Kernel News: Linux 3.14 RC6, MOOC, ARM Support in Xen and More
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-13 20:08:41 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-13 20:08:41 UTC
Kernel Level
While it's late into the Linux 3.14 kernel development cycle, a patch that was introduced in Linux 3.13 with an aim of improving open-source graphics driver performance for TTM-based drivers is now being reverted since for some situations it instead decreased the performance.
The first Arduino-certified product to come out of Intel’s embedded systems division, is the Galileo a sign of things to come or a white elephant?
-
Red Hat is a relative late-comer to the dynamic patching party. Oracle has been in the space the longest, thanks to its 2011 acquisition of dynamic-kernel patching vendor Ksplice.
He has worked on the Linux kernel and userland for more than 20 years, in areas including KVM, the kernel-based virtual machine, high speed networking, Linux/ia64, Linux/m68k, the system libraries (glibc) and high-end NUMA systems.
-
For users of the BFS scheduler patches to the kernel, they have been updated this week for the Linux 3.13 kernel.
Con Kolivas continues maintaining his Brain Fuck Scheduler patch-set outside of the Linux kernel with no ambitions to mainline the alternative CPU scheduler. BFS 0.446 was released this week and with this release comes support for the now-stable Linux 3.13 kernel.
-
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are all the rage as conventional computing platforms have taken up the challenge of network routing and management (see “What's The Difference Between SDN and NFV”). The trend is to integrate monolithic, vertically integrated hardware like gateways and routers into a single, virtualized, hardware platform.
-
On a related note, the LLVM Linux project is also seeking GSoC attention. Developers are still hard at work on making the upstream Linux kernel compatible with building under LLVM/Clang rather than just GCC. Much progress has been made in being able to build the Linux kernel with Clang but there's still outstanding patches, etc.
Education
-
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it is building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than 31 universities have partnered with edX and nearly two million people have accessed its courses online since it launched just 18 months ago.
Xen/ARM
Xen 4.4 provides stable ARM support, improved libvirt support for libxl, a new scalable event channel interface, and many other changes. I've already written at length before about the big improvements to Xen 4.4 within Xen 4.4 Is On Approach With Many Features and Xen 4.4 Will Be Riding High With New Features.
Graphics Stack
-
Other changes for today's NVIDIA 334.21 Linux driver update include a NVIDIA kernel module security fix for a userspace pointer dereference, OpenGL bug-fixes, support for GPUs with VDPAU feature set E, improved application profile support, improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver's composition pipeline, NVIDIA Settings control panel updates, and other fixes.
-
Last week we talked about Broadcom finally open-sourcing their VideoCore IV 3D Graphics Stack and it is indeed the real McCoy, but the $10,000 Quake III bounty has yet to be claimed for getting it to work on the Raspberry Pi.
-
VDPAU Feature Set E is the latest revision of NVIDIA's PureVideo hardware that's found in the brand new Maxwell graphics processors. With the GeForce GTX 750 series support for VDPAU Feature Set E, there is support for H.264 decoding up to 4096 x 4096 and MPEG-1/MPEG-2 streams up to 4080 x 4080. These new GPUs also support enhanced error concealment when dealing with the decoding of corrupted video streams.
Benchmarks
The ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T is a Haswell-based Intel ultrabook that I have found to be quite interesting and will be carrying out a large number of Linux tests (and Windows 8.1 vs. Linux benchmarks) from this laptop that sports Intel Iris Graphics 5100, dual SSDs, and other impressive features.
For any Linux laptop users or those concerned about their data's safety on production systems, I highly recommend utilizing disk encryption for safeguarding the data. However, what's the performance impact like these days? In this article with the current development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a modern Intel ultrabook we're looking at the impact (including CPU utilization) of using an eCryptfs-based home directory encryption and LUKS-based full-disk encryption on Ubuntu Linux.
-
For those curious about the performance of Intel's "Quark" x86 SoC for very low-power applications, including wearable devices, here's some benchmarks of Debian on their Galileo development board.
-
...in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
-
For this article we benchmarked Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development state and compared it to the Ubuntu releases going back three years to Ubuntu 11.10.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Good Explanation of Why IBM Has Chosen to Conceal Mass Layoffs (of 'Expensive' Staff) as "R.T.O." (Even For People Who Never Worked at the Office to Which They're Ordered to "Return")
- Many remaining IBM (or Red Hat) workers in Europe are in "cheaper" places such as Brno
- Microsoft's Serial Strangler and Matthew J. Garrett Join Forces in Trying to Gag Techrights (for Exposing Microsoft Corruption and Crimes Against Women)
- Whose terrible idea was it?
- Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Proud to Host Free Software Talk by Richard Stallman
- ahead of Monday's talk
- Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Machine-Generated FUD (LLM Slop) From GBHackers, CybersecurityNews, and Guardian Digital, Inc (Google News Promotes Slop Plagiarism, Misinformation)
- Companies that lie try to drown out the signal with falsehoods
-
- Politicians Ought to Invite Dr. Richard Stallman and Prof. Eben Moglen to Speak About Policies, Licensing, Digital Sovereignty
- Is there something in Europe other than RMS' talk this coming Monday (that we're not yet aware of)?
- Links 22/02/2025: Labour Department Investigates Microsoft Infosys Amid Mass Layoffs, Large Law Firms Caught Red Handed With LLM Slop (Defrauding Clients and Courts)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/02/2025: Analog Stuff, Sigil, and SSGs
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Market Share in Cameroon Falls to New Lows
- This means a lot of Android users (iOS is about 4 times smaller), but Android does not mean freedom
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, February 21, 2025
- The Streisand Effect is Real
- So don't be evil. Also, don't strangle women.
- Links 21/02/2025: Linux Foundation Openwashing, Microsoft Copilot Goes Down
- Links for the day
- Links 21/02/2025: Doomscrolling and European Ham Radio Show
- Links for the day
- Links 21/02/2025: TikTok Layoffs, WebOS Software Patents in Bad Hands
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/02/2025: Web Browsers, Mechanical Shortcuts, and Internet Hygiene
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman 'Only' Founded the FSF
- there's no reason to be upset at the FSF for keeping their founder in the Board
- Techrights Disconnected From the United States Two Years Ago
- Did people really need to wait for the US government to become this hostile towards the media before recognising the threat?
- Before Trying Censorship by Extortion the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Literally Begged Us to Delete Pages
- This is very clearly just a broad campaign of intimidation
- Hype Watch: Weeks After Microsoft Disappointed Investors With "Hey Hi" It's Trying Some "Quantum" Hype (Adding Impractical Vapourware to Accompany This Hype and Even LLM Slop in 'News' Clothing)
- Remember "metaverse"? What happened to media hype about "blockchain" and "IoT"?
- Report About February Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in 2025) Comes Back From the Dead
- Yesterday we wrote about an article in CRN (reporting Microsoft layoffs) being removed without any reasons specified
- Links 21/02/2025: Myanmar Scam Centre and Disruptions at USPTO
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 20, 2025
- gbhackers.com is Not Hackers, It's LLM Slop Outputs (Fake 'Articles') That Attack 'True Hackers'
- A site called linuxsecurity.com keeps doing this and now we see the slopfarm gbhackers.com doing the same
- Gemini Links 20/02/2025: Law of Warming and Cooling, Health, and Devlog
- Links for the day
- linuxsecurity.com Continues to Spread Lies or Machine-Generated FUD (Microsoft LLMs Likely the Source) About OpenSSH and Linux
- this LLM problem is global
- Links 20/02/2025: Microsoft Infosys Layoffs and IRS Layoffs (Good News for Rich Tax Evaders)
- Links for the day
- IBM Layoffs in Europe Already Happening or Underway (UK and Spain). They Try Not to Call These "Layoffs".
- "CIO" in particular was repeatedly mentioned lately, as was Consulting
- People Who Came From Microsoft Demanding Removal of Articles About Them, About Microsoft, and About Microsoft GitHub is "Generous" (According to Them)
- Imagine choosing a law firm that borrows money in the same year just to avoid overdraft in the bank!
- Possibly a Third Round of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 ("Cloud Solution Architects, Customer Roles"), Report Removed or Censored
- This is literally the top story for "microsoft layoffs" right now
- Instead of 'DoS Protection' Cloudflare is Allegedly Conducting 'DoS Attacks' on Users of Browsers Other Than Firefox and GAFAM's DRM Sandboxes (Chrome, Safari and Others)
- If you value the Web, you will avoid Cloudflare
- Mixing Real With Fake in One 'Article' (by "Director of Content, Help Net Security")
- From what we can gather, he got machines to generate some slop for him
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, February 19, 2025