Kernel News: Collaboration Summit, Releases of Linux, and Lots of Graphics Milestones
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-27 13:32:06 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-27 13:34:10 UTC
Collaboration Summit
At an exclusive gathering at the Linux Collaboration Summit, some of the crème de la crème of Linux developers talked about what’s going on with the Linux kernel today.
Open source software was first introduced in the enterprise by developers who used it in secret. CIOs and other managers would assert there wasn’t any open source within their walls only to uncover multiple skunkworks projects built on and with open source. Over the last decade, the use of open source software and tools has gone mainstream and today developers and managers alike understand and reap the benefits. Today no one gets fired for using open source.
At the Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event for top Linux and open source developers, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Foundation, said in the keynote: "Open source will be the new Pareto Principle." By that, he meant that 80 percent of technology value—whether it's from smartphones, TVs, or IT—will be coming from open source software development with only 20 percent coming from proprietary programming.
Companies are increasingly turning to collaborative software development to build their products and services and speed innovation, keynote presenters at Collaboration Summit told us this morning. But how does this process actually happen? Open source directors from Intel, Citrix and the OpenDaylight Foundation shared some of their secrets of collaborative development in an afternoon panel discussion, moderated by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. Below is an edited version of the conversation, which covers the rise of open source foundations, how to attract top engineering talent, how to manage open source developers, and more.
Open source and collaborative software development has evolved in recent years to become an essential part of technology industry innovation, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin in his opening keynote at Collaboration Summit today.
Kicking off one week's time will be the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley, California.
Releases
Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the eighth and most likely the last Release Candidate in the 3.14 branch of the kernel, although this should have been the final version.
Kernel Misc,
systemd 212, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts, which provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, has been released and is now available for download.
Alejandra Morales announced the Cryogenic Linux kernel module on the LKML today. Cryogenic aims to reduce system power consumption by "enabling cooperative clustering of I/O operations among the various applications that make use of the same hardware device. In order to achieve this target, Cryogenic provides an API that enables applications to schedule I/O operations on SCSI and network devices at times where the impact the operations have on energy consumption is small."
Wayland
Originally XWayland served as an X.Org module by which modified DDX hardware drivers could be loaded on the system so they could offer their 2D support. However, given the advancements of GLAMOR, that is being used instead so we can have one unified XWayland DDX without the need for having patched drivers for hardware support and should work on just about any platform that has OpenGL support. GLAMOR tends to still be slower than the hand-written 2D paths in the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel DDX, but there's still a lot of optimizations and code rewrites taking place of the code now that it's moved from being a standalone library to living within the X.Org Server.
The Ozone-Wayland developer team is proud to announce our next source release based on Chromium 35.0.1897.8.
Display Server Debate
Canonical showed wisdom recently by dropping its own Upstart and chose systemd which it initially criticized as NIH, invasive and ‘hardly justified’. The Free Software community is expecting that Canonical will show prudence and drop their MIR and adopt Wayland. Canonical has great ambitions with Ubuntu, their struggle is much bigger so it may be wise for them to use limited engineering talent to tackle the issues Ubuntu is facing in desktop and mobile space by using the technologies being develop by the larger Free Software community.
Robert Ancell, a Canonical employee and Mir developer, wrote a blog post yesterday entitled "Why the display server doesn't matter." In the personal blog post, Ancell argues that for too many years the X display server has been in use but finally we're reaching two new contenders for next-generation display servers: Mir and Wayland-based compositors. Robert Ancell states, "The result of [applications accessing the display server via a tool-kit and hardware/drivers becoming more generic] is the display server doesn't matter much to applications because we have pretty good toolkits that already hide all this information from us. And it doesn't matter much to drivers as they're providing much the same operations to anything that uses them (i.e. buffer management and passing shaders around)."
AMD
This week I was out at the Game Developer's Conference not with a focus on games but to learn about some changes they AMD currently pursuing for their Linux driver model. If this new Linux driver model goes through, the Catalyst Linux driver will be more open, but it's not without some risk. Read more in this Phoronix exclusive story.
Intel
XenGT is designed just not for 3D graphics acceleration within guest instances but also for media acceleration and GPGPU compute acceleration. There's use-cases for XenGT within cloud computing, data centers, rich virtual clients, multi-screen infotainment, and other areas. With other Xen GPU pass-through solutions there is no ability for both the host and guest operating systems to each access the same GPU simultaneously but they must be independently assigned at this time as there isn't a guest virtual GPU driver as in the case of VMware SVGA2 or VirtualBox Chromium. With Intel's XenGT solution, however, there is sharing support -- multiple VMs can access the same graphics processor due to its full virtualization. XenGT is pushed as offering performance, features, and sharing capabilities.
This tool allows easy installation of drivers for Intel graphics hardware. The newer version is available for Ubuntu 13.10 and Fedora 20 users only. Ubuntu 13.04 /Fedora 19 users can install this utility but they won’t receive upgrades to newer Graphics Stack. This utility doesn’t support versions below Ubuntu 13.04 and Fedora 19. Support for 13.04 will be dropped next month with the release of 14.04.
While there have been pre-releases of the xf86-video-intel 3.0 X.Org driver going back to last September, it's still not ready to be released, but a new feature update was made available.
NVIDIA
For current and potential owners of NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards that are curious about the graphics driver situation on Linux, under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest open and closed-source NVIDIA drivers with the latest "Kepler" and "Maxwell" graphics cards. Here's what you need to know now if trying to use the open-source Nouveau driver with these very latest NVIDIA graphics processors.
Nouveau's main set of open-source NVIDIA Linux driver changes for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been merged into drm-next, but don't get your hopes up too high.
If you were hoping there was finally proper re-clocking / dynamic power management or other breakthroughs for this open-source NVIDIA Linux GPU driver, there isn't anything real exciting like that for end-users with Linux 3.15. The main changes to this drm-nouveau-next pull is the first stage of ongoing GPU fault recovery support, initial support for the Maxwell GPUs, and various fixes throughout the entire driver.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticized Nvidia in 2012 at Aalto Talk as “the single worst company we have ever dealt with.” Along with him many other members of the open source community previously criticized Nvidia’s proprietary hardware and software, which made open source alternatives difficult.
Overlap
NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD are not always rivals and they proved that by organizing a joint panel at the Game Developer Conference 2014 in San Francisco to explain to developers how they can unlock the amazing potential of OpenGL.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Wayland is About Less Choice, About Removing Choices, It's Not About Freedom
- IBM insists that it cares about "diversity"
- Keeping Things Accessible
- Gemini Protocol seems to be growing
- Not Much Better Than LLM Slop: Linux Foundation-Funded 'News' Site Writes Linux Foundation 'News', Composed by Linux Foundation Operative, Quoting Linux Foundation Staff
- ...they get paid (sponsored) to produce this spam. Then they call it "journalism".
- Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 22x) 'Bought' by Microsoft and Microsoft Exceeded Sponsorship Limits by Giving Double the Maximum Permitted Amount
- When people get bribed they tend to forget how to utter a simple word: "No."
- EPO Examiners Point Out to the Heads of Delegations in the Administrative Council of the EPO That the "AI Policy" of the Office is Illegal
- "the Central Staff Committee (CSC) asks the Administrative Council to exert its supervisory role and instruct EPO management to enter into genuine dialogue with the staff representation on the AI Policy, to revise the “Leverage AI” target of 90% AI-automated classification in the SP2028 and to put in place the measures supported by staff in the resolution."
- French Cities Dumping Microsoft Because They Recognise Software Freedom, Open Standards, GNU/Linux Autonomy
- We hope that more French cities - maybe Paris - will follow Lyon.
-
- Links 27/06/2025: Journalists Under Fire and Microsoft Has Serious Slop Problems
- Links for the day
- X is Dying, But Not XServer/X11. Twitter X.com is Dying.
- People or businesses or government officials (and departments) that still rely on Social Control Media are playing Russian Roulette with their future online
- Escaping Colonialism (or 'Hegemony') Requires Abandoning GAFAM, Microsoft in Particular
- Europe is already in the process of abandoning Microsoft
- Microsoft Will Shut Down More Studios This Week, Its Media Operatives Will Tell Lies About the Magnitude of the Shutdowns and Layoffs (They Always Do)
- Many people who get counted as "workforce" are "temps" or similar
- What Linux Foundation 'Research' is: Paid Marketing
- What is Linux Foundation 'Research'?
- No, IBM Does Not Care About People With Disabilities
- "Aktion T4" did not seem to bother Watson
- Microsoft's Financial Problems Mean Shutdowns, Not Just Mass Layoffs
- If the original rumour is true, then expect almost 30,000 Microsoft workers to be let go this year
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 26, 2025
- The Netherlands: GNU/Linux Measured at All-Time High
- Are any Dutch cities going to announce dumping Microsoft?
- Gemini Links 27/06/2025: "Interstitial Existence" and Autocorrect
- Links for the day
- Technical People Need Technical Lawyers
- Technical Litigants in Person (LIPs) have many real and concrete advantages
- 10,000+ Articles in About 20 Months (and How We Got Here)
- More bloat does not beget efficiency and "bells and whistles" tend to have a hidden cost
- Links 26/06/2025: Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC) Failing Scandinavia, K-Pop Agencies Abuse People
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 26/06/2025: AuraGem Twitch Proxy is Back and UI Sluggishness
- Links for the day
- LWN is a Voice of GAFAM (Through Linux Foundation, Their Front Group or Occupying Force Inside Linux)
- remember who the chief editor works for and who sponsors many of the articles
- Links 26/06/2025: Noise Pollution Considered High in Europe, Mass Layoffs Next Week in Microsoft Confirmed, Very Large in Scale and Scope
- Links for the day
- The 'Case' of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft is a Lot of Copypasta (Maybe Also LLM Slop) From the Matthew Garrett 'Case'
- 5RB deserves to know and the matter shall be properly reported in due course (when the time is right)
- EPO Squeezing the Staff - Part II - Office Breaks Rules, Ignores Courts, Defies Justice
- False promises everywhere
- No, I Don't Want Your Latest XYZ, ThankYouVeryMuch...
- Wayland is finally ready?
- China Keeps Breaking Into Microsoft Systems, So for True Sovereignty, Nations Wary of China Need to Dump Microsoft
- Looking at data from Taiwan (not China) and Maharlika (not Philippines, the king is dead and Spain is out), there are encouraging signs
- Linux Journal Wants Ads on Its LLM Slop or Ads as 'Articles'
- it's basically another BetaNews
- How to Kill a Monopoly
- in 10 simple steps
- IBM - Like Microsoft - is a Dying Company and Perishing Brand ("AI" is a Lie and Decoy)
- "Arvind is cutting costs (layoffs, PIPs, forced RTO, etc...) like crazy. IBM offices are closing all over the place in the US."
- "Code of Conduct" Invoked When Fedora and Red Hat Users (Since the 1990s) Don't Want to Use Wayland
- That is IBM "DEI"
- Mozambique: GNU/Linux Rose From 0.5% Last Year to 3% This Year
- what (or how) statCounter is measuring
- Microsoft Layoffs Next Week: About 10% to be Laid Off in Microsoft Gaming (2 Days Before Independence Day), About 20%+ of XBox Staff
- Microsoft is rapidly collapsing
- Next Month Marks 11 Years Since Our In-Depth EPO Coverage
- The same is happening to Microsoft right now
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Campaigns Against Vista 11, Adds 4 New Associate Members Per Day
- If more people understood the underlying principles, more of them would flock to Free software overnight
- Canonical Seems to Have Culled Some Sources of LLM Slop From Planet Ubuntu
- It's like "junk food", it's not information
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, June 25, 2025
- On "Weak Claims"
- For the record, they sent me unjustified threats, repeatedly tried injunctions (censorship)
- EPO Squeezing the Staff - Part I - Burnout and Family Health
- more exceptional circumstances
- This Month's Mail (MX) Server Survey Shows Microsoft at 0.20% "Market Share"
- We need to remind people that desktops and laptops decline (in proportion to other client devices) and at the "back end" GNU/Linux is already dominant and has long been dominant
- Links 26/06/2025: Filespooler Guide and Learning to Code
- Links for the day
- Why Techrights Cannot be Vilified (and Instead It Gets SLAPPed Repeatedly by Microsoft People)
- Attack dogs are all "bark"; because they have no actual "bite"
- Austrian GNU/Linux Usage Up to About 5% as More of Europe Abandons Microsoft
- Since inauguration day the Austrian people have adopted more and more of GNU/Linux
- Why the "Wayland People" and "Rust People" Will Lose Hearts and Minds (Same Reasons)
- Wayland pushers are fast becoming like "Rust People"
- 5,600 Pages/Articles Per Year
- So far this year we've kept all the promises
- BetaNews Beginning to Show What Its True Goals Are
- The 'new' BetaNews won't be about journalism. It's trying to sell things.
- Microsoft Has Lost "The War"
- We'll soon see the 9th or 10th wave of Microsoft layoffs in 2025 alone
- Slopwatch: A Wreck and a Dreck, "Flooding the Zone With Dreck" or Flooding the Web With Junk
- "Slopwatch" continues today because we have many new examples
- Links 25/06/2025: Thwarting More Software Patents, Overlap Grows Between EPO Corruption and Illegal Kangaroo Patent Courts in EU
- Links for the day
- Links 25/06/2025: Elon Musk’s Lawyers Caught Lying, WhatsApp Faces More Bans
- Links for the day
- Wayland Pushers Lose the Argument, Use LLM Slop and Chatbots to Make Up Arguments for IBM
- Another new low and low blow
- Brian Fagioli Created Another Slopfarm Targeting "Linux" After BetaNews Became a Slopfarm of Phantom Accounts and Pseudonyms
- Mr. Fagioli even had slop about a dead Torvalds (hypothetical) as clickbait
- Wayland is Perfect, Nobody Can Escape Its Perfection! (Or Not)
- Do not form on opinion on Wayland based on politics
- What is "MATA"?
- Think of it as GAFAM or "Meta"
- Moral Duty for "Linux Sites" to Speak Out Against LLM Slop
- My wife has long complained about "Linux bloggers" keeping quiet and thus passive about a growing problem: slop
- In Recent Hours Google News Promoted at Least 3 Slopfarms That Relayed Linux Foundation Propaganda Made by Bots or LLM "Bullshit Generators" (as Dr. Stallman Dubbed Them)
- Google is circling down the drain and Google News too is hopeless
- Linux Journal is a Slopfarm, It's Experimenting With LLM 'Authors'
- Is Slashdot next?
- WebProNews is a Slopfarm
- Please avoid linking to WebProNews
- Microsoft LinkedIn is Dying and Many More Layoffs Are on the Way
- LinkedIn is just a failed acquisition of Microsoft. It causes losses and debt.
- Gemini Links 25/06/2025: Combinatorial Music and Self Hosting
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman Coming Back to Europe This Autumn to Give More Talks
- His last talk in Europe attracted about 400-450 people
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, June 24, 2025
- Social Control Media, Technology & Catholicism: Synod on Synodality review and feedback
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- How Many More Women Will Managers at Microsoft Strangle and Tell to Kill Themselves (or Try to Kill)?
- The world needs to know what happened
- The New BetaNews: 7 New 'Articles', All of Them LLM Slop
- BetaNews is basically defunct. Nobody writes there anymore.
- Another "Told You So!": XBox Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Many Recent Reports Were Chaff and Spin), Many Other Divisions Affected
- With mass layoffs at Microsoft the world would be much better
