Kernel Space

• Intel DisplayPort Gets High Bit Rate 2 In Linux 3.14

  An Intel DRM driver change that's been queued up for the Linux 3.14 kernel provides High Bit Rate 2 (HBR2) support for DisplayPort 1.2 devices for Haswell and future generations of Intel hardware.





• Linux 3.14 Kernel Gets A Power Supply Notifier

• Nftables Steals the Show in Linux 3.13

  "The release got delayed by a week due to travels, but I suspect that's just as well," wrote Linux creator Linus Torvalds in the announcement email on Sunday evening. "We had a few fixes come in, and while it wasn't a lot, I think we're better off for it." The patch from the eighth release candidate is "fairly small," Torvalds added, including primarily some small architecture updates, drivers and networking fixes. The ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 architectures all saw some minor changes, he noted, including some that arose from a networking fix for the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) JIT.





• Linux kernel 3.13 and Radeon users rejoice





• Linux 3.13 Kernel Officially Released





• Why you will love nftables

  Linux 3.13 is out bringing among other thing the first official release of nftables. nftables is the project that aims to replace the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}tables framework aka iptables. nftables version in Linux 3.13 is not yet complete. Some important features are missing and will be introduced in the following Linux versions. It is already usable in most cases but a complete support (read nftables at a better level than iptables) should be available in Linux 3.15.





• Deadline scheduler merged for 3.14





• USB & Staging Driver Changes For The Linux 3.14 Kernel

  Besides the sysfs to Kernfs changes that were submitted on Monday by a Greg Kroah-Hartman pull request, also submitted were pull requests for the USB and staging areas of the kernel for the Linux 3.14 release.





• Linux 3.14: Generic CPU Boost, P-State Improvements





• Memory Protection Extensions Not Done For Linux 3.14





• Linux 3.13 Improves Networking, Memory Performance

  The first new Linux kernel of 2014 arrives with new features and performance enhancements for the open-source operating system.





• Linux Kernel Updates Add Features for Mobile, Cloud, Big Data

  Linux kernel version 3.13, the latest release of the open source operating system, is out as of Jan. 20. Alongside the usual slew of code updates that only geeks can fully appreciate, this release brings with it some key new features that could impact the future of open source platforms for e-commerce, personal computing and more.





• Linux Foundation takes one giant step forward with the AllSeen Alliance and the Internet of Things

  If you read the technology press lately, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance (a Google News search I just did produced 412 results in a wide range of languages). That's not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there's a story behind the story that likely won't get the attention that it deserves, and that's what this blog post is about. (Disclosure: the AllSeen Alliance is a Linux Collaboration Project—the 11th so far—and I assisted in its structuring and launch.)





• Broadwell Audio, Better PM For Sound In Linux 3.14

  Initial audio support for Intel's Broadwell, the 2014 successor to Haswell. We've seen various Broadwell bits land in Linux 3.13 for graphics, etc, but it looks like the Linux 3.14 kernel will end up being the baseline for decent "out of the box" Broadwell support.





• Changes For The Linux 3.14 Kernel

Graphics Stack

• Wayland reaches version 1.4 RC

  The first release candidate for Wayland 1.4 is out now. Designed by Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. It is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it. Part of the Wayland project is also the Weston reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.





• NVIDIA Is Still Killing AMD Over Linux OpenGL Performance

  Back in November I published my review of the AMD Radeon R9 290 on Linux. This high-end AMD Radeon "Hawaii" graphics card ended up being a wreck on Linux: its performance was devastating. Radeon R9 290X owners have also reported their Linux performance with the Catalyst driver has been less than stellar. In new tests conducted last week with the latest AMD and NVIDIA binary graphics drivers, the high-end AMD GPUs still really aren't proving much competition to NVIDIA's Kepler graphics cards. Here's a new 12 graphics card comparison on Ubuntu.





• Khronos Releases SPIR 1.2 For OpenCL

  The SPIR 1.2 specification announced today provides non-source encoding and binary level portability for OpenCL 1.2 programs. Besides the new specification they're putting otu today, the Khronos Group is also publishing code to a modified Clang 3.2 compiler that can generate SPIR from OpenCL C 1.2 programs, a SPIR module written as an LLVM pass, and a header file with all enumerated values of the SPIR 1.2 specification.