Linux 4.3 Bringing Stable Intel Skylake Support, Reworked NVIDIA Driver

An anonymous reader writes: Mr. Torvalds has released Linux 4.3-rc1 this weekend. He characterized the release as "not particularly small — pretty average in size, in fact. Everything looks fairly normal, in fact, with about 70% of the changes being drivers, 10% architecture updates, and the remaining 20% are spread out." There are a number of new user-facing features including stabilized Intel "Skylake" processor support, initial AMD R9 Fury graphics support, SMP scheduler optimizations, file-system fixes, a reworked open-source NVIDIA driver, and many Linux hardware driver updates.

Comments

Re:SystemD kernel already supports

[UnknownSoldier]

> Now only if it had a decent text editor for ...

You could always use Vim ...

/me ducks ;-)

Or if you are really evil ... Vim mode for Emacs

If you really want to go straight to hell ... Emacs mode for Vim

Pick you religion / devil :-)

removing ext3fs?

[TheGratefulNet]

how will that affect older grub booting systems?

some very old systems know only about ext2. then there are some that only know about ext3.

I remember that if you diable journalling (or have closed the disk cleanly) that ext2 can read ext3.

is there any risk of an older system that can only read ext2 (or maybe 3) not being able to boot with even a cleanly shutdown ext4 fs?

and, would grub have to be updated?

somehow, removing ext3 seems wrong to me. ext4 has been out a while, but a fs is so important, its hard to believe that it was wise to remove a good, working collection of code like that.

(I do use ext4 on my current desktops but some embedded audio boxes still are ext2 and 3 based).

Re:removing ext3fs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing changes for the users, because the ext4 driver actually handles ext2/3/4, and it's the one all distributions ship.

People who have a ext3 filesystem already have it handled by the ext4 driver, almost nobody was actually using the ext3 driver that got removed.

Re:removing ext3fs?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Anyone still using a bootloader that can't go beyond EXT3 (ancient evil-tier old GRUB package) probably isn't thinking about building Linux kernel 4.3

I keep almost all my /boot's on ext3, so images are maximally portable (older pygrub on Xen machines can't do much). It's just a tiny /boot, so who cares - even a forced fsck takes about 2 seconds.

The ext4 driver in kernel mounts them all fine anyway.

Re:removing ext3fs?

[TheGratefulNet]

disagree.

I am still using voyage linux (.hk) and that is optimized for embedded use, such as audio. but they are still stuck on a way WAY old version of grub (grub1, not even grub2) and they boot ext2fs and that's it. not even ext3, afaik.

and yet, I do build kernels that support the latest audio (and dsd) drivers.

so, your theory is blown. some distros are still old but that does not mean the kernel has to be.

duh!

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[armanox]

Have you filed bug reports? People can't address problems they don't know exist. Many laptops are fully functional without problem, so you can't expect someone to know you have a problem.

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[Kjella]

This kind of stuff is why I use Windows as my primary OS now. I have a laptop and I have to be mobile right now. With Linux on my laptop I lose about 25% of the battery life and it also runs slower compared to Windows. Even worse it does not hibernate correctly and even sleep sometimes screws up. Sometimes when it wakes up from sleep under Linux the USB ports don't work. I have just gotten tired of dealing with these issues and after all this time it is pretty clear that it is not a priority for developers of Linux. It is just easier to have virtualbox with Linux installed under Windows and use that.

I'm sure they'd like to do more, but I guess volunteers lack the hardware and none of the major laptop vendors have seen much profit in selling Linux preinstalled so there's no funding for paid employees to support it. Unfortunately there's a lot of hardware quirks that can't easily be worked out without being able to diagnose and test it on that particular hardware. Particularly if it just fails every once in a while due to a particular state/timing/condition. Maybe it would be possible to create some kind of remote hardware lab where you get remote management + button operation + webcam + microphone + hard power reset switch to do testing, scripted suspend/resume runs and self-tests to give developers broader access but you still need people with time and interest to fix your particular model. That might be hard in itself.

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[chipschap]

This kind of stuff is why I use Windows as my primary OS now. I have a laptop and I have to be mobile right now. With Linux on my laptop I lose about 25% of the battery life and it also runs slower compared to Windows. Even worse it does not hibernate correctly and even sleep sometimes screws up. Sometimes when it wakes up from sleep under Linux the USB ports don't work.

I have just gotten tired of dealing with these issues and after all this time it is pretty clear that it is not a priority for developers of Linux. It is just easier to have virtualbox with Linux installed under Windows and use that.

I'll readily admit that it's more work and tinkering with Linux, but --- given the willingness to take the time to get things done right up front, which is a one-time effort --- I have to disagree with your points. The following is based on my experience with the three laptops I've owned over the past few years.

1. I did some power optimization and battery life on Linux is about the same as on Windows. Not better, but not worse either. (It was definitely worse before optimization, I'll admit ... but that's what optimizing is all about.)

2. Runs slower? I've never seen that in any noticeable way. Neither can I say it's faster ... except that I can control the amount of strange stuff running in the background and I'm not phoning home to Microsoft.

3. Hibernation / sleep were indeed an issue on 2 of the 3 laptops. But they work fine after somewhat substantial effort. The key thing seemed to have been finding out which hardware drivers to restart on resume. In one case I put in alternative hibernation software. It was all a pain but the point is that it can be done.

A day or two of work up front and I run Linux problem free for months and years. Not everyone is willing to do the work, and/or feel that such work shouldn't be necessary. Fine --- then run Windows if it does everything you need. For me, Linux is about productivity and being able to get things done without the major annoyances of Windows (I'm being polite and understating things here). I find Linux is worth the extra effort.

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[Ambassador Kosh]

By runs slower I mean when I am doing OpenMP applications they are actually running slower under linux. I am not sure how it works but for some reason under Linux I get higher reported temperatures and the CPU does not stay in the higher turbo ranges like it does under windows.

I installed the Linux pstate driver for a Haswell i7 chip and I have it using the performance governnor.

My other issue is when I try to use the dedicated GPU for GPGPU work it is a pain in the ass under Linux. I know it is not Linux's fault that it does not support technology like optimus very well but that doesn't change that it still makes it a pain in the ass.

I used to use Linux as pretty much my only OS. But since going back to school and working on biotech drug process development I have found my goals have changed. I will use free software if it works better but overall for doing very high performance c++ (OpenMP and MPI) it is easier to develop and debug with Visual Studio and the Intel developer tools under windows.

At this point I just want software that works so I can do my primary work of writing computers simulations to help us manufacture drugs that we can't currently figure out how to manufacture and make cures and treatments available to people that need them. Fiddling with my OS to get it to work is just not worth it anymore. I have not had Windows 8.1 crash on this laptop and the upgrade to Windows 10 went without any problems.

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[armanox]

For me Linux runs slightly better then Windows 10 on my laptop (Precision M4500). Windows 10 keeps breaking things (like my touchpad), so for smooth operation Linux actually wins in my case (battery life is roughly the same, CUDA works great on my Quadro card, I don't have switchable graphics, but I'm told they're a pain). Matlab is one of those wonderful cross platform pieces of software - works great for me in Solaris, OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Re:Laptops, anyone?

[LVSlushdat]

I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a Dell Precision M4400, and I'll admit the hibernation doesn't work 100% but ya know what? I have an SSD on the system and it coldboots in less time than it would take to come out of hibernation, so I really don't care.. For the VERY few Windows programs I need, I have a Windows 7 Virtualbox VM on the system.. After trying out Window 10 preview and seeing what a privacy nightmare it is, there ain't NO way thats ever gonna be on ANY machine *I* control....