12.13.13

Spanning over one week, grouped and clustered for convenience

KVM/QEMU/Xen

• IBM will be bringing KVM Linux virtualization to Power in 2014

  Linux has many hypervisors, such as Xen, and it’s supported by more, such as Azure, but it also has its own built-in hypervisor: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Unfortunately, KVM only works on Intel and AMD processors. Earlier this year, IBM announced that it would be adding KVM support to its Power architecture, and now we know that it will be appearing sometime in 2014.

• QEMU 1.7 Is Bringing New Features For Linux Emulation

  QEMU 1.7.0-rc2 was released yesterday and if all goes according to plan the official QEMU 1.7 release will happen on Wednesday. This next QEMU emulator update that’s also relied upon by Linux KVM will bring some exciting improvements.

• KVM/QEMU 3D Support Still Being Figured Out

• Xen PVH Support Brought Back Up For The Linux Kernel

• Xen Project Builds Its Own Cloud OS Mirage

‘Linux Experience’

• openSUSE 13.1 vs Ubuntu 13.10: a friendly match

  I often hear the argument that Android is not Linux or Chrome OS is not Linux. Technically that’s not true. Linux is just the kernel and both these operating systems user Linux so they are Linux-based operating systems.

  What people are actually trying to say is they don’t get the same ‘Linux experience’ when they use these operating systems. What’s that Linux experience?

Kernel Version 3.12

• Linux Kernel News

• Linux Kernel 3.12.3 Is Now Available for Download

• Linux Kernel 3.12.2 Is Now Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, November 29, that the second maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

• Linux Kernel 3.12.4 Is Now Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 8, that the fourth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

• Linux 3.13-rc3

  .. I’m still on a Friday release schedule, although I hope that
  changes soon – the reason I didn’t drag this one out to Sunday is that
  it’s already big enough, and I’ll wait until things start calming
  down.

  Which they really should, at this point. Hint hint. I’ll start
  shouting at people for sending me stuff that isn’t appropriate as
  we’re starting to get later into the release candidates.

  That said, it’s not like rc3 is somehow unmanageably large or that
  anything particularly scary has happened. I’d have *liked* for it to
  be smaller, but I always do.. And nothing particularly nasty stands
  out here.

  The bulk here is drivers (net, scsi, sound, crypto..) and ARM DT
  stuff, but there’s the usual randon stuff too, with arch updates
  (pa-risc, more ARM, x86) and some filesystem and networking updates.

Kernel Version 3.13

• VirtualBox 4.3.4 Released with Support for Linux Kernel 3.13

• File-Systems Appear To Slowdown On Linux 3.13 Kernel

• Download Linux Kernel 3.13 Release Candidate 2

• Download Linux Kernel 3.13 Release Candidate 3

• Linus Torvalds closes merge window two days early with Linux 3.13-rc1 release

• Random Is Faster, More Randomness In Linux 3.13

  The /dev/random changes went in for the Linux 3.13 kernel and this pull request was even interesting for the very promising next kernel release. While not in Linux 3.13, it’s mentioned the Linux kernel might also end up taking a security feature from the FreeBSD playbook.

• Linux 3.13 Gets A Second Helping Of Power Management

  A second pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.13 kernel that provides further updates to the often less than desirable ACPI and power management code.

  Submitted (and pulled) two weeks ago were already big ACPI and PM updates for this next Linux kernel release. However, Rafael Wysocki has now sent in a second ACPI/PM update for Linux 3.13 that’s queued up some more changes then and right ahead of the 3.13-rc1 tagging.

• Linux Kernel 3.12.1 Is Now Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few hours ago, November 20, that the first maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

• Jon Corbet’s Linux Weather Forecast

  This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your “chief meteorologist” is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments to the Discussion page. There’s a blog that reports on the main changes to the forecast. You can view it directly or use a feed reader to subscribe to the blog feed. You can also subscribe directly to the changes feed for this page to see feed all forecast edits.

• DRM Gets More Linux 3.13 Updates; VMware DRI3

  For those keeping track of Linux 3.13 kernel activity, another DRM subsystem pull update was submitted during this merge window.

Jailhouse

• Jailhouse: A Linux-based Partitioning Hypervisor

  We are happy to announce the Jailhouse project, now also to a broader community!

• New Linux Hypervisor Announced: Jailhouse

Linux Foundation

• A Summer Spent on OpenPrinting with the Linux Foundation

  This past summer marked Moscow-based developer Anton Kirilenko’s third Google Summer of Code internship with The Linux Foundation. That’s three summers, three different projects and mentors, and three totally different experiences with Linux and open source software.

• LinuxCon/CloudOpen Goose Chase Ends in Tie for Grand Prize (October)

• Slideshow: The Linux Foundation’s Guide to the Open Cloud

• Linux Foundation Gains New Cloud, Open Hardware and Gaming Members

• The People Who Support Linux: PhD Student Powers Big Data with Linux

• How Did KVM Virtualization Get Into the Linux Kernel?

  Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, more commonly referred to as KVM, is one of the most popular open-source virtualization technologies in use today. Both IBM and Red Hat use it as the basis for their Linux virtualization technologies, and it is the most widely used virtualization technology in the OpenStack cloud as well.

  KVM was originally written by Israeli software developer Avi Kivity while he was working at Qumranet. Qumranet was acquired by Red Hat for $107 million in 2008.

Training

• Outreach Program for Women Seeks New Linux Kernel Interns

  The interns who worked with The Linux Foundation as part of the FOSS Outreach Program for Women this summer come from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience, but they now have at least one thing in common (besides their gender). They can all add “Linux kernel hacker” to their resume.

• A Summer Spent on the LLVM Clang Static Analyzer for the Linux Kernel

• Training college students to contribute to the Linux kernel

  Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel.

  These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany.

Graphics Stack

• Radeon Gallium3D MSAA Mesa 10.1 Git Benchmarks

• NVIDIA’s PTX Back-End For GCC Has Been Published

  As part of the work to bring OpenACC 2.0 and NVIDIA GPU support to GCC, a large set of patches were published this morning for adding NVIDIA’s PTX back-end to the Free Software Foundation’s compiler.

• AMD APU vs. Radeon GPU Open-Source Comparison

  Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver. For end-users curious what the AMD A10-6800K “Richland” APU performance is comparable to when it comes to discrete Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D driver, here’s some weekend comparison benchmarks.

• MSM DRM Will Support New Hardware In Linux 3.14

  An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the “MSM” DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.

• NVIDIA Helping Nouveau With Video Decoding

  While it isn’t in the form of any complete documentation, a NVIDIA engineer has begun answering questions by the open-source Nouveau driver developers about video decoding with their H.264 engine.

• New Wayland Live CD Has A Lot Of Features

  The oddly-named Wayland Live CD environment for checking out the next-generation Linux display stack has been updated. The Wayland Live CD ships with many enabled tool-kits, the latest Wayland code, Orbital and Hawaii support, KDE Frameworks Wayland programs, and other new native Wayland applications.

• DRI3 Support Comes For X.Org GLAMOR

  As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.

• Quad-Monitor AMD/NVIDIA Linux Gaming: What You Need To Know

• How to start contributing to Mesa3D

• Crystal HD Decodes New Linux Support Improvements

  A couple years ago Broadcom released the Crystal HD as a standalone hardware video decoder chip. While there’s been an open-source Linux driver for the Crystal HD, we haven’t heard much about it in recent months, but that changed this morning.

• AMD APU On Linux: Gallium3D Can Be 80%+ As Fast As Catalyst

  After running earlier this week a 21-way graphics card comparison with Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, there were requests by some Phoronix readers to see some new APU performance numbers. For ending out November, here’s new Catalyst vs. Gallium3D driver benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux for the AMD A10-6800K with its Radeon HD 8670D graphics. The results with the latest Linux kernel and Mesa are very positive towards the open-source AMD driver where in some tests the performance can nearly match Catalyst! For at least one Source Engine game, the open-source driver can now even run significantly faster than the binary driver.

• Mesa 10.0 Release Brings OpenGL 3.3

  The 10.0 release was expected a few days back, but now it’s finally happened via Intel’s Ian Romanick with this brief announcement.

• zRAM Is Still Hoping For A Promotion

  While zRAM has been part of the Linux kernel’s staging area for a while now and this RAM-based compressed block device is used by Chrome OS and Android, it’s struggling to get promoted to the main area of the kernel.

• Intel’s GL Windows Driver Pushes Further Ahead Of Linux

  Intel’s Windows OpenGL driver continues to make progress in a more steadfast manner than the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. The latest achievement for the Intel Windows driver is OpenGL 4.2 compliance for Haswell.

• Another Game Studio Backs AMD’s Mantle API

  There’s another game studio now backing AMD’s Mantle graphics rendering API that aims to be faster and easier to implement for games than OpenGL. However, we’re still waiting for AMD Mantle on Linux.

• AMD “RadeonSI” Team Fortress 2 Is Now 75% Faster

  The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for AMD HD 7000 series GPUs and newer is now 75% faster for the Source Engine Team Fortress 2 game thanks to a new patch-set by Marek.

• Ultra HD 4K Linux Graphics Card Testing

  If you’ve been eyeing a purchase of a 4K “Ultra HD” TV this holiday season and will be connecting it to a Linux system, here’s the information that you need to know for getting started and some performance benchmarks to set the expectations for what you can expect. This article has a number of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks when running various Linux OpenGL workloads at a resolution of 3840 x 2160.

• XDG-Shell Patches Get Moving For Wayland

  After a lot of mailing list discussions amongst developers that have a stake in Wayland and early patches sent out, the latest xdg-shell patches were formally distributed today on the developers’ mailing list. The xdg-shell is a new protocol living outside of the core Wayland protocol.

Benchmarks

• 27-Way NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Card Benchmarks On Linux

Btrfs

• Btrfs hands-on: Exploring the error recovery features of the new Linux file system

  This is my final post in this series about the btrfs filesystem. The first in the series covered btrfs basics, the second was resizing, multiple volumes and devices, the third was RAID and Redundancy,and the fourth and most recent was subvolumes and snapshots.

  I think (and hope) that all of those together give a reasonable overview of what the btrfs filesystem is, what you can do with it, and how you can do some of those things. In this post I will wrap up a couple of loose ends – error recovery, and integration with other standard Linux utilities – and try to give a recap of the series as a whole. For complete and authoritative information, please refer to the Btrfs Wiki at kernel.org.

• Btrfs hands on: My first experiments with a new Linux file system

  Btrfs is a new file system for Linux, one that is still very much in development. Although I wouldn’t exactly describe it as “experimental” any more, it is, as stated in the Wiki at kernel.org, “a fast-moving target”.

  It has also been said publicly that the basic format and structure of the filesystem should now be stable; it would only be changed in the future if some overriding reason or need is found.

  The point of all this should be clear — it is still very early days, and it is not recommended to use btrfs in critical systems of any kind.

  I leave it to the reader to decide how critical their systems are; for my own purposes, I will be using btrfs on several systems that I use as testbeds, some of which I carry with me and use for normal work on a daily basis, so it will get a “real” test, but I will not be using it on the primary systems that my partner and I use for home/work/business activities.

Misc.

• Linux the Easy Way – Watching 100 Videos

  The Linux Foundation launched the 100 Linux Video Tutorials campaign last January and today an update was posted. According to Jennifer Cloer nearly 100 videos have been submitted but she said, ” We need your help to reach 100 Linux video tutorials in January.” The collection boasts 83 submissions so far.

• Petition to Synaptics Corporation regarding flakey Linux drivers

  Windows might be the majority, but a big part of that is because the laptop manufacturers expend little to no effort on the alternative. Meanwhile, 50% of their customers would be happier running Linux if it was well setup!

• Basic Data Structures and Algorithms in the Linux Kernel

• Knock: TCP Port Knocking Proposed For Linux Kernel

• KTAP 0.4 Allows For New Kernel Tapping

  KTAP version 0.4 is now available as the script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.

• New AVX/AVX2 Crypto Code For The Linux Kernel

• Knock: A Linux kernel patch for NAT-compatible, stealthy port knocking