
- Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
- FSF Turns 40
- We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
- Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
- Links for the day
- We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
- For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
- Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
- Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
- USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
- we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
- TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
- Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
- Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
- Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
- Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
- For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
- Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
- Google News is really bad
- Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
- I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
- Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
- Links for the day
- Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
- Links for the day
- FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
- It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
- Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
- Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
- They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
- Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
- Links for the day