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Linux 3.13 Kernel To Bring Major Feature Improvements
An anonymous reader writes "There's many improvements due in the Linux 3.13 kernel that just entered development. On the matter of new hardware support, there's open-source driver support for Intel Broadwell and AMD Radeon R9 290 'Hawaii' graphics. NFTables will eventually replace IPTables; the multi-queue block layer is supposed to make disk access much faster on Linux; HDMI audio has improved; Stereo/3D HDMI support is found for Intel hardware; file-system improvements are on the way, along with support for limiting the power consumption of individual PC components."
"Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve's Linux-based platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops. The Linux creator praised Valve's 'vision' and suggested its momentum would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously — especially if game developers start to ditch Windows. Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows. That's a sore point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come. 'I'm not just saying it'll help us get traction with the graphics guys,' he said. 'It'll also force different distributors to realize if this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because they can't afford to be different in this respect. They want people to play games on their platform too.'"
So many improvements! Which proves that right now Linux must really suck. It's a good thing then, that Windows, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, etc etc can be counted on to suck far worse.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Posted by timothy on Fri Nov 15, '13 10:04 PM
Go figure. I would accuse Dice of firing the editors and replacing them with ESL wage slaves but that would probably be an improvement.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The temperatures in hell are dropping but I am not going to hold my breath as Windows still holds the retailers and manufacturers by the balls to say the least. However with both Intel and AMD actively supporting the Linux kernel this quickly for their most important product lines perhaps a manufacturer like Samsung or Lenovo might actually try to market a real full blown Linux based device for a change instead of just dabbling in Android consumer craptronic devices.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
i have enough win boxes i need to tweak on a daily basis just to get them to act like a computer.
now some newb decides he's gonna turn my iptables into roadkill?
FU.
I still upgrade from time to time, but my attention is more focused on security than any supposed "improvements". I don't want to be the odd guy who is caught with some vulnerability that was fixed eight versions ago.
Some Linux distributors, instead of providing a new kernel that may break old applications or devices, instead backport security fixes to an old kernel.
"That's only going to work for so long until the next generation hits adulthood."
Do you really think so? The "next generation" is in high school right now, taking "computer science" courses, that consist of teaching Microsoft Office. What the next generation actually needs, is to learn to question authority. If they can learn that lesson, then maybe they can break the corporate lock-in tradition that the current generation seems so happy with.
Time will tell, of course. If Microsoft, Apple, and the major manufacturers start losing big money, then you'll be proven right.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
This is just a cash grab by the Linux developers.
sure i'll tear out my video card, fork over cash and put in a better supported one but which is best supported now?! they improved the Intel, AMD and NVidia video card drivers! dammit, cant they just improve one video card driver at a time?!
will these first world problems never end?!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What the next generation actually needs, is to learn to question authority
Apparently somebody's never met a teenager before. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I'm not sure what's going on in the school district you're in, but I've been in some Chicago Public Schools recently and they're teaching the kids a lot more than just "Microsoft Office".
I brought home one of the puzzles that some of the kids made on a 3D printer using some CAD program. It had nothing to do with Office. There were Linux machines scattered around the room and lots of the kids had iPhones or Android phones (not part of school, but don't think they're not learning how to work those platforms, make apps, etc). Now this happened to be a "selective enrollment" school (where you have to test in) but I don't think they're going all that far afield from what's happening in other schools.
I was pretty surprised at how well they seemed to be doing in terms of avoiding the obvious. Now, you'll still see Office in some of the career prep courses, but not anything like what I saw in schools' computer labs back in the early 2000s.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".
In any case, it's not about authority here...the real issue is that to most teenagers, or most people in general, a computer is merely an entertainment device, rather than a powerful tool that can be tailored to one's own needs. It doesn't matter how easy the latest user-friendly scripting language gets, "programming" remains something they envision as involving binary and machine code, purely there for autistic folks and aliens.
What we really need is to integrate programming of SOME kind into the general curriculum of our schoolchildren. And for Christ's sake, leave enough holes open on the local school network for kids to have fun learning to poke holes in the restrictive environment you've set them up in. The classes teach them HOW to do things, and the rebelliousness of getting around the restrictions gets them interested in doing them (and then the combination of heavy handed laws and bug bounty programs bring them back into societal correctness once they enter adulthood...hopefully).
The absolute LAST thing kids need is a user friendly interface. Save those for grandma, give the kid a raspberry pi, a book on Python, and then put them up behind a firewall that blocks most anything their friends will be wasting their time with. Not because you want to keep the kid OFF of such sites, but to make them at least learn a thing or two from time to time in their attempts to waste time in an otherwise purely wasteful manner.
I have. Most of them (like most adults) are idiots who ask the most trivial questions and don't question authority where it counts. What they usually do is mindlessly oppose everything, and that leads to them growing up and forgetting all about it.
The PS4 is just a low-end gaming PC with a Sony sticker on the front. Of course the games are going to look like something a PC could play a few years ago.
Bcache, merged in 3.11, improves IO up to 100X. Not 100%, 100X, or 10,000%. It may well be worth an upgrade if you're running a distro 2.3x and have random IO on multi TB storage.
I've been using linux for a while and until I can hookup my firewire Edirol FA-66 straight up from an install with any distro I will .It gets a bit teeny weeny annoying. And by 2013 you'd think things would have been down pat by now!Cmon. Im going to grit my teeth have shell out for a MAC!. Or sell everything to get linux in a Korg OASIS. If friggin Korg can do it right someone else can.I prepare to pay maybe not the equivalent of the Korg OASIS. I just want something that works!.
Continue duel booting with windows. If something does work and I update it.It ends up breaking something. Or the next release distro wont work at all I'm getting extremely p&$@ ed off of late. Sense about 8.04 of ubuntu. Version 10 or 12 of slackware. Around 2011 with distros thing have just gone ta crap. Config files init scripts get changed, shifted, fuggin moved around short linked to something somewhere
The last thing we need is yet another generation of people who think writing SEO-web shit or yet another fart app is programming. We need to at least have a generation that is capable of maintaining infrastructure, be it the Linux kernel, core apps, or at least knowing how the fuck to access a disk on a sector basis.
At one job, I was looking for programmers who knew what they were doing about cryptography. Met lots who could do cutesy API stuff and very well animated lock icons, but someone who could actually look at example source code for coding some actual security infrastructure were impossible to find.
At least give the kids something to fight for. Put a firewall in place, and let them figure out how to VPN out at the minimum.
We need fewer point and drool programmers... we need more people who actually can figure out lower level infrastructure and not just tied to the highest level in the computing stack.
Oh God that is one hilarious ad landing page. Well worth the click to earn your innovation protection badge!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
much improve. so amaze. wow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Firmware_binary_blobs
Will there be a compatibility layer so I can still use the iptables application/syntax for a while?
Nah just need to remove the absurd penalty involved if you get caught hacking the school network, at least as long as you don't use your exploits for any sort of personal gain. I had a lot of fun playing with the school network. Despite never once taking advantage to having full reign over the system I was thrown out of school for a year when I got caught. The effect it had on my life after school was enough to turn me away from hacking. In the 10 years since that was added to my record I have had a total of three jobs, I gave up even trying to find a normal job because I'm sick and tired of explaining it and getting turned away because of it.
What really added insult to injury was that the kids that picked fights on a regular bases almost always got detention for that, a couple got kicked out for a week, but none of them kicked out for a whole school year. It pisses me off so much that I'm shaking in anger just thinking about it.
What's not mentioned in the news article is that the most important updates to Nouveau are being posted in the 3.13 kernel. There's going to be Power Management support for most current generation graphics cards. This is a huge thing. Performance wise it is going to lead to a massive jump in performance on the Nouveau drivers. The only other outstanding parts of nouveau are the OpenCL support, and the SLI support. After this update it should be possible to use the nouveau drivers for a lot more serious 3d work than they have been used for in the past.
The kernel is now done. It has been done for years. Of course new hardware comes and needs to be supported. But everything in that department is rolling quite nicely. The kernel guys know what they are doing. The Linux kernel is stable and if a problem pops up, it gets fixed.
So these days the kernel is a nice black box which I don't have to worry about. Now, fix the desktop. That's where the interesting stuff is happening. Fix the terrible performance problems and lack of configurability of Unity. Make a rich graphical configuration tool for touchpads. Make the boot process beautiful: currently I just see the distro logo flashing in and out with some occasional scary lines printed in framebuffer console. Fix the little glitches here and there (quality assurance?!). Make DVD burning work correctly. Make it so that I have to never fight video tearing.
Xbox One also. The hardware of the two is almost Identical, so don't play the fanboy card.
What the fuck is wrong with you Linus?
If your programmers cannot figure out which libraries to use and/or link everything statically, might I suggest that instead if crying fragmentation they look for a different profession.
When is BTRFS finally going to be declared stable and become default on major distros? Its features were needed years ago. The Copy on Write features are killer features that have been needed on Linux for years, such as to implement a filesystem level versioning, system restore an restore point feature and improved snapshot features. Ext4 is only a stop-gap and Ext is really starting to show its age.
If you think that is the only issue with fragmentation, Linux tards are even bigger morons than I gave them credit for.
Dynamic linking usually fails. New versions of code rarely adequately support backwards compatibility. Java is probably the worst offender. Any long term stable system is going to have 20+ versions of java or other libraries to maintain stability of its programs.
My youngest son graduated high school three years ago, in southwest Arkansas. I taught the boy more about computers than the school system did - then the little smart ass learned at least five times as much as I taught him, on his own. He is putting himself through college, and informs me that the majority of the courses, majority of the teachers, and majority of the students are clueless boobs who can't do much more than the Microsoft-centric high schools taught them.
I'm sure that mileage does vary, depending on location, but Microsoft still has a lot of lock-in going for them in the school systems.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
the multi-queue block layer is supposed to make disk access much faster on Linux
What do you mean by "much faster"? Have we been chugging along in the slow lane all these years?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".
Exactly. Teenages only rebel in small ways; they don't really think about things from a big-picture point-of-view. I remember going to middle school and high school in an upper-middle-class suburban area: all the kids at my schools were die-hard Republicans (this was back in the Reagan/GHWBush years, so this meant something slightly different back then). It wasn't until they went to college that many of them started changing their views radically.
I wonder when the deficiencies in SSD TRIM support will be fixed. I don't think there's still any distro which enables discard support automatically in fstab.
You mean like the deprecation of HAL in favor of udev, breaking user space programs that rely on HAL?
I said "for some workloads" twice. Specifically those "localized" workloads would include a web server with a MySQL database, a mail store, or other frequently accessed files - a very, very common workload. The database and other frequently accessed files end up on SSD while the large, sequentially accessed files such as videos stream from spindles.
I also said "up to" - in some cases it might not be 100 times as fast, but "only" ten times as fast.
For some common types of workload, bcache (or dmcache) makes a big difference.
Linus said that he wants to have a 4.0 in about a year, not for now... and that he wants a clean, more bug fixed version (to see if distros use it as a long term stable version, instead of something like 2.6.32 or 3.2.x
Higuita
Nobody wants to hire a kid who thinks he can hack and then gets caught. It shows you can't be trusted at any job where you might need to touch a computer, phone or money. Worse still, it shows you lack skills.
People want to hire the guys who performed the hacks and got away with it, not the ones who overestimated themselves and failed.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The problem is with the definition of major. There are almost never minor improvements to the kernel, using conventional ideas of major and minor. Ergo, these terms need updating or removing. They serve no useful function in the context of the Linux kernel.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wow. That read (to me) as though you get some pleasure & felt superior by deriding someone. (We all can be guilty of that sometimes. Human nature I suppose, but not one of the better bits.) Regardless, IMO you're not not giving enough consideration to a few points:
It seems kernel releases are becoming more frequent. One thing I did not see in the article (unless I read right over it), is when this kernel is supposed to be released. Does anyone have a clue or can you point me in the right direction?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
...says the troll that's probably touched Direct3D never.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I still play my Loki games despite every clueless git trying to make pronouncements about things they don't have any experience with (game programming or app programming in general).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The biggest issue for a Lenovo or Samsung isn't Linux hardware support, it's the nightmare of customer support on Gnome3 + Cinnamon + KDE + XFCE + LXDE + Unity...
Also, I'll say that I actually like Unity except for the one feature (which everyone else seems to hate also)... replacing the 'start' menu with a search window. People often want quick access to apps that they don't run every day and thus can't remember the names, so having a bunch of accessory, control panel and utility icons crowd into the list when I start typing what I thought was the app name really REALLY sucks. Listing apps hierarchically under a handful of categories is what works; the user should have both a menu and search available, and not be herded into primarily using search.
The window handling, menus and taskbar in Unity are an improvement although they take a little getting used to.
As for Wayland, I think it will flounder the way X11 has been doing. It is one thing to design software components by committee... its quite another to do so through a committee of committees (which is what many FOSS consortia are); it took these pretenders decades to get display configuration half-right. Mir may or may not pan out, but it seems to have a strong vision for what the graphics layer needs to be.
In the local school district, they use some office application I have never heard of before. This doesn't seem to harm the kids in any way. They aren't unable to cope with other brands of spreadsheet or word processor afterwards (like the Lemmings will claim).
This is kind of the way it should be for school in general. Teaching concepts and whatnot.
If you can't handle different brands of word processor, you're going to be totally f*cked when your brand of choice makes a major UI change in the future.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> already switched to osx years ago.
Bought some Macs. Was not really impressed.
Glad I can buy a much wider range of PCs for far less money if I am not married to a single highly proprietary operating system.
The worst part about running MacOS is being stuck with Apple hardare.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's for sure. I learned on Nota Bene. Now nothing throws me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise...
Is this from your extensive experience coaxing young girls into your pedo-van?
Linux always breaks, apps are not tested, things crash, guis are horrendous and 10 years behind MacOSX and Windows, etc.
PC is great for running Windows which is more solid than Linux (dont give me an argument how BSOD happen every 15 minutes because back when you ran Win ME 15 years ago the same situation must exist now).
Linux only runs great on servers from tested releases like Redhat sadly.
If you hate Windows MacOSX is your only option for desktop work. Raedon drivers break every apt-get update rendering X useless.
http://saveie6.com/
My youngest son started become a teenager when he was 6, he is almost 15 now and usually more mature than a lot of people 20+.
I still play my Loki games despite every clueless git trying to make pronouncements about things they don't have any experience with (game programming or app programming in general).
1 example proves infinite? Now which logic fallacy is that...
Exactly. He just did something he knew was wrong using a computer. That means it shouldn't count, he was using a computer and therefore everything he does makes him a hero. See also Aaron Swartz
The benchmarks I've read, which were reviewed by the kernel mailing list, indicated that dm-cache has the best performance in many cases. My gut feeling is that I'd rather use bcache, but I don't know why.
The current benchmarks have one huge failing, though. They test random IO by doing truly random IO all over the disk. Real random writes, in real workloads, is concentrated mostly in a relatively small number of blocks, such as the database and log files. That's important because the caching systems put the frequently accessed blocks in cache. True random benchmarks, with no blocks being frequently accessed, counteracts what the cache is doing. What's needed is a set of benchmarks run with random IO within four files of a few GBs each , to simulate a database, mail store, or other frequently accessed region of the disk.
you should have kicked the shit out of the principal, then they would have let you back in. i mean, come on!
Im 14 I got a rasbperry pi and I went through those holes on the school network that you speak of.
I got yelled at for that. a lot!
But thats besides the point i put my brother on arch on the rasbperry pi.
And I totally agree about the programming in school curriculum.
I brought it up with my principal and she said it would cost too much money!!!!
They freakin waste so much money as it is on pointless projects that never get done and field trips for stupid stuff.
When will they wake up????!?
The freaking government will hire them all day! :)
OOOOOOOOOOOH the microsoft office crap at my school was an idiotic move.
Guess what. They called it Information technology.
Man if IT was so easy that you could type words into libreoffice all day then anyone would do it.
Freaking ridiculous.
You elitist, there's no way most people's three year old PC can run that kind of game, and not the Linux PCs. You at least run into shit like having a slightly too slow CPU, unless you talk about an old high end PC or one upgraded to not get under 20 fps in fire fights. Half the people are running laptops, too.
I sadly stopped caring about PC gaming : I have absolutely no need or desire to upgrade my CPU (3GHz dual core AMD) yet games are written for even faster dual cores, or for quad cores. I'm glad my PC works at all, thanks. I would need to get a motherboard with higher current or different socket, and that's a pain. I'm even using linux anyway which makes it hard or impossible to run even a ten year old game (except blizzard and valve ones).