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
- RMS 'Inauguration' in Montpellier (Government Administration) on January 20th
- Happy hacking
- Even Technical Articles and HowTos From UNIXMen Nowadays Seem to be LLM Slop
- We've just permanently removed the RSS feed of UNIXMen
- The FSF's 2024 End-of-Year Fundraiser Succeeds: Over $400k to Support Software Freedom
- That's worth bringing up again because the SFC is trying to 'crash' this achievement of the FSF
- [Meme] Fentanylware (TikTok) Banned in the United States, Next Up European Union (EU)
- And the United Kingdom (UK)
- President Biden is Right, "Free Press is Crumbling" and the United States Exports Its Media-Hostile Culture to Other Continents
- perhaps Biden should pay closer attention to how Donald Trump-inspired Americans take their battles to other continents
- Guardian Digital, Inc (linuxsecurity.com) Uses Microsoft-Controlled Front Groups and LLM Slop in Order to Spread Microsoft-Directed Anti-Linux FUD
- Microsoft garbage likely produced by Microsoft LLMs, spewing out Microsoft FUD
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- Slopwatch: Too Lazy to Write Real Articles, Offloading to Chatbots Instead (LLM Slop About "Linux")
- The Web was already full of garbage before the LLM frenzy. Now it's even worse.
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 17, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, January 17, 2025
- Links 17/01/2025: TikTok Banned by the United Stated (SCOTUS Rejects Appeal)
- Links for the day
- Software Freedom Conservancy Inc (SFC) Makes It Obvious It's Just a Copycat Trying to Exploit or Leech Off the FSF's (and GNU's) Work
- They swim next to the rich people (who "match")
- Links 17/01/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) Herds Its (Drug) Users Into Even More Harmful "Apps"
- Links for the day
- Likely Fake 'Article' About Linux Mint 22.1
- BetaNews fired up its plagiarism machine (LLM)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 16, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, January 16, 2025
- Links 16/01/2025: Conflicts, Overpopulation, and Software Patents
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Lock-down With DRM Server/s (in a Nutshell)
- Companies like Microsoft and Apple have a 'God complex'
- Thank You, London! There Was No Way to Still Reliably Host Gemini From Home (on a Raspberry Pi 4) Due to Scale
- The only regret we've long had is that we hadn't made the move earlier
- The Summit of Future (Kerala, 2025): Dr. Richard Stallman (RMS) to Give Keynote Talk
- promotional video was uploaded
- Richard Stallman's Talk This Coming Monday (European 'Tour')
- bunch of talks in Europe
- Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part II - Down to the Very Core, Including the Hardware (CPU, GPU, Peripherals, and More)
- instead of distinguishing themselves and antagonising these broadly reviled "antifeatures", both Canonical and IBM decided to join Microsoft in advocating lockdown
- FSF, Guardian of the GNU Project, to Reach $400,000 in Winter Fundraiser Ahead of 40th Anniversary
- The GNU Project Turns 42 later this year
- Links 16/01/2025: "Meduza, IRL" and the Clock is Ticking on TikTok in the US
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/01/2025: Yesterday's Gone, The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E Howard
- Links for the day
- Computer Users Aren't Zoo Animals
- Animals don't belong inside cages in zoos, either
- Links 16/01/2025: Scale and Scope of Microsoft Layoffs Revealed (Two Waves of Layoffs in 2025 Already)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/01/2025: Meta Has a Pixelfed Problem and Space Time Scoping
- Links for the day
- Anti-Linux 'Articles' in linuxsecurity.com (Guardian Digital, Inc) Are Composed by Bots, Probably Microsoft's
- linuxsecurity.com has become a mindless stream of LLM slop
- "New Year, New Career"
- published a few hours ago
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 15, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, January 15, 2025