02.12.14
Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, KDE at 12:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at some recent developments around lesser-known desktop environments for GNU/Linux, including brand new ones
THE “BIG THREE”, namely GNOME, KDE, and XFCE, are not the only games in town. Now we have Defora [1], Moonlight [2], and Ome [3], not to mention LXLE [4,5] and Enlightenment, which recently released E18 [6-8] and will soon release E19 [9]. There are several other desktop environments that continues to be developed, whereas several perished over the years.
Speaking for myself, I recently switched from KDE to Enlightenment on the desktop where I write articles. Enlightenment is a fantastic desktop environment even for relatively new desktops, especially if memory becomes a constraint and speed can use some significant improvement. There are bugs, sure, as well as ‘missing’ features, but this desktop environment which I used regularly over a decade ago is still very light and powerful. Without it, I would have no choice but to cope with bloat, pretty much like in Microsoft and Apple land.
People who claim that GNU/Linux offers not much of real choice because it’s all about KDE, GNOME and some desktop bundles that are no longer maintained (or have been stale for a decade or two) are simply not looking hard enough. It can be rewarding for everyone to experience many environments on mobile (GNU/)Linux and even on desktops (like Unity); the more, the merrier. This attracts develops because it fosters creativity and self expression. To emancipate ourselves from GUI tyrannies (Apple is the worst in that regard) we need to explore alternatives environments, just as we do in many walks of life. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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If you have not yet found the perfect open-source desktop match for your needs, the desktop environment born out of DeforaOS is yet another option. This desktop environment is built using GTK2 and part of a larger effort to provide “ubiquitous, secure and transparent access to one’s resources” and to work regardless of form factor.
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Moonlight is a project still in its early stages and likely will fade away like the many other third-party desktop environments with limited manpower and scope. Moonlight Desktop is trying to be a lightweight desktop for the Raspberry Pi and other low-powered, low-end, old devices — similar in scope to Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, etc. They really don’t seem to be far along at all right now and are still working towards an appearance for their desktop.
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Originally the developer behind Ome was set out on making his own operating system and was thinking of using LLVM IR for its application binary while making the packages like Android’s APK files. He had posted to the LLVM mailing list last month for feedback on these plans but now today he’s posted a new LLVM mailing list message.
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I have not been a happy user of Ubuntu since the shift to the Unity desktop. Even the Lubuntu version has some bothersome Ubuntu traits attached. Enter the LXLE distro with its Lubuntu-less appearance. It provides a Long Term Support advantage over using Lubuntu and has a larger and more useful default application set. Even on poorly endowed hardware, this distro boots in less than 1 minute.
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The development team behind the Enlightenment project, an open source, powerful, lightweight, and eye-candy desktop environment for the X window system has announced the third maintenance release of the stable Enlightenment 0.18 branch, which includes various fixes and improvements.
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Just one year after the long-time coming official release of Enlightenment 0.17 (E17), Enlightenment 0.18 has been released!
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The freeze for E19 will begin in one month, on 28 Feb 2014. After that point, I am likely to reject most* requests for feature additions, and I will be shifting into release mode.
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02.11.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 8:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some of the latest bits of news about Linux, the Linux Foundation, and core parts of the kernel
Core
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Following the news that SUSE engineers are working on a kernel module called kGraft that can patch a running kernel, iTWire contacted the company to find out if Oracle’s ownership of Ksplice – a mechanism for doing the same job – would pose any legal issues.
Ksplice was developed by Ksplice Inc under an open source licence until July 2011 when it was bought by Oracle and taken proprietary.
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While in-fighting continues within the Debian camp over what should be the default init system in Debian, a developer has shown off his own tiny “sinit” init system project.
The “Suckless Init System” is a real init system and is derived from M. Farkas-Dyck’s Strake init code. This “suckless” init system is designed to be a simple system and was made to scratch the itch of a developer wanting to remove BusyBox from his toy Linux distribution, Morpheus.
Linux Foundation
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By definition, the Linux Foundation has Linux as its core mission, helping to bring the community of Linux developers and vendors together and fostering the right environment for collaboration. When the Linux Foundation started—it was created in 2007 as a result of the merger between the Free Standards Group (FSG) and Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)—Linux was the only thing that the group did. But in 2014, that’s no longer the case.
Releases
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With the rest being filesystems (vfs, nfs, ocfs, btrfs and some kernfs fixes), some mm noise, and tooling (perf). Shortlog appended, which doesn’t always happen for rc2.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced a few minutes ago, February 6, that the second maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download.
Hardware
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With the early Atom “Bay Trail” hardware being disastrous for Linux, when Intel recently announced their Bay Trail based NUC Kit we were anxious and decided to give this unit a go. The Intel NUC Kit DN2820FYK packs an Intel Celeron N2820 Bay Trail CPU and motherboard supporting up to 8GB of DDR3L system memory and 2.5-inch HDD/SSD in a 116 x 112 x 51 mm form-factor. In this article is a rundown of the Phoronix experience so far for this Atom NUC Kit and how well it’s running with Ubuntu Linux.
SDN
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The needs of enterprises and service providers diverge when it comes to software-defined networking. Enterprises are the ones looking for capital and operational cost relief, while service providers require new service velocity, panelists at the inaugural OpenDaylight Summit said this week.
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Graphics
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A new GLSL intermediate representation (IR) approach has been proposed for Mesa in replacing its existing tree-based representation for shaders.
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NVIDIA announced their first public Linux graphics driver beta in the 334.xx series today and with it comes a splendid number of changes.
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AMD has released the new AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Linux video driver for the Linux platforms, featuring quite a few changes and support for a couple of new chipsets.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: This month’s articles about success stories and debates regarding GNU/Linux on the desktop
GNU/Linux Distributions
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GNU/Linux largely uses open standards so whatever applications and computers you have can all talk to each other and speak the same languages. That allows you to turn a lab or a school into a super-computer as needed. That allows you to set up as many databases, search engines, web-servers, clients thick (resourceful) and thin (using resources of a server), as you need, want or can afford. Basically, you don’t need a brand new PC to get great performance if you can connect to another powerful computer running the software you need. GNU/Linux lets you do that transparently.
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Even if you’re a Windows (or Mac) user, knowing how to use Linux is a valuable skill and it can run a bunch of awesome things in your home — even if it isn’t your main desktop OS. Here are 10 ways you can use Linux even if you’re not ready to go full Ubuntu.
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Engaging in arguments about the superiority of one computing environment over another with individuals who are every bit as convinced of their view as your are of yours is a fruitless endeavor. I used to have lengthy discussions on the relative merits of Linux over Windows or Mac OS X, or BSD, or BeOS, or any combination thereof, none of which turned out to be a productive use of my time, or anyone else’s time involved. I like to think that I’ve grown out of the need to defend my choice of computing platform, and instead focus on what I can do. It is always best to let your work speak for itself.
Chrom*/OS
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A few years ago, Google completely took the web by surprise by launching its own browser. The crowd, which was busy transitioning from the outmoded Internet Explorer to the trendy Firefox, initially took little notice of the search giant’s endeavor. However, due to its availability across all platforms, and also its blazing fast speed, Google Chrome became a darling of the web user within a few months. This, in turn, pushed Google to bring more features to Chrome thereby sending the partially open-source browser into a spiral of success.
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First, ASUS announced the ASUS Chromebox, then HP followed with the HP Chromebox, and not to be left out, Google followed with the announcement of the Chromebox for meetings.
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A few days after Asus announced the first Chromebox mini-PC to be introduced the original Samsung Chromebox, HP unveiled its own Chromebox model, which similarly runs on Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Google announced “Chromebox for Meetings,” an enterprise video-conferencing system that initially will be built on the Asus Chromebox, but later this year be available with the HP Chromebox and an upcoming Dell Chromebox (see farther below).
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That processor will also mean the HP Chromebox will cost more its Asus competitor, which will start at just $179 (though probably with a less-powerful Celeron CPU). We’ll find out this spring, when HP’s model becomes available. With that company onboard, the Chromebox platform looks a lot more viable than just a week ago, when the only Chromebox you could buy was a refurbished Samsung model.
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Have you noticed that a Chrome process always runs in the background when there are Chrome apps active, even if you do not have Chrome browser opened? Even though Chrome apps run like native apps they need the whole Chrome process to run in the background. Google is trying to change this and is working to make Chrome web apps API needs minimal.
Terminology Debate
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Jack Wallen believes that a language barrier is preventing Linux from being adopted, en mass, on the desktop. Do you think a simplified, standardized language for Linux is the solution?
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On the other hand, there’s such a thing as dumbing something down too far. One of the big attractions of Linux is the power and control that comes with it. Many of the people who opt for Linux are eager to learn what is necessary for them to truly take control of their computers.
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I’ve been in technology for more than twenty years. Along the way I’ve worked for and with many different women that have served in different roles. Some wrote or managed editorial content, while others were focused on the business side as marketing managers or vice presidents, and still others managed the back end and programming parts of the company.
They all had one thing in common though: THEY. JUST. DID. IT.
Education
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No, not literally, but figuratively, the generosity of many IT-companies to “help” schools afford IT is more about enslaving students to use and be locked-in to those companies’ products rather than choosing what works best for the students and teachers. I am surprised that M$ is not on the list…
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In most countries these days, kids start learning computers at a very early age in school and even in still developing countries, computer education is a top priority. Computers are as important part of our daily lives as food and clothes are. Computer Education is considered a very vital part of our kids education today but are we doing it right?
Hardware
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My intentions were different: as I had a play with it in the showroom, I was salivating as I thought of how Linux would fly on such hardware. I planned to replace Windows with Debian GNU/Linux and use the laptop for my work; my existing laptop, an IBM Thinkpad, is entering its 10th year of service and its age is showing.
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The other side of that coin is that barebones PCs can be good for people who aren’t planning on paying for an OS. You can use your favorite Linux distribution on a barebones PC without paying the added cost for some Windows license you have no intention of using.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Servers at 8:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A showcase of GNU/Linux on servers, based on very recent news
GNU/Linux Rankings
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A real OS doesn’t limit what you can do with your hardware and it doesn’t charge you extra for doing what you want. GNU/Linux is a real OS. Just ask the hosting providers. On Netcraft’s list of 47, 1 uses F5-BIG-IP, 5 use *BSD, 5 have an unknown OS and only 4 use that other OS with the EULA from Hell. All the rest, 32, use GNU/Linux as they should.
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Linux is an excellent tool for creating the IT environment you want. Its flexibility and open-source architecture mean you can use it to support nearly any need, running mission-critical systems effectively while keeping costs low. This flexibility, however, means that if something does go wrong, it’s up to you to ensure your business operations can continue without disruption. And while many disaster recovery solutions focus on recovering data in case of an outage, leaving it at that is leaving the job half done. Having the information itself will be useless if the applications that are running it don’t function, and you are unable to meet SLAs.
Rackspace
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Rackspace is making it a priority for employees to contribute to any public open source project, even ones that may compete with Rackspace, as part of a new policy at the company.
ARM
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The channel has moved another step closer to having ARM-based server rooms a major presence in the enterprise. On Jan. 28, ARM—together with a slew of collaborators including Canonical, Citrix (CTXS), Linaro, Microsoft (MSFT), Red Hat (RHT), SUSE, Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)—announced the new Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification for deploying servers based on the ARMv8-A 64-bit processor.
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“The rise of open source has opened doors for new architectures; the ARM partnership entering the market has already changed people’s perception of what’s possible; you’ll see that it’s going to drive a faster pace of innovation. Think of what happened in the phone ecosystem. It changed so much over the last five years in terms of what’s possible, and that’s been largely because there’s been a huge number of choices and innovation in terms of supply chain, in terms of new IP that’s being integrated. I expect to see the same thing happen in the data center space because now you have all these choices and people are innovating at different paces but it’s still overall accelerating the pace of innovation in the market,” said Mandyam.
IBM
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Even though we don’t talk about it much, there are companies throwing in the towel and looking for IT solutions that do not include IBM i, Power Systems, or IBM. One of the companies with a track record of working in the IBM i migration business is Infinite Corporation, which last week introduced a new cloud-based migration plan called Infinite i. It will compete head-to-head with IBM i-based clouds.
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Dell
AMD
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Advanced Micro Devices continues to lay the groundwork for its ARM-based server processor plans, unveiling its upcoming eight-core Opteron A1100 Series “Seattle” chip and a development kit complete with an open-source software stack.
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While these chips are aimed at high-density, low-power servers, AMD is also putting together a micro-ATX development kit built around the A1100. This will include a Fedora-based Linux environment with development tools, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Java 7 and 8. This software stack is consistent with the goals of these low-power servers: running Web applications is likely to be their primary role.
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The development kit packages the processors into a Micro-ATX form factor, along with the necessary connectors for developers to throw memory, power and communications at it, and a basic software stack of GNU/Linux, device drivers, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Java 7 and 8.
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This week theCUBE covered the Open Compute Project Summit (#OCPSummit). As the name implies, this conference is part of the open source movement, but with a twist. When most people hear “open source” they think software — Linux, OpenStack, KVM and other major open source projects. This conference is about open source hardware, and in particular, x86 servers.
Linode
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According to the company, which concentrates its efforts on Linux-based virtual servers, “We’re pleased to announce the official release of Linode CLI – a simple, yet powerful and easy-to-use tool to manage and provision Linode cloud services from the command line. The Linode CLI gives users the same functionality they’re accustomed to, but with the convenience of the command line. The Linode CLI can create, reboot, rename, and resize Linode servers, manage domains and DNS records, NodeBalancers and more. Users can even access their account balance and network transfer. The Linode CLI makes it easy to script and automate tasks with its built-in JSON output mode.”
Arduino
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Trying to marry Linux and Arduino together isn’t giving me a good feeling and I’ll tell you why.
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Yet it’s no less an Arduino board than the de facto standard Arduino board, the ATmega328-based Uno R3. Perhaps more so, in fact, since it has on-board features that the Uno lacks and requires add-ons to accommodate: Ethernet connectivity, a mini PCI Express connector and a Micro SD slot, for instance.
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“The traditional view of open source is about software. Open source hardware has been around for about 7 to 10 years. Making hardware open and building a community around it is a huge advantage in hardware like in software,” Burns said. “The community behind it keeps it alive, keeps it useful.”
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Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A little roundup of Debian news and why whatever Debian is doing (e.g. regarding init systems) is important
Debian, which SteamOS is based on, may already be the world’s most widely used GNU/Linux distribution (Red Hat leads only in revenue, not necessarily code or deployments), so now that Red Hat’s Systemd 197 is released (full announcement here) there is an important crossroad where init systems fight for domination. Systemd is not for everyone and dependence on Red Hat might not be ideal because of security risks in Linux [1, 2, 3, 4] among other factors. It’s up to Debian developers now; they can judge it from a technical point of view.
Debian was the distribution promoted in the “Goodbye Microsoft” Web site (which would also be a PRISM break) several years ago and it continues to be somewhat of a major choice there [1-6]. Based on [7-12], the init system for the next Debian continues to be a subject of great controversy. This is going to have an impact on Debian derivatives such as SolidXK [13] and maybe even Ubuntu [14] (although it has its own init system), not to mention the freedom-oriented gNewSense (gNewSense 3.1 has just been released [15-17]), Live CD pioneer Knoppix [18,19], and Kali [20], to name just a few that made the headlines very recently.
Whatever Debian chooses to do is a very big deal because no Linux-related project is as big as Debian (in terms of number of developers and general impact).
Now that Valve extends its offer from Debian developers [21,22] to Ubuntu developers [23,24] it should be noted that whatever Debian does is going to affect Ubuntu as well.
An “unCivil War” [25] is not needed right now. It would be best to merely follow the rivalry of init systems, not create hostilities as some journalists are currently doing. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Having got Debian 7.3.0 installed, I had to install all the application programs that I used on my previous computer. Over the years, I had installed a lot of applications; many of them turned out to be not so useful, or were obsoleted by other applications, or (in the case of anti-virus software) I want to start over with. So I began by making a list of those applications that I really used. Then I started to install them, from scratch, on Debian 7.
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I have a new computer with a clean Debian 7 installed. I have an old computer with many years’ worth of files in several partitions. How do I copy them over? I could restore my backup media to the new PC, but that’s a lot of fiddly manual work, and not all my files are backed up that way (anything I can download again from the Internet gets rarely backed up). Besides, the latest version of everything is the version actually on my desktop.
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In our last episode, I had decided that I was going to do a clean install of Debian 7 on the new computer. What I really want is to install the MATE desktop (pronounced Ma-Tay). I’ve liked MATE a lot since using it with Linux Mint — but Debian doesn’t (yet) make a MATE install disk. For Debian 7, the choices are Gnome 3, KDE 4, LXDE, or XFCE. I did not want to install all the baggage of Gnome or KDE. And I’m already using LXDE, which is clean and fast. So that’s what I installed as my starting point.
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Partway through the install process, I was informed that I needed to install a “non-free” driver, “rtl_nic/rtl8168d-1.fw”. “Non-free” software is software that can’t be distributed under the GPL; for various reasons, Debian does not include such software on the install disk. Often these are manufacturer-specific hardware drivers. The installer helpfully offered to accept that file from either a CD or a USB memory stick.
So off to Google, where a search for “rtl_nic/rtl8168d-1.fw” pointed me to…a Debian package, “firmware-realtek”. Actually I got links to two packages: one for Debian 6 “Squeeze”, and the other for Debian 7 “Wheezy”. I chose the latter and downloaded the package (.deb) file.
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The Debian GNU/Linux Project’s bid to reach agreement on which init system it would have as default for its next release appears to have gone completely off the rails.
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A move by Debian technical committee head Bdale Garbee to bring the debate on the default init system to a head by calling for a vote appears to have failed.
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Debian technical committee was discussing the default init system for Debian and it bioled down to basically systemd, which is developed by the larger free software community (lead by Lennart Poettering), and Upstart which was developed by Canonical employees.
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The Debian init system debate by Debian technical committee members that is largely a fight between systemd and Upstart remains unresolved.
A few days ago there was a call for voting on the init system by the Debian technical committee members but that vote has now ended and it basically comes down to more discussion and clarifying the voting process is also needed.
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I propose we take the simplest possible “next step”. Let’s vote just on the question of what the default init system for Linux architectures should be in jessie. Once we have an answer to this question, it seems to me that we would be “over the hump” and more likely to be able to re-focus our attention on all the secondary questions, like what our transition plan should be, whether we should try to dictate a default for non-Linux architectures, how and to what extent alternate init systems should be supported, and so forth. Most importantly, we could start *collaborating* again… which is something I fervently wish for!
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SolydXK started last March as the unofficial Linux Mint Debian Edition with KDE. Though there had been speculation that an official KDE version of the popular desktop distribution would surface, ZDNet wrote recently, SolydXK co-founders Arjen Balfoort and Amadeu Ferreira took it upon themselves, with the support of other Mint community members, to actually build it.
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For those curious about performance differences between the current Debian 7.3 “Wheezy” stable release and the upcoming but currently unstable Debian 8.0 “Jessie”, here are some performance benchmarks comparing Debian’s stable and testing releases on the same hardware. Making things more interesting, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development form was also tossed into the mix.
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Current users of gNewSense 3.0 don’t have to reinstall. They get all updates automatically.
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A perusal through today’s newsfeeds netted several interesting topics. Jamie Watson published a Knoppix 7.2.0 review. Bryan Lunduke reported that the Elementary OS team has taken over maintenance of Shotwell. And a ZDNet blogger has listed his five reasons for using Windows 8 instead of Linux, but they are all really just jabs at Linux. All this and more in tonight’s How the Linux Turns.
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If my memory is correct, the first generally available release of Knoppix (on a Live CD) was made sometime in late 2000. I don’t think it is exaggerating to say that Knoppix set the standard for Live Linux distributions when it was released, or that the Linux world as a whole learned a lot about how Live distributions should be done, and how powerful, versatile and useful they could be.
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Exploring this Debian GNU/Linux derivative that is tightly focused on security analysis and penetration testing – and it comes with a mind-boggling array of utilities for that purpose.
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For a variety of reasons, Valve Software decided to base its SteamOS gaming console operating system on Debian GNU/Linux. While it’s likely that Valve’s SteamOS will result in code contributions and enhancement that can benefit the upstream Debian project, Valve also want to give back in other ways.
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As I’m sure most will be aware, for the last couple of weeks, Valve have
offered access to all Valve produced games free of charge to Debian
Developers [0].
As of today, they have kindly extended this to all registered Ubuntu
Developers [1].
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Valve Software recently announced that they would offer free Valve games to all Debian developers, which was considered a way of saying thank you to the base that is used to create Steam OS.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 6:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The big lie that Nokia is “supporting” or “embracing” Android is easily contradicted by recent developments
As we already pointed out about a month ago, Microsoft Nokia phones running Android are not Android phones but enhanced surveillance devices with Microsoft surveillance through Skype (part of PRISM) and much more. These are very malicious devices that Rupert Murdoch’s press is promoting and people should generally boycott. But there are even better reasons to boycott Nokia and instead turn to Finnish companies like Jolla.
Half a decade ago we explained how Nokia had advanced software patents in Europe and last year we covered patent lawsuits against Android/Linux from the Elop-led Nokia (now a Microsoft proxy). Some lawsuits took place in Europe and sought embargoes. According to this report “[s]ettling months of pending patent litigation between them, Nokia and HTC have signed a patent and technology collaboration agreement. The settlement means HTC will make payments to Nokia.”
Nokia is not the first to assault this Android backer which hardly has any patents (unlike Samsung). HTC is apparently paying Apple after litigation, it might be paying Microsoft (this cannot be verified), and now Nokia. This coalition of patent stacking is harming Android and harming customers who buy Android devices. Google is trying to fight back by buying Motorola patents — a move that does not surprise Apple because Apple reportedly tried to get those patents for itself and then attack Android with them.
The general public needs to understand that there is a lot of rogue activity such as collusion. Deciding on which phone (if any) to buy is not a simple decision, especially if ethical choices are sought. █
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02.09.14
Posted in GNU/Linux at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Pratheesh Prakash
Summary: Prelude to a series of video interviews with the father of Free (as in freedom) software
IT HAS been a while since we least released an episode with Stallman. We published 6 short videos where Stallman spoke about the early days of GNU back in the 1980s. There is a new comment from a valued reader who says “Linux has nothing to do with Stallman.”
“It’s not as though Apple and Microsoft would have thrown away their kernels to replace them with pre-1.0 Linux back in 1991.”It depends what one means by “Linux”. A lot of people use the word to refer to the GNU system which was extended by the inclusion of Linux. And even if they refer only to the kernel, where would if it be if had no system to be integrated into (the first person to do this was a colleague of mine in Manchester Computing)? It’s not as though Apple and Microsoft would have thrown away their kernels to replace them with pre-1.0 Linux back in 1991. In that sense, Linux is somewhat indebted to GNU.
A new post [1] shows a very deceiving timeline from the Linux Foundation, where Stallman only shows up some time around 1992, almost a decade after he started building the GNU system. This is revisionism and a distortion of history. It’s not the first and it motivates or justifies the need for rebuttals. In the coming weeks we are going to release several different videos of Stallman talking about non-technical matters or Internet matters which do not involve operating systems. Stallman explains, among other things, that he believes demonisation of him might be part of a paid campaign. Incitations against him are common and they are usually not hinged on facts. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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There’s a big problem with this “20 Years of Linux” graph, and many “XX Years of Linux” graphs as most all show an incomplete history or timeline of events and milestones. The one below for example.
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02.07.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Linux, accumulated and sorted over the past days for easier digestion
Linux 3.14
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With yesterday’s release of the Linux 3.14-rc1, here’s a look at the top features that were merged for introduction in the Linux 3.14 kernel.
The mentioned features are what I’ve found most interesting about this next major kernel release to date based upon the dozens of articles I’ve already authored on Phoronix about Linux 3.14, my testing already of 3.14 development code on multiple systems, analytics via Anzwix, etc.
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In a fixes pull request sent in by Red Hat’s David Airlie last night, a handful of DRM driver bugs were corrected. Additionally, there’s an update to the command submission (CS) parser for the R600 and R700 generation GPUs (the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 4000 series hardware) to support setting up the OpenGL Geometry Shader rings. The Evergreen GPUs and newer already has this GS support within their CS parser.
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“I realize that as a number, 3.14 looks familiar to people, and I had naming requests related to that. But that’s simply not how the nonsense kernel names work,” Torvalds wrote. “You can console yourself with the fact that the name doesn’t actually show up anywhere, and nobody really cares. So any pi-related name you make up will be *quite* as relevant as the one in the main Makefile, so don’t get depressed.”
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Linux kernel 3.14 RC1 includes updated drivers, architecture updates (ARM mostly, x86, PowerPC, s390, mips, and ia64), core kernel improvements, networking, mm, tooling, etc.
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While the EXT4 changes and XFS alterations for the Linux 3.14 kernel weren’t too exciting, the Btrfs file-system update was submitted today for Linux 3.14 and it’s definitely exciting.
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These latest MIPS designs, which were announced back in 2012, are described as “the interAptiv is a power-efficient multi-core microprocessor for use in system-on-chip (SoC) applications. The interAptiv combines a multi-threading pipeline with a coherence manager to deliver improved computational throughput and power efficiency. The interAptiv can contain one to four MIPS32R3 interAptiv cores, system level coherence manager with L2 cache, optional coherent I/O port, and optional floating point unit.”
Linux 3.13
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After the recent tests of AMD’s Kaveri APU with DDR3-800MHz to DDR3-2133MHz Linux memory testing and following up with AMD Kaveri DDR3-2400MHz testing on Ubuntu Linux, many Phoronix readers followed up with a request of new memory testing done on the Intel side. In this article are benchmarks of a Core i5 Haswell CPU looking at the CPU and graphics performance impact with memory frequency scaling on Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
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The first update for the stable Linux kernel 3.13 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman just a few minutes ago, starting the maintenance cycle for this new branch.
LLVM/Clang
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After a few days ago showing LLVM Clang 3.4 running very well on AMD’s Kaveri APU, here are some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.2, the latest GCC 4.9 development snapshot, and LLVM Clang 3.4 from an Intel Core i5 “Haswell” system running Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
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A group of developers remain hard at work on the LLVMLinux project to build the mainline Linux kernel on x86 and ARM with the Clang compiler.
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Thanks to Jakob’s work on Sparcv9 ABI in Clang and recent changes to Sparc code generator, I am happy to announce that Clang can self host itself on Linux/Sparc64 and on FreeBSD/Sparc64.
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Graphics Stack
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Rob Clark has landed a new shader compiler into his Freedreno Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno A3xx hardware.
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AMD is doing another large and important open-source graphics driver code drop this morning. This morning AMD is publishing their VCE code that allows for hardware-based video encoding.
Since last year AMD has provided open-source UVD support for video decoding on modern Radeon GPUs. There still isn’t any open-source UVD1 support (only UVD 2.0 and newer), but now AMD has turned its focus to open-source hardware-accelerated video encoding.
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The new compiler generates a dependency graph of instructions, including a few meta-instructions to handle PHI and preserve some extra information needed for register assignment, etc.
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Many people where worried about some Steam Machines using AMD graphics, I was too, but considering they are applying direct fixes for SteamOS as detailed below I don’t think we will have to worry too much.
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Benchmarks
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The latest Linux distribution benchmarks to share at Phoronix are a comparison of Manjaro Linux 0.8.8, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development state, openSUSE 13.1, and Fedora 20. All tests were done from an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell system to look at the current state of various Linux distributions when it comes to various areas of open-source performance.
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The latest kernel benchmarking that happened at Phoronix was testing every major Linux kernel release from Linux 3.3 through the latest stable Linux 3.13 release from an Intel Sandy Bridge system to see how the kernel performance has evolved during the hardware’s lifetime for key subsystems.
Misc.
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Daniel Phillips, a lead Tux3 developer, wrote to the kernel mailing list on Monday and acknowledged that it’s been a long time coming for Tux3… We covered Tux3 back in 2008 as the Tux2 successor that was never merged due to licensing issues and then it had been quite some time without any news on Tux3, until it was resurrected in early 2013.
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I reached out to Tip4Commit to find out just how many people were not collecting tips. One of its creators, Arsen Gasparyan, got back to me with some data. He shared with me that, as of last week, Tip4Commit supported 337 GitHub projects, for which 9,076 tips have been earned (a tip is earned when a pull request for a commit on a supported project is accepted), totaling about 3.34 Ƀ (worth about $2,650 at today’s Bitcoin exchange rate of $793.20). However, only 1.956 Ƀ has been received by 67 users, meaning 1.384 Ƀ, a little under $1,100 or about 40% of the value of all tips, has gone unclaimed.
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