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Linux 3.4 Released
jrepin writes with news of today's release (here's Linus's announcement) of Linux 3.4: "This release includes several Btrfs updates: metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much better metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools. There are other features: a new X32 ABI which allows to run in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions, another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module."
I tried btrfs, and ended up going back to ext4. Hoped btrfs might be a good choice for a small hard drive, and it is-- it uses space more efficiently. But it's not a good choice for a slow hard drive or the obsolete computer that the small size goes with.
Firefox ran especially poorly on btrfs. I was told this is because Firefox does lots of syncs, and btrfs had very poor performance on syncs. Maybe this improvement in performance on metadata is just the thing to fix that?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
As much as Linux is doing rather well despite the plethora of different versions and security risk from the open code base, using it is rather risky for legal reasons as well. Red Hat stole much of Linux from SCO's Caldera, and are distributing it without paying royalties, meaning users could be on the hook for several hundred dollars a license and casting the future of Red Hat's offerings in jeopardy.. Litigation is ongoing now, and experts expect SCO to win a crushing verdict any day now. Linux has some neat features, but there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the community about its legal future.
Yes! In the last RC! I'm not having that problem any more at all and 3.4 is rock solid on my systems.
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine, PulseAudio as a sound server (mixer) and ALSA to talk to the hardware, the rest (OpenAL, gstreamer, OSS, ESD) are either obsolete or totally different stuff unessential to audio playback. Earlier problems related to closed source softwares (Flash, Skype) or badly written HW drivers are mostly fixed.
"Another" audio subsytem? Today standard is PulseAudio on ALSA, and that it has been like that for at least 4 years. Before ALSA there was OSS but Linux developers disagree with how OSS do the sound mixing and resampling in kernel space (for better latency, they said) and OSS went closed source for awhile. PulseAudio is an effort to unite all the sound server/mixer (ESD from GNOME, aRTs from KDE or ALSA's own dmix) plus some nifty features like better battery life (less wake ups per second).
Update your FUD once in awhile, please.
Achievement Unlocked
Most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious Slashdot post.
The new x86-64 ABI with 32-bit pointers is cool because it allows you to get the architecture improvements of x86-64, such as extra registers and RIP-relative addressing, without increasing memory usage substantially due to larger data structures. Also, 64-bit operations will just use the 64-bit registers. The vast majority of programs simply do not need the extra address space.
One reason that this ABI works so well is that the majority of the x86-64 instruction set uses 32-bit operations. Some operations involving pointers can be done in one instruction without using a temporary register to load a 64-bit constant.
Windows actually also can support this, in theory, but you're on your own in trying to communicate with the Win32 API. The linker option /LARGEADRESSAWARE:NO causes the NT kernel to limit your program's address space to 2^31 bytes.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
It is something the FS should handle. The "Just fix the program," is a bad answer because while maybe one could change Firefox, you'll find another program that can't be changed because the nature of what it does requires many syncs.
The low level systems should be robustly written to do what apps need, they shouldn't be telling apps "You can't do that."
What is the rationale for moving up to 3.4 so soon?
Obviously big tech companies, as well as the Mozilla Foundation play the versioning game aggressively, but the Linux kernel always had a reputation of being conservative.
Why is the GNU logo the one that marks this story, when it's specifically about the Linux kernel, and not GNU userland? Among the keywords, GNU shouldn't even be there for this story, and the logo for this story should have just been the penguin logo.
[Old Man mode]: I remember a time before PulseAudio, and before JACK, and before ALSA: The Linux kernel had some built-in drivers ("OSS-Free"?) which supported adequate functionality for every sound card/chip on the list, and if you wanted more features or support you could just pay 4front for a better driver (and they were always worth the minimal price).
And: Everything. Just. Worked. Always. Hardware settings (back when sound cards still had configurable analog sections(!)) were deterministic and reliable, and getting excellent sound from *random_app* was a foregone conclusion.
Much fun was had, for instance, with "cat /dev/audio > /dev/st0" to dump a radio show (reliably! without problems! in the plain-and-simple way that Unix is supposed to be!) to DDS tape.
Now, this was 17 (or so) years ago. Anything involving further difficulty, at any stage of the game on a user level, on the Linux sound front is a step backward.
Now, get the fuck off my lawn.
[/Old Man mode]
Kid-proof tablet..
I still remember that message, on Oct 1991, from a guy by the name of Linus Benedict Torvalds on comp.os.minix
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote :-) "
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine
Well, sometimes getting audio to work is beyond the control of the Linux kernel. If the system has integrated audio on the motherboard (e.g. a laptop) the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) supplied by the manufacturer in the ROM can instruct the hardware to behave differently under different operating systems, or provide different descriptions of the hardware (e.g. audio inputs and outputs) to different operating systems. That's why it's common to have little glitches in Linux audio, like not having the right mixer controls.
The DSDT is written in a language called ACPI Source Language (ASL). Intel and Microsoft both provide compilers for ASL, but the MS compiler accepts buggy, non-compliant DSDTs. Since for some vendors (Toshiba) the job is considered done when stuff works under the current version of windows, they ship their laptops with DSDTs that won't work under anything but Windows and might not work in future versions of Windows.
Since the kernel writers have no way of knowing what specific hardware is in your machine except what your machine tells the kernel, they can't fix this. It's entirely the manufacturer's fault, although users blame Linux because everything works in Windows. Getting stuff working isn't exactly a nightmare, but it's beyond most users' capability. You extract the DSDT from ROM, decompile it, fix the bugy ASL, compile it, then put the fixed DSDT in your initramfs (remembering to do this again every time you install a new kernel). Sometimes using a linux boot parameter to masquerade as Windows to the hardware works.
So to recap: the Linux audio system may be fine, the hardware drivers may be fine, but if the manufacturer fails to supply a correct description of what the hardware contains to the Linux kernel, audio might not work.
Disclaimer -- this information is a few years out of date, as I've stopped using Toshiba laptops and use Asus instead. However I'm fairly sure it still exists with certain manufacturer's laptops, which have worked flawlessly for me under Linux.
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