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Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
Kind of a shame, I was hoping they were integrating the Digital Research Mac-like User Interface system for DOS (and the Atari ST) into the kernel, just to annoy purists...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I recommend reading this link to get an idea of what's going on in the Linux graphics stack:
"So currently there is not one field where construction done but several. These are 2D Acceleration, Memory Management, 3D Acceleration and 2D Modesetting. And they are all being worked on at the same time to speed things up.
But the problem is that more or less all of these depend on proper Memory Management, which is also the hardest thing to get right.
Now lets look at how Xorg works today; every Xorg driver implements its own way of memory management and provides the DRI1 functionality when it comes to 3D. Furthermore it is responsible for modesetting, which is quite suboptimal, since some perliminary modesetting is already done in kernel, so it can output messages during bootup. The Xorg driver resets the hardware again when it is loaded.
Kernel Based Modesetting
In order to solve this duplication the modesetting code is about to be moved into the kernel, so the hardware can be setup once and for all. But since modesetting involves memory management which is not done properly yet too."
Because the UAC window is on an independent desktop that other applications cannot interact with. The only possible flaw is if something has installed itself as a mouse or keyboard input driver, I believe. But doing that will spawn a great big red unsigned driver prompt.
What should be important is that maybe next gen games should be released on Linux as a platform equal to Windows.
I was a long term Linux user, who went to XP just for the games. My gaming rig is waiting an RMA on a PSU, so rebuilt an old system and installed Slackware.
On an older machine with slower drives and a quarter the Ram, the responsiveness of the OS is amazing. If mainstream games were released for Linux I'd have no choice.
Sadly, I mainly use computers these days for relaxation, shopping and play, and if I'd continued as I set out, would no doubt be a full time Linux user... However, as a gamer, I put up with XP64 as a day to day OS.
You're correct that the vast majority of improvements in the Linux kernel - when taken by themselves - are unlikely to change anything for any specific end user. These become significant when you add them all together. Odds are slim that any one person will ever use some new hardware support being added in a given kernel update, or some notice some change that ups battery life by couple a percent. However, when you compare the hardware support or battery life of a modern Linux distro to one even a few years old the change is drastic.
There is a huge number of examples I could give, but a recent event really stands out for me. Just a couple days ago a friend was having computer problems (couldn't read a DVD) and wasn't sure if it was a hardware or software issue. A simple check was to boot off Linux off of a USB flash drive and see if it worked (it didn't - ends up the DVD was funky). What's amazing here is that on a completely random system - built as a Windows gaming machine without Linux in mind - a Linux install which has never seen this hardware before performed flawlessly. It booted off of the USB drive faster than the (clean, relatively minimal bloat) XP did from the hard drive, detected and automatically connected to wifi, et al. Everything just worked.
Adding support for a few new webcams or wifi adapters or some new memory management or power stuff isn't going to make a difference. Doing that repeatedly for years, however, and all of a sudden you've got the best hardware support (out of the box anyways) and best performing OS around.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
The NVidia blobs remain a big problem. It's not the kernel blob: it's their replacement by setting aside of the OpenGL libraries, used to access the NVidia features. This part of the NVidia process destabilizes every OS that it touches because any updates to those libraries overwrite the NVidia libraries and seriously break your graphical setup.
It's theoretically possible to rewrite the Xorg and Mesa packages to cooperate with this by bundling the Nvidia package and its libraries to a package matching the Mesa components and install one or the other, but no one has yet done so. So NVidia remains a dangerously unstable set of tools to install in any sytem that gets any updates otherwise.
Basically the next generation games consoles will be based on Linux + some API.