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Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

An anonymous reader writes Linux 3.18 was recently released, thus making Linux 3.19 the version under development as the year comes to a close. Linux 3.19 as the first big kernel update of 2015 is bringing in the new year with many new features: among them are AMDKFD HSA kernel driver, Intel "Skylake" graphics support, Radeon and NVIDIA driver improvements, RAID5/6 improvements for Btrfs, LZ4 compression for SquashFS, better multi-touch support, new input drivers, x86 laptop improvements, etc.

33 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A Device Manager? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

    ls -al /dev/

  2. Will RTL8192 still be broken? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It worked always great, then I think after 3.12 it doesn't work anymore. The problem is that most distributions I tried installed with 3.08 or something below, and they all want to upgrade to a newer kernel and all probably want to upgrade utilities - that also could be broken for that chipset. So long story short, due to linux being broken one piece at time, I had to buy a mac :(

    1. Re:Will RTL8192 still be broken? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Sounds somewhat worrying. That's a very popular chip.

      There's always a few things you can do:

      - Talk to LKML.
      - Post a bug report in bugzilla.kernel.org.
      - Find the specific patch which caused the regression with git bisect. Canonical has a good guide on the topic (use "man git-bisect" for more info).

    2. Re: Will RTL8192 still be broken? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Could you be more specific on a device that isn't working. I'm pretty sure I have run a device with a version of this chip not long ago without issue. Knowing a specific device might help track down any issues.

    3. Re:Will RTL8192 still be broken? by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

      It worked always great, then I think after 3.12 it doesn't work anymore.

      Seems to be working for me with Debian's 3.16.

      Bug report numbers?

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
  3. "New Features" by coop247 · · Score: 1

    driver improvements, RAID5/6 improvements for Btrfs, LZ4 compression for SquashFS, better multi-touch support, new input drivers, x86 laptop improvements

    Not sure "new features" is the right summary of changes.

    --
    //TODO: Insert catchy phrase
    1. Re:"New Features" by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

      By the way, wtf is a "x86 laptop improvement"?

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    2. Re:"New Features" by r1348 · · Score: 1
    3. Re:"New Features" by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      x86/64, but with a ton of stuff crammed into the ACPI interface, some of which is actually there for power management, none of which is properly documented because every manufacturer likes to put their hotkeys and screen close sensor on a different ACPI event.

  4. System Hardware. Or yum install hardinfo by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    The kernel and friends manage hotplug devices quite nicely.
    I take that to mean you want a clickity-click GUI, so you can see what the system has already detected and handled properly for you, and do things without needing to understand what you're doing. If that's what you're looking for, hardinfo is a well-known option. Your choice of graphical desktop environment probably has one it provides by default as well. Look under "System" or similar.

  5. Re:systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Red Hat is why shitstemd exists...

  6. Re:systemd? by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Linux kernel is depricated[sic] - systemd will take over its functionality.

    +1 hilarious.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  7. Re:systemd? by twistedcubic · · Score: 1

    This is not at all true. The opposite is true. The latest kernel works perfectly fine on any 15 year old x86 machine.

  8. Re:systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The basic idea is good, but SystemD has implemented it poorly. FreeBSD is sitting back and taking notes of what not to do. SystemD is pioneering the idea, could have been done better, but FreeBSD will get the benefit of hindsight. FreeBSD will still manage to mess some stuff up and OpenBSD will refine it 10 years from now.

  9. Re:systemd? by Barsteward · · Score: 2

    "but SystemD has implemented it poorly." - thats a matter of opinion

    "SystemD is pioneering the idea" - surely Sun, Apple and Ubuntu have similar in place before systemd came about.

    --
    "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
  10. Re:systemd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I'm glad to hear that systemd is being reimplemented in Emacs Lisp so it can run seamlessly, as all functionality should, as part of Emacs.

  11. Re:System Hardware. Or yum install hardinfo by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    Not really : "hardinfo" itself is not known or not known under that name, and a report about the installed hardware is a bit worthless (lspci and lsusb do about that).
    The Device Manager is not only a unique GUI (stable during two decades of Windows versions), it allows to choose or install drivers and even to configure the drivers. You can do things that are seemingly impossible in linux like limiting a wireless card to a maximum speed (to get a connection "slower" but more stable), or other things. It would be not only having the simple GUI (from times when Windows was easier to use) do lsmod and modprobe kind of work, but also configuring the kernel modules (or kernel), which is something an advanced user is likely to not know about (do I need to set up a build environment and recompile kernel modules?, compile kernel?)

    There does exist a useful GUI under linux, the "Proprietary Driver Manager" which allows to switch between nvidia and nouveau (for instance) by clicking a radio button.

  12. Re:System Hardware. Or yum install hardinfo by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

    Manual override of connection speed is via the 'iwconfig' command. I've done it before. I don't know if you can set a maximum speed, but you can set a fixed speed.

  13. Lockup issue by xluap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Has the lockup issue been solved?

    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

    1. Re:Lockup issue by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      That's something different.

      See this LKML page. Search with CTRL+F for "frequent lockups in 3.18rc4".

      The thread is clearly still going on. As far as I can tell, the bug has not been fixed.

    2. Re:Lockup issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      As far as I know, they found the cause (it seems the kernel doesn't handle well some clock issues and clock overflow), and Linus send a RFC-like patch that kinda "fixes" the thing but it is so hackish that it needs to be discussed, generalized and ironed out. DaveJ doesn't have access to the hardware triggering the issue anymore, so it may be a while before they can actually fix it in a proper manner.

      On the way to figuring out the cause for that bug, they found other lockup issues with similar symptoms but completely different causes and fixed them.

  14. Re:systemd? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    But is systemd GPLv3? It would have to be in order to be a part of emacs

  15. Re:systemd? by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

    The point is that that's the opinion of people who dislike systemd. That doesn't automatically mean they'll also dislike "a Systemd like init".

    People like that might not (those who think it's implemented poorly). The people who will are the ones who insist on an init system that follows the "Unix philosophy". They're not going to be satisfied with anything other than sysvinit.

  16. Re:systemd? by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

    Great, we look forward to seeing your new upstart-based distro, since everyone else has abandoned it.

  17. Re:DirectX? by loonycyborg · · Score: 1

    Not essential anymore. All major game engines tend to have opengl codepaths and even full linux ports.

  18. Re:systemd? by Barsteward · · Score: 1

    "Technical objections != dogmatic hate" - after reading a lot of posts by those that don't like systemd in these forums, that statement does not stand up to scrutiny. Its been "dogmatic hate" under the guise of very flimsy "technical objections" that were really personal likes/dislikes. I'd love to see a list of "technical objections" against systemd that have not already been (or cannot be) refuted or have different ways of doing the same thing.

    It would be nice to have an adult discussion of the pro/cons of systemd without the emotive claptrap especially against LP.

    --
    "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
  19. Re:systemd? by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

    Great, we look forward to seeing your new upstart-based distro.

    That'd be Debian. Jessie will support systemd, upstart or sysvinit.

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  20. Re:systemd? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    are they using -march or -mtune?

    I do understand that many won't run out of the box with less than a 586-class processor now, but I don't think P4 is common yet

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  21. old hardware left behind by bzipitidoo · · Score: 1

    One of my PCs is a Gateway GT5628 PC with an Intel Q6600 chipset. Shutdown used to work every time on this PC, with kernels around the 2.6.32 version. By 2.6.38, shutdown was unreliable. About half the time shutdown works, and the other half the computer goes through the shutdown process successfully and at the very end, fails to turn itself off, sitting on the text screen with "power down" displayed on the monitor. I have to hold the power button for 4 seconds to complete the shutdown.

    I haven't submitted any bug report. It would be nice if shutdown worked every time like it used to, but it's a minor problem with an easy workaround, so minor I figured no one would care to hunt it down and fix it. I haven't. I could try a bunch of old kernels out to narrow down when this feature was broken, but haven't felt it was worth my time.

    Linux is very good about supporting old hardware, but inevitably some does get left behind. They deliberately dropped support for the 386 somewhere around kernel version 3.5. Other old hardware simply isn't checked. When was the last time anyone tried a mouse that plugs into the serial port? Not USB, not PS/2, but ye olde 9 pin (or 25 pin!) serial port? Last time I fooled around with one about 5 years ago, I couldn't get XWindows to recognize it. The fastest "fix" is to just get a USB or PS/2 mouse. Or, at the price of systems these days, a whole new computer.

    --
    Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  22. Re:System Hardware. Or yum install hardinfo by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Which leads us to the sadly all too true obligatory XKCD which is why Linux on the desktop is so low its getting its ass handed to it by "other" and has gotten so low its literally below the margin for error.

    Considering that every time Linux starts to get stable the devs take a big steaming shit on it, Pulse, KDE 4, Gnome 3, Systemd, not to mention Torvalds constant kernel fiddling, is anybody really surprised by the plummeting numbers? Its a damned shame but as long as devs would rather put out yet another release instead of fixing the bugs in the previous release Linux will always remain in alpha quality.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  23. Re:DirectX? by Ultra64 · · Score: 1

    Really curious to know how this is "Flamebait".
     

  24. Re:systemd? by Pi1grim · · Score: 1

    Have you actually taken a look at the log format that journald uses? Text is stored verbatim in them, so you can even dig through them with grep. Binary meta-data being added to it makes wonderful things possible - getting logs by unit, time and other parameters without whipping out a mile-long regexp. So please read up on the topic you attempt to bash or you will end up looking pretty stupid to anyone with a clue. Just like you did now.