Kernel News: 3.14 Release Candidate 4, Systemd 209, AMD Free Software, More Benchmarks
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-26 08:39:34 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-26 08:40:12 UTC
Summary: Roundup of Linux (kernel) news from the past few days, including some rather exciting announcements
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Hey, things are looking pretty normal, and rc4 is smaller than rc3, so
I'm happy.
The biggest patch in here (accounting for about a sixth of the total)
is just DaveJ re-indenting a reiserfs file. Ignoring that whitespace
cleanup, the rest is mostly the usual mix of drivers, networking and
some architecture updates.
Nothing big, and nothing that looks particularly scary.
So get to it, and test it all out.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, February 20, that Linux kernels 3.13.4, 3.12.12, 3.10.31 LTS, and 3.4.81 LTS are now available for download.
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Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 209 and once again it's another massive release with stuffing more features into the init system, including preparing the user-space side for the kernel D-Bus implementation.
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This example can be used to setup a minimal Linux installation for any task. In this tutorial however I am going to use kernel development as an example. Since the process I have used in the past have been from sporadic sources, I wanted to consolidate the information for my own need. This tutorial is the result of that effort. So that next time if I feel like doing something kernel related, I don’t have to start over again.
Graphics Stack
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Good news: AMD's press / global communications team is finally talking up their open-source Linux graphics driver features. Bad news: they appear to still need lots of training over their own Linux graphics drivers. Or is there some Linux driver shake-up happening? Here's some of what they are promoting right now with the AMD Linux graphics driver.
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Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.
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Wayland clients running on the Weston compositor now have support for the minimize button.
Clients using an XDG shell surface now support the state of being minimized with this Git commit on Tuesday.
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Broadwell support has been a work-in-progress on Linux for many months and most of the hardware enablement is complete. The Mesa driver has had mainline support for Intel Broadwell graphics for some time now, but only today is it being enabled by default and not hidden behind the Intel preliminary hardware support flag. The latest Broadwell work was with this commit and other changes.
Benchmarks
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Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.
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After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.
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In my last article on next-gen filesystems, we did something in between a generic high altitude overview of next-gen filesystems and a walkthrough of some of btrfs' features and usage. This time, we're going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin. That's the most current Long Term Service (LTS) Ubuntu release.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Nonfree Software in My Bank, by Richard Stallman
- Updated 8 hours ago
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- Yes, Microsoft is the Problem
- "I am no MS shill."
- Another Failed Use Case for Chatbots (LLM): Legal Advice and Analysis
- They're just some self-discrediting toy that costs way too much to operate
- Links 29/07/2025: More Pushbacks Against Slop and More Praises of Tom Lehrer
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Purple Yarrow and Understanding Op Amps
- Links for the day
- This Monday WebProNews Absolutely Flooded the Web With Fake (LLM Slop) 'Articles' About "Linux", Google News Promoted Them as Legitimate
- All of the following are fake articles attributed to pseudonyms or authors that don't exist; the images are also slop. Why does Google promote these?
- Linuxiac is Not a Slopfarm, But at Least Some of Its Articles Are Machine-Generated Fakes
- what we said about it was correct
- Expect More Microsoft Layoffs
- "Are more job cuts coming?"
- Microsoft Behaving Like It's Running Out of Money to Pay Salaries
- Does that seem like the behaviour expected from a company which claims it is "worth" trillions?
- LWN Downtime Due to Linode, Not LLM Bots
- "I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 28, 2025
- Links 28/07/2025: Science, Health, and Conflicts
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Healthy Self-Image With Autism and a "New Life"
- Links for the day
- Links 28/07/2025: COVID-19 Sped up Brain Aging, "Circumvention is More Popular Than Compliance"
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman is Usually Right Because He Thinks "Outside the Box"
- he is able to observe society (mores and norms) as somewhat of an outsider
- LWN Has Been Down for a Long Time, Another Casualty of LLM Bots?
- Time will tell. How much time though?
- Slopfarms Versus 'Linux' (and Against People Who Write Real Articles About GNU/Linux)
- LLM slop in slopfarms by Brian Fagioli and Redazione RHC
- Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray and Running pkgsrc in a FreeBSD Jail
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Turns News Sites Into Spamfarms
- Is the site The Register MS the next IDG?
- The Register MS/The Register US
- On Saturday I contacted them for a comment (before issuing criticism)
- Hacking revelations at Vatican Jubilee of Digital Missionaries
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 27, 2025
- The Week to Come
- Planning ahead
- LLM Slop Has Only Been a Boon for Misinformation Online
- The very same companies that were supposed to maintain quality (again, not limited to Google with PageRank) are now actively participating in generating and spreading slop
- When They Tell You It's Free, Does That Mean No Charges (If So, Who's Paying and Why)?
- there's "no free lunch"
- We're Going to Focus Less on the Molotov Cocktail-Throwing Microsofters and More on Patents
- We can get back to focusing on what we wanted to focus on all along
- Just Trying to Keep Web Sites Honest (Journalistic Integrity)
- the latest articles in LinuxIac are real
- Links 27/07/2025: Political Affairs, Data Breaches, Attacks on Freedom of the Press
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/07/2025: Hot in Japan and Terminal Escape Codes
- Links for the day
- Links 27/07/2025: More Microsoft Layoffs Coming, Science and Hardware News
- Links for the day
- Links 27/07/2025: FSF Hackathon and "Hulk Hogan Was a Very Bad Man"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/07/2025: DAW Mixer Chains and Simple Software
- Links for the day
- The Register MS is Inventing or Giving Air Time to New Conspiracy Theories so as to Distort the Narrative As High-Profile Agencies Fall Prey to Microsoft Holes
- But the problem is holes, i.e. Microsoft making bad products; the problem is Microsoft
- Most Editors at The Register Are American, Including the Editor in Chief, a Decade-Long Microsoft Stenographer (Writing Prose to Sell Microsoft)
- It's not easy to tell where the site is based (we tried) because it's hiding behind ClownFlare and CrimeFlare hasn't been well lately
- Pushers of systemd Rewrite History (Richard Stallman Said UNIX "Was Portable and Seemed Fairly Clean")
- Unlike systemd
- "New Techrights" Soon Turns 2 (A Few Days Before the FSF Turns 40)
- We have a lot more to say about LLM bots
- When Silence Says So Much
- Garrett, a 'secure' boot pusher, will need to defend himself in the UK High Court
- The Register in Trouble
- There is not much that can be done at this point
- Trajectory of The Register: From News Site/s Into "B2B"... and Into Microsoft Salespeople
- Something isn't right at The Register
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 26, 2025
- Misinformation in Social Control Media
- Social control media passes around all sorts of tropes
- Slopwatch: Fake Linux 'Articles' and Slopfarms With "Linux" in Their Names/Domains
- throwing bots at "Linux" to make some fake articles