Links 3/1/2014: Linux (Kernel) News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-03 15:31:10 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-03 15:31:10 UTC
Kernel Space
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I recognize at least 5 of the voices in the video: Jim Zemlin, Richard Stallman, Eben Upton, Mark Shuttleworth and of course Linus Torvalds.
-
Linux never fulfilled its original promise as an old-school desktop operating system. But its everywhere in 2013, driven by a vibrant community.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Security is Desirable, But Not When the Term Security is Misused to Imply Centralisation of "Trust" (Whose?)
- 'Security' is not an excuse for vendor lock-in
- The Media Helps Microsoft, Amazon and Others (GAFAM and Beyond) Lie About Mass Layoffs Amid Valuation Bubble
- The media, instead of saying that there's an "AI bubble" crashing the economy might instead choose the narrative of "jobs replaced by AI"
- Bad Tempered? You Might Have Just Given Away That You're Losing the Argument
- Brett Wilson LLP is fully aware that it is being investigated
-
- [Video] Dr. Richard Stallman at Technické Univerzitě v Liberci
- New/via libre-liberec.cz
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Linux Journal (Slashdot Media), UbuntuPIT, and Google News (Noise)
- egregious plagiarism
- Links 17/10/2025: Better Answers Sought After Air Crashes, "China Fans Patriotic Sentiment as Trade War With U.S. Heats Up"
- Links for the day
- Links 17/10/2025: Fentanylware (CheeTok) Causing Problems, Japanese Government Blasts Slop
- Links for the day
- The Linux Foundation Seems to Have Turned Linux.com Not Only Into a Spamfarm But Also LLM Slopfarm
- it's polluting the Web, even important domains like Linux.com, with spam and LLM slop
- Links 17/10/2025: UK’s Largest Breach Penalty and Windows TCO Examples
- Links for the day
- Go Watch Video About Librephone, Get Microsoft Ads
- Very ethical company...
- Campaign of Defamation Against the People Who Built NixOS (and Are Now Pushed Out From Their Own Project)
- We've already grown familiar with - and resistant to - such tactics
- Links 17/10/2025: Nestlé Crisis, Canada Post Versus 'Gig Economy' [sic] and Vista 11 Breaks Itself
- Links for the day
- Tux Machines Has Helped Separate Opinions/Analysis From News
- In September 2023 we decided to split things apart and not repeat links in both sites
- Tux Machines Has Improved Navigation of GNU/Linux and BSD News
- Some more 'wiring' work
- What a World Would Look Like If Everyone Used Free Software Only
- Freedom is what matters, not "Open".
- Richard Stallman (RMS) is a Target of Defamation Campaigns Because of His Views on Software (But Politics Are the Excuse for Defaming Him)
- Here in this site we try to refrain from politics, except in Daily Links
- End of Vista 10 and Rise of GNU/Linux as Client Side Operating System
- It seems certain GNU/Linux will grow in popularity over time
- Taking Stock of a Week's Worth of EPO Leaks
- We remain committed to exposing EPO corruption as long as it keeps happening
- Mathieu Parreaux claims FINMA knew since day one
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Calumny, Libel, Joerg Jaspert & debian-private untouchable cyberbullies
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 16, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 16, 2025
- Techrights Turns 19 in 3 Weeks
- coverage of suppressed topics and protecting all sources/whistleblowers
- International E-Waste Day Same Day as End of Vista 10
- message from Akira Urushibata
- The EPO's Central Staff Committee Presents Evidence That Staff Compensation Lowered While the Office Increases Income by Illegally Granting Invalid Patents
- These people become millionaires by doing illegal things
- Second or Third Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in October 2025, This Time Portugal
- Those are just the ones we know about, there may be several more
- 'Help Net Security' (helpnetsecurity.com) May Have Become a Slopfarm as Well
- Zeljka Zorz, Editor-in-Chief at Help Net Security, was reported to us
- Gemini Links 17/10/2025: Rant About Network Solutions, Strange Anomaly on Lagrange
- Links for the day
- EPO Staff Representation Lacks Social Dialogue With Relevant Management, Controversial and Sometimes Illegal Policies Implemented Without Necessary Input
- "In this open letter, the CSC requests that the President submits an agenda item in the next available General Consultative Committee (GCC) meeting on setting up regular meetings between the CSC and the higher management of DG1."
- Links 16/10/2025: Political Leftovers and Gemini Protocol Links
- Links for the day
- Lies Need to be Corrected
- the Court never invited us
- Slopwatch: Guardian Digital (linuxsecurity.com), Slashdot, Google News, and More
- Maybe one day, once the bubble pops completely, Google News will just outright delist all slopfarms
- Lufthansa Modern Slavery, Joerg Jaspert (ganneff) & Debian NSB Softwareentwicklung charade
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 16/10/2025: US Starting More Trade Wars With China, CIA War on Venezuela
- Links for the day
- SUSE Blog is Still LLM Slop, Marketing Manager at SUSE Cannot Write
- Would you buy from a company or seek support from a company that cannot even write (or fakes writing)?
- Pretend You're Not Dead: Microsoft Spent Almost Two Decades Rebranding Things as "Cloud, Then "AI", Now "XBox" and "Quantum"
- "AI" bubble pops, Microsoft harping about "quantum" already
- IBM Allegedly Found New Tricks for Silent Layoffs: LPI, Then MIS (Not PIP)
- Remember that "Red Hat layoffs" won't be reported after the bluewashing
- Links 16/10/2025: Red Lines and Feeding of Microsoft Trolls
- Links for the day
- MIT as a Propaganda Mill of GAFAM, Paid by GAFAM
- "the news" today
- Links 16/10/2025: Lies Euphemised as ‘Dueling Versions of Reality’ and Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Resorts to Porn as No Business Model Was Found
- Links for the day
- The Local Staff Committee Munich (Representation of the EPO's Staff) Explains When Cluster of Pregnancies May Result in Reduced Pay
- "...even one week of part-time working is sufficient to reduce the salary you perceive during the entirety of your maternity leave."
- Another Black Eye for 'Secure Boot', Microsoft Media Tries to Blame "Linux"
- It enables Microsoft to remotely control computers, even computers that don't run Windows and never had any Microsoft software installed
- Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT, linuxsecurity.com, and Various Slopfarms in Google News Attacking "Linux"
- A new survey of the Web said that the majority of the Web is now slop (that's being said in the news this week)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 15, 2025
- Links 16/10/2025: Increased Use of Social Control Media Surveillance in US, French Rage Over Pensions
- Links for the day
- Links 15/10/2025: Qantas Airways Loses Control of Sensitive Data and Software Patents Are Being Thrown Out
- Links for the day
- Vista 10 is 'Dead', Here's Why People Should Move to GNU/Linux (or the BSDs)
- Today we try to make an outline of reasons move away from Windows to GNU/Linux
- Our Sites Continue to Improve
- LLM slop has had no noticeable impact on us
- Gemini Links 15/10/2025: Neovim, Helix Compared and Gemlog.blue Now Closed
- Links for the day
- Links 15/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon, OneDrive Spyware Revved Up, More 'Gen Z Protests'
- Links for the day
- The EPO's Staff Engagement Survey 2025 is Already Tainted by Intimidation by EPO Management (Trying to Influence Outcomes by Scaring Genuine, Honest Critics)
- "[W]e have received reports that, following the previous survey, teams with negative responses were reproached or questioned about their answers..."
- The DDoS Attacks by Microsoft's Scam Altman and Other Slop Charlatans and Frauds is Hurting the FSF, Delinking It From Copyleft Projects
- This impacts a lot more than access to the licences
- Microsoft Scanning Faces in Photos People Upload to Microsoft (Even Unconsciously), Slashdot Turns Report About It Into "Microsoft Sez" (Says)
- Or "let's repeat the lies from a PR person/Microsoft's publicist"
- [Teaser] Angel Aledo Lopez the Manipulator (Nepotism, Poll Rigging, and Other EPO Corruption)
- We'll discuss this later today or tomorrow, based on internal EPO material
- Attacks on Techrights Are Only Making Techrights Bigger and Even More Popular
- A week ago they offered to settle with us
- Epic Metaphor for End of IBM: "The IBM Demolition is Down to the Last Shards!"
- Nothing lasts forever
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 14, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 14, 2025
- Proprietary and DRM Prisons Spiralling Down the Sinkhole? Not Just Yet.
- Let's hope that more people will flee to GNU/Linux
- The European Patent Office (EPO), the Second-Largest Institution in Europe, is Cracking Down on Recreational Activities
- Without AMICALE activities, and as staff already says it's pressured to work more for less, how can the EPO recruit bright people?
- Transparency: FSFE financial reports exclude speaker fees and expenses
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock