Linux 4.6 Brings NVIDIA GTX 900 Support, OrangeFS, Better Power Management (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel has been released. New to the Linux 4.6 kernel are a significant number of new features including NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 open-source 3D support when using the closed-source firmware files, Dell XPS 13 Skylake laptop support, a fix for laptops that were limiting their own performance due to incorrectly thinking they were overheating, AHCI runtime power management support, Intel graphics power management features enabled by default, a new file-system (OrangeFS), and a range of other improvements.

Comments

Re:OrangeFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge LOL.
Yet *another* filesystem from Linux, just one of dozens. What a fucking joke.
I swear BSD has had just essentially two filesystems ... FFS/UFS and ZFS. Both amazingly stable and performant for their design.
But Linux can't even get one of dozens to sit well in the community, whether they be buggy or unbalanced in certain performance areas.
I'm soooo glad I switched from Linux to BSD back in the UFS days.
And even more happy now with native in-kernel ZFS.
My days of dealing with the Linux-thing-of-the-month club are long since GONE.
And good riddance.
I need something stable and long term, no constant churning.
And I found it in BSD.

Re:when is it going to be different?

[dbIII]

The ideal is convincing Nvidia that software patents will not be an issue if they open up the code. We may have to wait for the ex-SGI guys in that place to retire because they were burnt before. The absolute ideal way for that to happen is if those stupid software patents that are normally just a description of a problem instead of a solution to be completely discarded.

Re:Another Reason

[drinkypoo]

So there is a high probability that nVidia are taking the Microsoft coin and in return the deal prohibits them from providing full open source to the FOSS community...

nVidia has hinted around repeatedly that getting into bed with Microsoft and producing NV2A is specifically where they became massively encumbered. A lot of people who claim to be interested in this stuff don't seem to know that Microsoft was dipping their toe into GPUs back in the nineties with Project Talisman, mostly being done by Cirrus Logic with some input from Silicon Engineering, Inc. It had features not then in use by other graphics solutions, including a skewing technique that permitted you to interpolate some parts of some frames instead of actually fully rendering them. Who knows what patents were cross-licensed between nVidia and Microsoft?