Slashdot Mirror
Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window
hypnosec writes "The Linux 3.11 merge window is about to close, most probably this Sunday, and most of the pull requests have been merged, including feature additions and improvements to disk & file system, CPU, graphics and other hardware. Some notable merges are: LZ4 compression; Zswap for compressed swap caching; inclusion of a Lustre file-system client for the first time; Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support for R600 GPUs; KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64); and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC."
Holding out for Linux 3.11 for workgroups.
This space for rent.
and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC
I'm surprised the Slashdot headline didn't read "DRM Coming to Linux" or some other such nonsense. :-)
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
And that's about all you're going to see here, since most of the valuable contributors have abandoned this site and the people who are left are mostly trolls and shills.
And YES, we are going to see almost nothing but comments making variations of this joke.
Indeed. Linux 3.11 is a colourful clown suit for Unix.
http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/biz-enterprise/485159-a-conversation-with-linus-torvalds
"I think I will call 3.11 Linux for Workgroups."
"If I can't have Linux for Bob
I don't want nobody, baby"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
fck, wrong article.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I remember learning Unix shell, compilation, basic C programming on X11 terminals (there were a couple hundreds of them) and something like Solaris 7. We were given an ugly login shell (black on white xterm), the motif window manager (mwm) and that's all.
It was funny as it really looked and acted like Windows 3.1, only without the program manager, file manager or control panel. It also had alt-f9 to minimize, alt-f10 to maximize, alt-f7 to move etc. which is really cool and still found on Gnome2/Mate and Xfce at least.
It was really fun trying to fo something useful in that environment, some guy had made a crude launcher (we had to walk into his home directory), I used aliases for e.g. launching a green on black xterm rxvt with nice font size and much bigger scroll buffer, we figured out how to have a background image on the "desktop".
I looked for it in vain on linux, tried to download Lesstif but it's only libraries and nothing else. Now maybe we'll be able to use it at last?, lol. I hope they open source mwm, along Motif and CDE.
It was also both minimalist (more so than say Fluxbox or jwm) and easy to use, unlike twm and myriads of "worse than Windows 3.1" window managers. One little issue was you lost everything when closing the login shell by accident (but you thus never get into a situation where all shell windows or all windows all closed and you can't open a new terminal)
Hey, Mr. Anonymous Coward, stop talking to yourself!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm going to use it under LinOS/2.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's about time to have dynamic power management for Radeons (from a user point of view, don't know how difficult it is). It's just a bad default to have it spinning at full speed all the time, because most graphics card make a lot of noise when running at full speed. The alternative was to default to a low power mode, which reduces the performance for anyone who doesn't bother to look up the controls.
The problem with dynamic PM is that many times you need the performance quickly and for a short time. Can the card switch modes in much less than a 120th of a second, such that you don't get an impact on performance (on at 120Hz monitor)? Can it detect that it needs to switch modes in a similarly short time? It's not that bad of a problem, because most cards can run the desktop effects in low power mode (didn't work for me on Gnome, but I assume that's a bug since it was great in KDE). The main problem would be with hardware video decoding or deinterlacing and gaming, but I don't think the open driver supports any video decoding, and deinterlacing should have a reasonably constant load.
Overall, great to have dynamic PM. It may help with laptop battery life for many people who haven't bothered to check the PM settings before. For me who turns down the performance to low, I don't have to remember to turn it up before playing games etc.
Linux itself doesn't spy on you. There is a lot of network code in the kernel, but there would be quite a debacle if it connected to anything on the internet by default.
As for desktop linux distros, there was a big story when Ubuntu started to send "local" search queries to Amazon. So you can expect that any more serious spying would get an even bigger objection. There is still potential for secret spying, but that is true for any system you don't build from scratch, and it's impossible to know. Fedora uploads crash dumps to their servers, but only on explicit request and with proper warning. When I still used it in F18 it connected to the network when you mis-typed a command (to try and find a package with that command), but I'm not sure if it actually sent the string you typed.
Linux distros may also connect to NTP servers and update servers by default, but there is no way for the servers to identify a specific host. If the government already knows your IP address, it can at best (worst) tell them when you were awake, but there are many other entities which are better positioned to give this information. Any application software can of course spy, and browsers do that unless customised
In a related posting about Linux kernel development I asked why embedded single-board-computer manufacturers always seemed to be way behind in versions and why they don't keep up with versions but I didn't really get a satisfactory answer. So let me ask this another way: are there any commercial single-board-computers or commercial embedded devices that use 3.11 (or the most recent stable mainline kernel)?
For those that don't know AArch64 stands for ARM 64 this part of the ./ post might be quite misleading: "KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64);"
I'd like my tty1-6 to be in 80x50 text mode. I've never managed to do it, for six years and counting!
Right now they are in 80x25, and I don't remember doing anything for that, not long ago I had the text console in high res graphical mode. And before that, graphical corruption. Before that, black screen. It's like it's totally random, though I once fixed it from black screen to high res text or 80x25 text with a grub parameter (I don't remember well which I got).
I also killed my high end and great 22" CRT monitor by switching from corrupt text console to graphical X11 too much, when reinstalling the nvidia driver. /etc/fix_the_damn_console.conf or some easy solution?
Shit, why not a file like
Zswap for compressed swap caching
Is it full replacement for zram swap space?