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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
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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.
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