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
- New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
- It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
-
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
- Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
- There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
- The Slop Song
- The train wreck marches on
- LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
- Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
- Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
- Links for the day
- "Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
- Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
- Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
- We do try to keep on top of those things
- Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
- The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
- Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
- Forking always an option
- IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
- IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
- We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
- Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
- If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
- Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
- Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
- How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
- Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
- UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
- It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
- Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
- GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
- Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
- Links for the day
- Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
- Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
- Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
- If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
- Social Control Media is Sinking
- it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually