01.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Software-wise, my choice for this on Android is Torque, an excellent app that not only can collect all the OBD-II stats, but also graph and log them in myriad ways. (There’s also a free version, Torque Lite, that has a fair deal of the functionality of the full version.) Grab either one from the Google Play store.
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We got to thinking, how does one analyze mobile apps? To find out, we downloaded Santoku Linux, a Linux distribution crafted specifically for mobile forensics, mobile malware analysis, and mobile security testing.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Space
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It’s not Christmas yet, but Linus “Santa” Torvalds came down the chimney and announced that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing, for all you good Linux geeks out there.
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44 years ago, somewhere in Helsinki, the capital and the largest city in Finland, was born Linus Benedict Torvalds, the founding father and the chief architect of the Linux kernel.
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In this short article we want to remind everyone how Linux evolved over two decades, thanks to an infographic posted by the Linux Foundation two years ago to mark the 20th anniversary of Linux.
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The Christmas benchmarks we have to share on Phoronix today are of testing the XFS, Btrfs, and EXT4 file-systems on the Linux 3.13 development kernel compared to Linux 3.12 from a high-performance hard drive. Earlier this month results were shared on Phoronix that indicated file-systems on a solid-state drive slowing down with this new Linux kernel, but is that also the case for HDDs?
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Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling.
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Torvalds seems to be content that last week has been calmer since rc4 and he expects that things will calm down over the next week. About 40 percent of Linux 3.13-rc5 is driver related changes and updates including GPU, networking and sound; 15 percent are architecture updates specifically powerpc; 10 percent pertains to filesystems (ceph/cifs); 10 percent is about documentation; while core kernel (scheduler) and mm (numa) fixes make up the rest of the rc5.
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Zemlin, in his report, notes that more than 1.5m Android, which is based on linux software, phone activations are happening every day. Many high-tech cars such as the Cadillac CTS sedan and the all-electric Tesla Model S run Linux.
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While we’re mid-way through the Linux 3.13 kernel development cycle and the Linux 3.12 kernel has been out for almost two months, the Reiser4 file-system is finally available for this latest stable kernel release series.
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Software-defined networking (SDN) emerged in 2013 to be one of the hottest trends in networking. SDN wasn’t invented in 2013, it’s a concept that has its roots in a Stanford University thesis co-authored by Martin Casado in 2005, “The Virtual Network System.” The term SDN emerged in 2009. Ironically, Casado, the man who helped to create the SDN revolution, said in a video interview earlier this year that he no longer knew what the term SDN meant, because the definition has blurred as networking vendors big and small adopt the term to fit their own definition.
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I recognize at least 5 of the voices in the video: Jim Zemlin, Richard Stallman, Eben Upton, Mark Shuttleworth and of course Linus Torvalds.
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Linux never fulfilled its original promise as an old-school desktop operating system. But its everywhere in 2013, driven by a vibrant community.
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Linus Torvalds has just announced a few minutes ago, December 15, that the fourth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing.
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That’s because all of Linux’s huge advantages – zero cost, reliability, security, customisability – are vitally important in this sector, which is about linking together things that have not hitherto been connected. Adding computational and networking capabilities to this new class of devices must be as cheap as possible, and that means Linux (and other open source components) have an unbeatable advantage here. It is therefore surely only a matter of time before Linux dominates this sector as completely as it does elsewhere.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 12, that the fifth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
Even if it was released just 4 days after Linux 3.12.4, it looks like Linux kernel 3.12.5 is not as big as the previous two maintenance builds, as it only contains various updated drivers (networking, SCSI, USB, Xen), a couple of sound updates, and several ARM improvements.
Graphics Stack
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There’s X.Org Server security vulnerabilities — even for vulnerabilities going back two decades — from time to time and in related components of the Linux graphics stack. Parts of the X.Org stack can be in fairly rough shape given the age of X11, but a very poor picture of it was painted at the Chaos Communication Congress. It was stated that the X.Org security is even worse than it looks.
At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) last week in Germany, Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher who previously reported X.Org vulnerabilities, gave a presentation. Covered in the presentation at the very well known CCC conference in Germany were client-side issues and then an entire half of the presentation devoted to the X.Org Server.
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While most of the Linux desktop world is focused around Wayland, X11, and Mir for the basis of the display technologies, DirectFB has continued marching forward and picked up many features this year and there will be another batch of features presented soon with DirectFB 1.8.
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As an extra holiday present for Linux and open-source fans, Intel has quietly released a large batch of new programming documentation that covers their latest-generation Haswell graphics cores. The new “programmer’s reference manuals” cover the 2013 Haswell HD Graphics, Iris Graphics, and Iris Pro Graphics. This massive batch of documentation is spread across twelve volumes and does document their hardware registers.
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After yesterday recapping Mesa’s development this year and LLVM’s growing development, up today are some statistics concerning Wayland and its Weston compositor this year from the Git side.
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Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren’t up to date on all of the development activity, I’ve now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git.
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While Intel’s open-source OpenGL Linux driver improved a lot in 2013, sadly not advancing as much is the Intel OpenCL Linux driver for GPGPU support.
As covered by several Phoronix articles, Intel’s work to deliver (open-source) OpenCL support to the Linux desktop that can take advantage of Ivy Bridge and Haswell graphics cores is Beignet. Beignet still seems to be rather an after-thought and not a big focus of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers; most Beignet activity is still done by Intel China developers.
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Going on for a while now has been the “etnaviv” driver project to create an open-source user-space graphics driver for the Vivante GC embedded GPUs. Work has slowed up to the Git repository as of late, but there still is the yet-to-be-mainlined Mesa classic driver.
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While X.Org Server 1.15 was delayed from its September release target over having no new features at the time, the final release of X.Org Server 1.15 is now available.
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Intel Broadwell support continues to be tidied up within the Intel Mesa DRI and DRM kernel drivers to hopefully make for a smooth launch of Intel’s next-generation processors within a few months time.
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While Valve only advertises NVIDIA graphics driver support in the SteamOS Beta released on Friday, I already found that AMD Radeon GPUs work with Catalyst on this Debian Linux derived OS. With a simple tweak, Intel HD Graphics can also run quite fine on SteamOS.
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For the ninth year in a row I am issuing year-in-review articles concerning the state of NVIDIA’s (and separately, AMD Catalyst) Linux graphics driver and the accomplishments the driver’s made in the past calendar year along with benchmarks of all notable driver releases this year. NVIDIA’s made a lot of progress on the Linux front this year, especially for any Linux gaming stakeholder, so let’s get started on our 2013 NVIDIA Linux Year-In-Review.
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With the end of the year quickly approaching, at Phoronix I have been re-testing all of the Linux graphics drivers to see how the performance has changed in 2013 and the features added/removed over the calendar year. I’ve been doing these annual Linux driver yearly recaps going back to 2005 when Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy compared to Windows. Yesterday I started with the NVIDIA 2013 Linux Year-In-Review of their first-rate binary driver while today I have some performance tests done for Intel’s latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.
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Keith Packard has been working on an X.Org Server clean-up of the aging code-base and he’s managed to reduce the number of generated warnings down to zero.
With the X.Org Server code originating from the X Server code-base that’s been under development for the past 25 years, there’s lots of crufty old code still present that was written before ANSI C was even standardized. Over time, the code has gotten out of shape and doesn’t comply with today’s best practices.
Benchmarks
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01.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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12.31.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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While ardent Linux gamers have likely already heard and own a copy, for those that didn’t hear yet Valve’s latest kindness, the Linux-friendly entertainment company is giving away their very popular Left 4 Dead 2 game today and tomorrow as a Christmas present to gamers.
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While in some of the past years we have seen new Sauerbraten / Cube 2 game releases around Christmas and the end of the year, there’s no indications of any imminent releases this year, but the Tesseract fork is continuing to show signs of hope for another non-ioquake3-based game engine with improved visuals. Tesseract is derived from Cube 2: Sauerbraten but with much better visuals.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The Midnight Commander file manager provides a variety of helpful options that will let users customize the interface to fit their needs.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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In December of last year Phoronix was first to cover Project Darling, an open-source project that allows running Apple Mac OS X binaries on Linux-based systems. Sadly, the Darling Project appears to now be a memory of the past.
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The VideoLAN project has announced the release of libbluray 0.5.0, the latest version of the open-source Blu-ray library. This latest release has better BD-J Java support and other new/improved features.
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12.28.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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One of the great things about doing multimedia work under Linux is the wide choice of free, open source tools available and the fact that they embrace just about every standard you can think of. In this round-up of FOSS video editors for Linux (many of them are also cross-platform) there’s everything from traditional non-linear editing systems through to real-time video mixing suitable for video jockeys to use live. Will the next Ken Burns please stand up?
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Get back to some serious old-school gaming with Syder Arcade!
Syder Arcade is a love letter to Amiga games of the ‘90s, no coins, no upgrade grinding, just your tenacity and a motherload of alien invaders.
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