Links 14/1/2014: Kernel News (Linux)

ARM Allwinner A10, Cubieboard Come To Coreboot

The Allwinner A10 ARM SoC is now supported by Coreboot along with the A10-based Cubieboard.

Linux 3.13-rc7 announced

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 3.13-rc7 noting that even though the things are calming down, he will release rc8 before releasing the final one.

Btrfs-Progs To Be Updated In Tandem With The Kernel

Chris Mason intends to update the btrfs-progs user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system in conjunction with new stable Linux kernel releases.

The lead Btrfs developer, who is now being employed by Facebook along with other Btrfs developers, quietly announced the release policy change a few weeks ago on the developers' mailing list.

Linux Drives Automotive Innovation into the New Year

With the addition just last week of the Google-led Open Automotive Alliance, nearly every automaker in the world is choosing Linux for technology integration and innovation in the car. This reminds me a lot of the early days of Linux in the enterprise or Linux in mobile. Is starts small and accelerates at an exponential rate. It’s one of the unique attributes of Linux.

Volatile Ranges Still Being Tried For The Linux Kernel

The Volatile Ranges feature for the Linux kernel is now in its third year of being developed and a new set of sixteen patches were published today but there's still no sign that the code is ready for merging in the near-term.

AnthraX Linux Kernels Remain Closed Source

AnthraX, a kernel used by some for their mobile Android devices as an alternative to the stock kernels or those from other open-source Android projects for reportedly offering better performance and functionality, is still refusing to release the kernel's source-code even though it's based on the Linux kernel and subject to the terms of the GPL.

Linux Kernel News - December 2013

The last 3.13 release candidate for 2013 came out on December 29th. This 3.13-rc6 is small with just 81 commits to infiniband, gpu, cpufreq, libata, and block drivers in addition to a few small filesystem fixes, and ARM SoC related changes. Please read the 3.13-rc6 release announcement.

Right before Christmas on December 22nd, 3.13-rc5 came out. Changes in this rc include drivers, architecture, filesystems, scheduler, and mm (numa) fixes. One important news in this release announcement is about the 3.14 merge window will start after Linus Torvalds gets back from attending the Linux Conference in Australia. Please find the full text for the 3.13-rc5 release announcement.

Linux 3.14 May Bring Big VMware GPU Driver Update

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware sent in their first pull request today of "vmwgfx" driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel, but it looks like the best is yet to come.

Intel Ivy Bridge Linux Performance Stepped Up In 2013

In continuation from last month's Intel Haswell Linux Performance Improved A Lot In 2013, here are benchmarks of Intel "Ivy Bridge" HD Graphics 4000 when comparing the performance over the past year.

Linus Torvalds’ Subsurface 4.0.1 released

Subsurface is a diving log software written by none other than Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. Linus is also the creator of version control system Git which is the most popular version control system of the world.

Intel Starts On Mesa Compute Shaders Support
Anatomy of a 22-year-old X Window bug: Get root with newly uncovered flaw

Sysadmins have a few days to patch libXfont to remove a newly discovered, 22-year-old privilege-escalation bug in the code before any tiresome users whip out an exploit. The flaw allows someone logged into a vulnerable machine to crash the X server, or possibly execute injected code as a superuser.
Intel Driver Picks Up More Improvements In Linux 3.14

Linux 3.14 To Have PRIME Support For NVIDIA Tegra

The Tegra changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel are rather large with 121 commits in this latest pull just for the open-source graphics driver. There's initial DRM panel support, initial support for registering DSI hosts and peripherals, Tegra114 DSI host support, host1x/display support for the Tegra124 (Tegra 4), and there's a very simple PRIME implementation.

Intel X.Org Driver Gets Fixes, Broadwell Acceleration

Besides publishing their Haswell hardware documentation, coming out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center today is the latest Intel 3.0 X.Org driver development release.

Ozone-Wayland Continues Rising High

The Ozone-Wayland sub-project for Google Chromium support on the next-generation Linux display server continues to be pushed ahead with improved and new features by Intel open-source developers.

YouTube goes 4K at CES, brings royalty free VP9 to fore front
Read the excellent year-end proprietary AMD Catalyst and free Radeon driver roundup from Phoronix and find out why I'm recommending against buying AMD hardware for Linux

The Latest Benchmarks Of The Linux 3.13 Kernel

For some quick benchmarks to start off another week of open-source and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are new results comparing the Linux 3.13-rc7 kernel against the latest stable 3.11/3.12 kernels: 3.11.10 and 3.12.6, respectively. These benchmarks were done from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32 Intel ultrabook that's been featured in several Phoronix articles in recent weeks.

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