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
- Frans Pop suicide and Ubuntu grievances
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Workers' Right to Disconnect Won't Matter If Such a Right Isn't Properly Enforced
- I was always "on-call" and my main role or function was being "on-call" in case of incidents
- A Discussion About Suicides in Science and Technology (Including Debian and the European Patent Office)
- In Debian, there is a long history of deaths, suicides, and mysterious disappearances
- Federal News Network is Corrupt, It Runs Propaganda Pieces for Microsoft
- Federal News Network used to be OK some years ago
- Hard Evidence Reinforces Suspicion That Mark Shuttleworth May Have Worked Volunteers to Death
- Today we start re-publishing articles that contain unaltered E-mails
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- [Meme] Sometimes Torvalds and RMS Agree on Things
- hype around chatbots
- [Video] Linus Torvalds on 'Hilarious' AI Hype: "I Hate the Hype" and "I Don't Want to be Part of the Hype", "You Need to Be a Bit Cynical About This Whole Hype Cycle"
- Linus Torvalds on LLMs
- Colin Watson, Steve McIntyre & Debian, Ubuntu cover-up mission after Frans Pop suicide
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 30/04/2024: Wireless Carriers Selling Customer Location Data, Facebook Posts Causing Trouble
- Links for the day
- Links 30/04/2024: More Google Layoffs (Wide-Ranging)
- Links for the day
- Fresh Rumours of Impending Mass Layoffs at IBM Red Hat
- "IBM filed a W.A.R.N with the state of North Carolina. That only means one thing."
- Mark Shuttleworth's (MS's) Canonical is Promoting Microsoft This Week (Surveillance Slanted as 'Confidential')
- Who runs Canonical these days? Why does Canonical help sell Windows?
- What Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Can to Remedy the Damage Done to Frans Pop's Family
- Mr. Shuttleworth and Canonical as a company can at the very least apologise for putting undue pressure
- Amnesty International & Debian Day suicides comparison
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- [Meme] A Way to Get No Real Work Done
- Walter White looking at phone: Your changes could not be saved to device
- Modern Measures of 'Productivity' Boil Down to Time Wasting and Misguided Measurements/Yardsticks
- People are forgetting the value of nature and other human beings
- Countries That Beat the United States at RSF's World Press Freedom Index (After US Plunged Some More)
- The United States (US) was 17 when these rankings started in 2002
- Record Productivity and Preserving People's Past on the Net
- We're very productive these days, partly owing to online news slowing down (less time spent on curating Daily Links)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, April 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, April 29, 2024
- Links 30/04/2024: Malaysian and Russian Governments Crack Down on Journalists
- Links for the day
- Frans Pop Debian Day suicide, Ubuntu, Google and the DEP-5 machine-readable copyright file
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich), the mentality of sexual violence on campus
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- [Meme] Russian Reversal
- Mark Shuttleworth: In Soviet Russia's spacecraft... Man exploits peasants
- Frans Pop & Debian suicide denial
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- The Real Threats to Society Include Software Patents and the Corporations That Promote Them
- The OIN issue isn't a new one and many recognise this by now
- Links 30/04/2024: OpenBSD and Enterprise Cloaking Device
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Still Owes Over 100 Billion Dollars and It Cannot be Paid Back Using 'Goodwill'
- Meanwhile, Microsoft's cash at hand (in the bank) nearly halved in the past year.
- [Teaser] Ubuntu Cover-up After Death
- Attack the messenger
- The Cyber Show Explains What CCTV is About
- CCTV does not typically resolve crime
- [Video] Ignore Buzzwords and Pay Attention to Attacks on Software Developers
- AI in the Machine Learning sense is nothing new
- Outline of Themes to Cover in the Coming Weeks
- We're accelerating coverage and increasing focus on suppressed topics
- [Video] Not Everyone Claiming to Protect the Vulnerable is Being Honest
- "Diversity" bursaries aren't always what they seem to be
- [Video] Enshittification of the Media, of the Web, and of Computing in General
- It manifests itself in altered conditions and expectations
- [Meme] Write Code 100% of the Time
- IBM: Produce code for us till we buy the community... And never use "bad words" like "master" and "slave" (pioneered by IBM itself in the computing context)
- [Video] How Much Will It Take for Most People to Realise "Open Source" Became Just Openwashing (Proprietary Giants Exploiting Cost-Free or Unpaid 'Human Resources')?
- turning "Open Source" into proprietary software
- Freedom of Speech... Let's Ban All Software Freedom Speeches?
- There's a moral panic over people trying to actually control their computing
- Richard Stallman's Talk in Spain Canceled (at Short Notice)
- So it seems to have been canceled very fast
- Links 29/04/2024: "AI" Hype Deflated, Economies Slow Down Further
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/04/2024: Gopher Experiment and Profectus Alpha 0.9
- Links for the day
- [Video] Why Microsoft is by Far the Biggest Foe of Computer Security (Clue: It Profits From Security Failings)
- Microsoft is infiltrating policy-making bodies, ensuring real security is never pursued
- Debian 'Cabal' (via SPI) Tried to Silence or 'Cancel' Daniel Pocock at DNS Level. It Didn't Work. It Backfired as the Material Received Even More Visibility.
- know the truth about modern slavery
- Lucas Nussbaum & Debian attempted exploit of OVH Hosting insider
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is Not a Friend of Freedom
- We'll shortly reproduce two older articles from disguised.work
- Harassment Against My Wife Continues
- Drug addict versus family of Techrights authors
- Syria, John Lennon & Debian WIPO panel appointed
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 28, 2024
- [Video] GNU and Linux Everywhere (Except by Name)
- In a sense, Linux already has over 50% of the world's "OS" market
- [Video] Canonical Isn't (No Longer) Serious About Making GNU/Linux Succeed in Desktops/Laptops
- Some of the notorious (or "controversial") policies of Canonical have been covered here for years
- [Video] What We've Learned About Debian From Emeritus Debian Developer Daniel Pocock
- pressure had been put on us (by Debian people and their employer/s) and as a result we did not republish Debian material for a number of years
- Bruce Perens & Debian public domain trademark promise
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 28/04/2024: Shareholders Worry "AI" Hype Brings No Income, Money Down the Drain
- Links for the day
- Lawyer won't lie for Molly de Blanc & Chris Lamb (mollamby)
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 27, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 27, 2024