01.03.14

Links 3/1/2014: Linux (Kernel) News

Posted in News Roundup at 10:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Kernel Space

• Btrfs-Progs To Be Updated In Tandem With The Kernel

• Download Linux Kernel 3.13 Release Candidate 5

  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.

• GrSecurity Continues Hardening The Linux Kernel

• The 50 Watt Power Regression Is Believed To Be Fixed

• Linux 3.13-rc6

• ‘Fairly small’ Linux 3.13-rc6 released

• Happy Birthday, Linus Torvalds!

  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.

• Linux 3.13 Kernel Development Will Be Dragged Out

• Linux: Then and Now

  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.

• Linux 3.13 Kernel HDD File-System Benchmarks

  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?

• Torvalds: Linux devs may “cry into our lonely beers” at Christmas

  Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling.

• Linux 3.13-rc5 released

  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.

• Linus Torvalds’ Leadership Defines 2013 As The Year Of Linux

  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.

• Reiser4 Is Now Available For The Linux 3.12 Kernel

  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.

• A Summer Spent on the Linux Kernel Virtual File System

• Linux Kernel 3.12.6 Is Now Available for Download

• SDN in 2014: More Adoption and More Money for Vendors

  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.

• Exclusive Research: How Are Enterprises Deploying SDN?

• VIDEO: David Meyer, OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee Chairman

• Video: Changing the World One Line of Code at a Time

  I recognize at least 5 of the voices in the video: Jim Zemlin, Richard Stallman, Eben Upton, Mark Shuttleworth and of course Linus Torvalds.

• The Genius Of Linux Is Community, Not Technology

  Linux never fulfilled its original promise as an old-school desktop operating system. But its everywhere in 2013, driven by a vibrant community.

• ZRAM Finally Promoted Out Of Staging In Linux Kernel

• Linux Foundation Highlights Linux for Mobile, Cars, Gaming, Cloud

• ‘Big’ Linux 3.13-rc4 released by Linus Torvalds

• Linux 3.13-rc4 Kernel Released, But It’s Too Big

• Download Linux Kernel 3.13 Release Candidate 4

  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.

• Android’s ION Proposed For Mainline Linux

• What is Linux? Can I use it? (very bad article)

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

• Linux’s New Game: the Internet of Things

  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.

• The Top 10 Best Linux Videos of 2013

• Linux Kernel 3.12.5 Is Now Available for Download

  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

• NVIDIA Optimus Linux Power Battery Tests

• Intel Pentium G3220 On Linux

• Intel Celeron, Pentium Haswell HD Graphics On Mesa 10.1-devel

• X Server Security Disaster: “It’s Worse Than It Looks”

  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.

• More Changes Coming For DirectFB 1.8

  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.

• Intel Releases A Boatload Of Haswell Documentation

  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.

• X.Org Server 1.16 Planned For A July Debut

• Wayland’s Weston Was Rapidly On The Rise This Year

  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.

• Features Coming To Wayland, Weston 1.4

  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.

• Intel’s Beignet OpenCL Is Still Slowly Baking

  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.

• 2013 Was A Stellar Year For Mesa

• The Vivante Mesa Driver Is Still Brewing

  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.

• X.Org Server 1.15 Release Has Several New Features

  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.

• NVIDIA Optimus Linux Power Battery Tests

• Intel Broadwell Support Continues To Land For Linux

  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.

• xorg-server 1.14.99.905

• It’s Easy Getting Intel Graphics To Work On SteamOS

  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.

• iFixit opens a Steam Machine prototype, finds a modular computer

• NVIDIA 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review

  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.

• Intel Haswell Linux Performance Improved A Lot In 2013

  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.

• AMD Catalyst 13.12 GPU Driver For Linux Released

• Mesa Support Comes For Adaptive Vsync

• X.Org Server: 1,047 Warnings Reduced To Zero

  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

• 6-Way End-Of-2013 Linux Benchmarks

• ASUS Zenbook Prime Linux Benchmarks

• Linux 3.13 Kernel Power Consumption Benchmarks

• Intel Core i3/i5 Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge Linux Performance Update

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