Links 13/12/2013: Linux (Kernel) News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
Spanning over one week, grouped and clustered for convenience
KVM/QEMU/Xen
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Linux has many hypervisors, such as Xen, and it's supported by more, such as Azure, but it also has its own built-in hypervisor: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Unfortunately, KVM only works on Intel and AMD processors. Earlier this year, IBM announced that it would be adding KVM support to its Power architecture, and now we know that it will be appearing sometime in 2014.
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QEMU 1.7.0-rc2 was released yesterday and if all goes according to plan the official QEMU 1.7 release will happen on Wednesday. This next QEMU emulator update that's also relied upon by Linux KVM will bring some exciting improvements.
'Linux Experience'
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I often hear the argument that Android is not Linux or Chrome OS is not Linux. Technically that’s not true. Linux is just the kernel and both these operating systems user Linux so they are Linux-based operating systems.
What people are actually trying to say is they don’t get the same ‘Linux experience’ when they use these operating systems. What’s that Linux experience?
Kernel Version 3.12
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, November 29, that the second maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 8, that the fourth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
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.. I'm still on a Friday release schedule, although I hope that
changes soon - the reason I didn't drag this one out to Sunday is that
it's already big enough, and I'll wait until things start calming
down.
Which they really should, at this point. Hint hint. I'll start
shouting at people for sending me stuff that isn't appropriate as
we're starting to get later into the release candidates.
That said, it's not like rc3 is somehow unmanageably large or that
anything particularly scary has happened. I'd have *liked* for it to
be smaller, but I always do.. And nothing particularly nasty stands
out here.
The bulk here is drivers (net, scsi, sound, crypto..) and ARM DT
stuff, but there's the usual randon stuff too, with arch updates
(pa-risc, more ARM, x86) and some filesystem and networking updates.
Kernel Version 3.13
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The /dev/random changes went in for the Linux 3.13 kernel and this pull request was even interesting for the very promising next kernel release. While not in Linux 3.13, it's mentioned the Linux kernel might also end up taking a security feature from the FreeBSD playbook.
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A second pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.13 kernel that provides further updates to the often less than desirable ACPI and power management code.
Submitted (and pulled) two weeks ago were already big ACPI and PM updates for this next Linux kernel release. However, Rafael Wysocki has now sent in a second ACPI/PM update for Linux 3.13 that's queued up some more changes then and right ahead of the 3.13-rc1 tagging.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few hours ago, November 20, that the first maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
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This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments to the Discussion page. There's a blog that reports on the main changes to the forecast. You can view it directly or use a feed reader to subscribe to the blog feed. You can also subscribe directly to the changes feed for this page to see feed all forecast edits.
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For those keeping track of Linux 3.13 kernel activity, another DRM subsystem pull update was submitted during this merge window.
Jailhouse
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We are happy to announce the Jailhouse project, now also to a broader community!
Linux Foundation
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This past summer marked Moscow-based developer Anton Kirilenko's third Google Summer of Code internship with The Linux Foundation. That's three summers, three different projects and mentors, and three totally different experiences with Linux and open source software.
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Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, more commonly referred to as KVM, is one of the most popular open-source virtualization technologies in use today. Both IBM and Red Hat use it as the basis for their Linux virtualization technologies, and it is the most widely used virtualization technology in the OpenStack cloud as well.
KVM was originally written by Israeli software developer Avi Kivity while he was working at Qumranet. Qumranet was acquired by Red Hat for $107 million in 2008.
Training
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The interns who worked with The Linux Foundation as part of the FOSS Outreach Program for Women this summer come from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience, but they now have at least one thing in common (besides their gender). They can all add “Linux kernel hacker” to their resume.
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Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel.
These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany.
Graphics Stack
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As part of the work to bring OpenACC 2.0 and NVIDIA GPU support to GCC, a large set of patches were published this morning for adding NVIDIA's PTX back-end to the Free Software Foundation's compiler.
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Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver. For end-users curious what the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU performance is comparable to when it comes to discrete Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D driver, here's some weekend comparison benchmarks.
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An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the "MSM" DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.
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While it isn't in the form of any complete documentation, a NVIDIA engineer has begun answering questions by the open-source Nouveau driver developers about video decoding with their H.264 engine.
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The oddly-named Wayland Live CD environment for checking out the next-generation Linux display stack has been updated. The Wayland Live CD ships with many enabled tool-kits, the latest Wayland code, Orbital and Hawaii support, KDE Frameworks Wayland programs, and other new native Wayland applications.
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As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.
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A couple years ago Broadcom released the Crystal HD as a standalone hardware video decoder chip. While there's been an open-source Linux driver for the Crystal HD, we haven't heard much about it in recent months, but that changed this morning.
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After running earlier this week a 21-way graphics card comparison with Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, there were requests by some Phoronix readers to see some new APU performance numbers. For ending out November, here's new Catalyst vs. Gallium3D driver benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux for the AMD A10-6800K with its Radeon HD 8670D graphics. The results with the latest Linux kernel and Mesa are very positive towards the open-source AMD driver where in some tests the performance can nearly match Catalyst! For at least one Source Engine game, the open-source driver can now even run significantly faster than the binary driver.
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The 10.0 release was expected a few days back, but now it's finally happened via Intel's Ian Romanick with this brief announcement.
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While zRAM has been part of the Linux kernel's staging area for a while now and this RAM-based compressed block device is used by Chrome OS and Android, it's struggling to get promoted to the main area of the kernel.
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Intel's Windows OpenGL driver continues to make progress in a more steadfast manner than the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. The latest achievement for the Intel Windows driver is OpenGL 4.2 compliance for Haswell.
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There's another game studio now backing AMD's Mantle graphics rendering API that aims to be faster and easier to implement for games than OpenGL. However, we're still waiting for AMD Mantle on Linux.
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The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for AMD HD 7000 series GPUs and newer is now 75% faster for the Source Engine Team Fortress 2 game thanks to a new patch-set by Marek.
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If you've been eyeing a purchase of a 4K "Ultra HD" TV this holiday season and will be connecting it to a Linux system, here's the information that you need to know for getting started and some performance benchmarks to set the expectations for what you can expect. This article has a number of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks when running various Linux OpenGL workloads at a resolution of 3840 x 2160.
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After a lot of mailing list discussions amongst developers that have a stake in Wayland and early patches sent out, the latest xdg-shell patches were formally distributed today on the developers' mailing list. The xdg-shell is a new protocol living outside of the core Wayland protocol.
Benchmarks
Btrfs
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This is my final post in this series about the btrfs filesystem. The first in the series covered btrfs basics, the second was resizing, multiple volumes and devices, the third was RAID and Redundancy,and the fourth and most recent was subvolumes and snapshots.
I think (and hope) that all of those together give a reasonable overview of what the btrfs filesystem is, what you can do with it, and how you can do some of those things. In this post I will wrap up a couple of loose ends - error recovery, and integration with other standard Linux utilities - and try to give a recap of the series as a whole. For complete and authoritative information, please refer to the Btrfs Wiki at kernel.org.
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Btrfs is a new file system for Linux, one that is still very much in development. Although I wouldn't exactly describe it as "experimental" any more, it is, as stated in the Wiki at kernel.org, "a fast-moving target".
It has also been said publicly that the basic format and structure of the filesystem should now be stable; it would only be changed in the future if some overriding reason or need is found.
The point of all this should be clear — it is still very early days, and it is not recommended to use btrfs in critical systems of any kind.
I leave it to the reader to decide how critical their systems are; for my own purposes, I will be using btrfs on several systems that I use as testbeds, some of which I carry with me and use for normal work on a daily basis, so it will get a "real" test, but I will not be using it on the primary systems that my partner and I use for home/work/business activities.
Misc.
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The Linux Foundation launched the 100 Linux Video Tutorials campaign last January and today an update was posted. According to Jennifer Cloer nearly 100 videos have been submitted but she said, " We need your help to reach 100 Linux video tutorials in January." The collection boasts 83 submissions so far.
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Windows might be the majority, but a big part of that is because the laptop manufacturers expend little to no effort on the alternative. Meanwhile, 50% of their customers would be happier running Linux if it was well setup!
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KTAP version 0.4 is now available as the script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Changing One's Name Won't Change One's Past
- People who have earned a bad reputation are not magically "entitled" to reset
- People Who Assault Women Are Not Victims of "Distress"
- It seems like an American tradition. In a country with almost 50 presidents, not even one was a female.
- Adoption of Gemini Protocol Still Growing
- Gemini Protocol is being obscured by the media - it doesn't help that Google 'hijacked' the word "Gemini" - but people still manage to find out about it, download a client, and use it
- Brett Wilson LLP "Takes it Personal" (Character Assassination, Not Professionalism). Everybody Can See That.
- On behalf of violent men
- Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
- people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
- Microsoft Repeats the Mistakes Made by the EPO After We Exposed a Major Microsoft/EPO Scandal 10 Years Ago
- That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
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- Ubuntu is Becoming GAFAM-Like
- What does that say about Canonical and Ubuntu?
- Slopfarms Which Take Real Articles About GNU/Linux and Turn Them Into Copycats Which Are False
- Even before the LLM hype those were quite common
- The Firm That Picks on Techrights is Accustomed to Working With Criminals
- Techrights never did anything illegal. So why is it being picked on by people who work with criminals?
- Microsoft Said the Mass Layoffs Were for "Investment" in "AI", But It's Also Laying Off the "AI" and "Copilot" Staff
- Months ago we showed many so-called "AI" people were getting the boot and this time it's the same
- DryDeadFish is Dead, Long Live DryDeadFish
- We kept checking, hoping it can recover from some temporary technical issue
- For Quite Some Time Already Microsoft Attracts Crackpots, Scams, and More
- Occasionally we talk about the situation at IBM as there are many parallels
- Links 14/07/2025: Chatbots Broken Again, McHire LLM Shows Limits of the Hype
- Links for the day
- Slashdot Media Turned Linux Journal Into a Slopfarm and Now Slashdot Actively Promotes Anti-Linux Slopfarms
- Yes, "no-nonsense" apparently means actual nonsense
- Links 14/07/2025: Arresting Photographers, Threats to Revoke US Citizenship Over Criticism
- Links for the day
- More EPO Leaks on the Way
- We hope that Mr. Rowan will actually try to refute what we say and show, not merely point the finger at the messengers
- Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities
- systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft
- copyleft.org 'Hijacked' by the People Who Attack the Person Who Created Copyleft
- So far there's nothing "tasteless" in copyleft.org, but that can change at any time in the future
- Asking People to Take Down Articles and Videos Only Makes These More Popular and "Viral"
- If you do something bad, one of the worst things you can possibly do it try to silence those who speak about it
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 13, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 13, 2025
- Two-Thirds Towards FSF Goal, Richard Stallman to Give Talks in Europe
- There are 67 left before reaching the target
- Gemini Links 14/07/2025: Politicised Tech and "Leaving GitHub"
- Links for the day
- The Demise of LLMs
- We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
- Links for the day
- Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
- Links for the day
- Firing Away With Nonsense
- Or fighting fire with fire
- Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
- Links for the day
- Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
- Neither legal nor useful
- The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
- This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
- Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
- Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
- Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
- And likely in prior years, too
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
- Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
- EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
- Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
- Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
- Gemini Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
- Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
- cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
- Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
- Links for the day
- If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
- Nope.
- Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
- Links for the day
- Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
- The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
- EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
- slides
- Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
- The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
- EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
- "The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025