Links 13/12/2013: Linux (Kernel) News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-13 14:15:37 UTC
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.
'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!
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.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Rust is Starting to Seem More Like Microsoft-hosted "Digital Maoism", Not a Legitimate Effort to Improve Security
- Maybe this is very innocent, but they seem to have taken a solid, stable program from a high-profile Frenchman and looked for ways to marry it with GitHub, i.e. Microsoft/NSA
- Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia Fortify Their Digital Border With GNU/Linux
- This month's data from statCounter is particularly interesting near the Baltic Sea
- Richard Stallman Gives Public Talk at Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic
- "For programs that you could run, and for network services that could do your own computing, under what circumstances is it reasonable to trust them?"
- Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs Comes Shortly. Microsoft Propaganda Sites and Slopforms Powered by Microsoft LLMs Already Spew Out Face-Saving Nonsense.
- Based on last month's leak, some very extensive layoffs are now imminent [...] Perhaps we can expect a lot of noise, some of it spewed out by bots, to distract from or belittle the impending mass layoffs
- Ubuntu Becomes Microsoft GitHub, Based on Decision Made by British Army Officer
- You're hopeless, Canonical
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- People Used to Talk
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- Outsourcing GNU/Linux to Microsoft GitHub Promoted by Microsoft LLM Slop and Army Officers
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- Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part III: No More Media Lawsuits From Brett Wilson LLP This Year, One Can Only Guess Why
- People leak a lot of material to Techrights because they know, based on the track record, that the sources will be protected and whatever gets published will stay online, in full, no matter how stubborn an effort (even lawsuits and blackmail) will be sent its way
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- a rather long document
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- The eighteenth "and a half" anniversary
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- In this case, "enshittification" is an understatement
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- While selling us some rusty old propaganda about how moving to Microsoft GitHub (Rust) will improve security
- Making Site Archives More Easily Accessible (Approaching 50,000 Blog Posts)
- Efforts to censor us have always backfired badly
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- They're trying to scare people and they misuse their licence to operate
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- Thanks for listening. How can this Morse feed be further improved?
- Right now any and all feedback on the audio would be helpful
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- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, May 05, 2025
- Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part I: Hiding Behind Lawyers (or Guns for Hire) After Abusing Many People and Even Strangling Women While Microsoft Paid Salaries
- This whole thing is very typical of the Microsoft and Bill Gates mindset
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- Disbelief in itself isn't a bad thing; but the problem is that people are taught to believe rich people in suits more than they believe others
- Skype is Officially Dead Today and This is Why People Should Use Free Software Instead (Goodbye, Microsoft)
- It's also a good reminder of why people should move to GNU/Linux
- 'Simple Articles' in MyGemini Just One of Many New 'Sites' in Geminispace
- Geminispace has grown fast lately; it's turning 6 next month
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- SUSE the Company Now Uses LLM Slop to 'Write' Its Blog, What Does That Tell Us About SUSE?
- There are many giveaways
- Richard Stallman is in Alicante Today to Give a Talk, Czech Republic in Two Days (Wednesday)
- Of course he can deliver the talk in Spanish
- Gemini Links 05/05/2025: XL Bullies and Luddites
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 04, 2025
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