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.
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