12.13.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Spanning over one week, grouped and clustered for convenience
KVM/QEMU/Xen
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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.
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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.
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‘Linux Experience’
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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
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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.
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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.
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.. 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For those keeping track of Linux 3.13 kernel activity, another DRM subsystem pull update was submitted during this merge window.
Jailhouse
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We are happy to announce the Jailhouse project, now also to a broader community!
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Linux Foundation
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Btrfs
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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KTAP version 0.4 is now available as the script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.
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12.12.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Meanwhile, The Raspberry Pi User Guide, co-authored by project founder Eben Upton with Gareth Halfacree, is now out in a second edition and is a complete guide to the Raspberry Pi. It includes setup and installation information, instructions for using the Pi to power music and video, instructions for using the Pi in electronics projects, and there is a guide to networking Pi devices. Currently, it looks like the title is sold out, but there should be more copies available very shortly, as noted here.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 12:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GNU/Linux distribution SteamOS is officially out tomorrow and Activision turns out to be actively against GNU/Linux
Valve and Activision (Subsidiary of Activision Blizzard) are both companies with some connections or roots in Microsoft. Valve’s CEO used to work for Microsoft and Activision is a Microsoft partner that nearly got bought by Microsoft. But there is a fundamental difference between those two companies.
Over the past year or so Valve has shown that it is serious about GNU/Linux, as we noted several times. SteamOS is coming out tomorrow [1,2], boasting a growing number of games [3]. The same goes for Desura [4], but not for Activision.
According to reports [5,6], Activision is actively blocking development for GNU/Linux. Activision deserves a lot of flak for this. Hit Activision in the pocket where it hurts a company the most. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Valve’s Linux-based Steam Machines gaming console starts shipping today to a few beta testers. SteamOS, it’s Linux for gamers, is scheduled to be released to everyone at the same time.
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Valve’s Linux-based gaming-centric operating system SteamOS will be with us by the weekend, as the company plans to get the first prototype Steam Machine boxes in front of beta testers tomorrow.
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Shiden is a arcade style SHMUP (Shoot em up). Shiden takes influence from games like DoDonPachi, Cho Ren Sha 68k and Mars Matrix. In these styles of game the player is a single ship that must face thousands of enemies and dodge all of their bullets whilst causing as much carnage as possible. While this may make you seem overpowered, your ship is actually noticeably weaker than most enemies, taking only a single shot to be destroyed. With a low entry barrier stemming from a simplistic control scheme, to a high skill ceiling for those interested in second loops, TFB and 1cc runs, SHMUP’s are a genre of game that offer something for everyone.
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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition will not be releasing on Linux due to a decision by rights-holder Activision.
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A game studio has shared publicly that Activison is preventing a new game from actively being made for “that platform”, a.k.a. Linux.
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Posted in Debian, Intellectual Monopoly, Ubuntu at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
On the shoulders of giants but without shoulders of one’s own
Summary: How Canonical impedes dissemination of work that Ubuntu inherits from other projects, such as Debian and GNU
Linux Mint KDE [1] and Linux Mint Xfce [2] are two examples of Linux Mint releases that widely deviate from Ubuntu, unlike the GNOME (and derivatives like Mate and Cinnamon [3]) version of Linux Mint 16. When there were gentle arguments about security of Linux Mint Clement Lefebvre made it known that Canonical wanted Mint to license Ubuntu binary packages. This angle is being explored again [4] because products like MintBox [5] rely on Canonical giving access to those binaries (otherwise they become less secure). Jim Lynch’s studying of this relies on a bit from DistroWatch that says: “Clem claims he has been asked by Canonical’s legal department to license the binary packages used by Ubuntu. To me this is a scary thought. Ubuntu is a base distribution for many projects, some of them (such as Mint and Kubuntu) are quite successful.
“Clem’s statement makes me wonder if Canonical has approached other open source projects about licensing the right to access Ubuntu’s package repositories. If so, what might follow? Would derivative distributions need to pay to use Canonical’s packages? How would Canonical enforce such a policy, with lawyers, by blocking access to the repositories if a user isn’t using Genuine Ubuntu?”
Should Canonical start signing licences to use Debian packages too? It looks like trademarks are no longer the only type of Intellectual Monopolies we should debate.
Canonical is growing increasingly selfish and isolated, with hardware deals around something called “Ubuntu Touch OS” [6,7,8] (hardly GNU/Linux) and work around Canonical copyrights [9] (Unity). No wonder some people see the “ugly” side [10]. In his latest talks across the UK Richard Stallman was discouraging adoption of Ubuntu by members of the audience. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Clement Lefebvre has announced earlier today, December 8, that the Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux Mint 16 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.
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The MintBox 2 is here, and it’s more powerful than ever. Just how much power are you getting for nearly £400 though?
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The recently released Mint 16, nicknamed Petra, might be the perfect Linux desktop for newcomers.
At its core is Ubuntu 13.10, but on top of this are desktops Mate and Cinnamon, the latter being the Mint project’s homegrown user interface.
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Canonical has inked its first deal with partner who’ll put the Linux-basd operating system on its phones, founder Mark Shuttleworth reveals.
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Posted in Antitrust, Europe, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Regulator to Microsoft: I see what you did there…
Photo by Agência Brasil
Summary: Microsoft’s patent and antitrust strategy against Android/Linux (through Nokia) is not working out too well because of hypocrisy and obviousness
MICROSOFT, an abusive monopolist, had the audacity to accuse Android/Linux of the same [1, 2, 3]. Nokia, a former monopolist by some people’s standards, was the notable Microsoft proxy at the time.
Well, based on this new report from The Verge and interpretations of it, “[i]n April this year, a Microsoft-sponsored antitrust complaint about Android had this to say: “Google’s predatory distribution of Android at below-cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform.””
Now Microsoft drops to zero cost, as well, according to the report. As the author then points out: “And we have the whole Scroogled campaign (I felt dirty just for visiting that site).”
“And now they’re considering doing the exact same things they claim Google is doing unfairly? Does this company have any internal consistency whatsoever? ”
Never mind the inconsistency on privacy in “Scroogled” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
The only thing uglier than all this is the racketeering, which is illegal by internationally-acceptable (universal) law. We recently wrote about European regulators catching up with this abuse by proxy. “Handset business will sell to Microsoft, but keep its patents. Regulators noticed,” said one report while others noticed how Microsoft's own (direct) racketeering fell apart because Microsoft's patents are bogus and invalid (Microsoft is patenting bras now). This put at risk Microsoft’s attempts to make Android more expensive.
According to another new report from The Verge, Nokia now working on an Android phone as part of a push into the low-end smartphone market. “Several sources close to Nokia suggested the company is working on the project under the code name “Normandy,”” said ECT. So Nokia complains about Android while using it? Who controls the whole of Nokia’s policy now?
This isn’t the only case where Microsoft tries to use intellectual monopolies to undermine Linux/Android. As this new report puts it, Microsoft continues to use crooked licensing in virtualisation — a subject we have covered for over a half a decade (since the Novell days). “This is the main reason why Windows barely gets a look-in in today’s cloud world,” wrote the author. “When I ask FOSS devops-type colleagues about it, their responses range from incredulity to hilarity. Why on Earth would they want to deploy on Windows? What possible advantage would it give them? These guys wield Puppet and Chef to deploy vast swarms of headless virtual Linux systems. Microsoft and proprietary software doesn’t feature in their world; some weirdos run Mac laptops but that’s about it.”
The age of Microsoft’s abuses against Linux may be over, but only if regulators take a closer look (with our help) at what Microsoft is doing and then warn it/threaten with antitrust action. Don’t believe for a second that Microsoft will just ignore the words from Joaquin Almunia; it wasn’t empty rhetoric and it has become a business risk (loss of revenue if not embargo). █
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Posted in Site News at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: QuinStreet agrees to license a decade of news stories from LinuxDevices for republication and long-term preservation
BACK in the summer we campaigned to bring LinuxDevices back to the Web (after QuinStreet had bought it and took it offline).
Well, Techrights activism in conjunction from other pressure (from site authors) over this issue has finally paid off. The founder of that site told us yesterday that he would bring back the site after all these efforts to influence QuinStreet. He got his Christmas gift a little early. He was writing for a company (for profit) and he will soon be hosting his own work that he worked hard on to produce for many years, informing a lot of people in the GNU/Linux world (especially embedded/device developers).
In essence, we have managed to rescue ~10,000 high-quality articles from ‘Internet bitrot’. It’s massive!
In the near future LinuxDevices content will be republished under LinuxGizmos.com. “It will live on a subdomain of LinuxGizmos,” the founder of the site told us. This is still work in progress (a developer is currently working on data conversions). When all the articles get indexed (which they will) all the information and other useful data will be easily reachable again. This is a victory to those who advocate for preservation, as some of us are (other Techrights members silently played a role in this).
The lesson to learn from this whole saga is that authors should insist on ownership (or copy rights) of their work. Without it, valuable work can go down the digital dustbin when a corporation has no interest in it, or it may take years and lots of immense effort to retrieve anything from this dustbin. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Marketing at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A group called the “AllSeen Alliance” is the last thing which the Linux Foundation should want to be associated with
Branding is the main expertise of the Linux Foundation’s head (Linux Foundations CEO). That’s the field he comes from (his professional biography reveals this) and this is the purpose he serves, especially by ignoring if not altogether deleting GNU's role. It is all about the “Linux” brand, trying to label everything that uses the popular kernel “Linux” but never GNU or something similarly (or even more) important. Just remember who is the guardian is the “Linux” trademark and who seized control of the domain Linux.com. That in itself is not a major issue or a big deal, but the point is, the “Linux” brand is a relatively huge success story, perhaps bigger than Apple and the “i” things (or even the “Obama” brand, which exceeded in value any single corporation in the world, as empirically measured some years back).
“Perhaps the name of this so-called alliance can still be amended.”The Linux Foundation has been very good at advancing the Linux brand, so why was it so tactless in labeling its new initiative “AllSeen”, especially amid the NSA scandals? LXer commenters have rightly pointed out that this was a mistake. We can expect what they promote to be a potential cause for issues (see [1] from October 2013), but alas, the announcement [2] received a lot of press [3-13], not just from Linux Foundation staff [14].
The name “AllSeen” is not benign; it’s similar to All-Seeing and in practice it involves sensory signals being passed over a surveillance-dominated Internet. This can be used against people (espionage), as information about ‘smart’ meters shows. Perhaps the name of this so-called alliance can still be amended. Android, by the way, is no brilliant brand either, no matter if it refers to the devices, the users, or the creator (Andy Rubin).
Branding matters. The Linux Foundation can still dodge the “AllSeen” nonsense before it’s truly irreversible due to brand recognition. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The Linux Foundation, together with industry heavyweights, has announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance.
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The Linux Foundation announced an “AllSeen Alliance” for the Internet of Things built upon Qualcomm’s open source “AllJoyn” IoT interoperability framework.
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open source project, which was originally developed by and is contributed to the Alliance by Qualcomm.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance, a consortium dedicated to advancing adoption and innovation in the “Internet of Everything” in homes and industry.
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