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: But of course the distributions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian bug #1558331 proves that. They claim MongoDB and Chrome are tools of the repukianz so they don't allow us to install them.

Wow, this shows the hatred of Debian contributors:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1558331?comments=all

They hate us and don't want to allow us to use the software we need.

OrangeFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers provided performance charts against AppleFS in the release notes, but they found it wasn't comparing the same thing.

Re:OrangeFS

[ArchieBunker]

I looked over the homepage for OrangeFS and still can't figure out the point.

Re:OrangeFS

[Anonymous Coward]

From a glance at their website, I think the keyword is MPI-IO. Picture a weather simulation consisting of 10,000 processes that work together in parallel, where all of them perform semirandom input/output using the same files. That's gonna be difficult to do right with conventional filesystems...

Re:OrangeFS

[Billly Gates]

When people here filesystem they think of a disk file system.

Maybe calling it Orange Clustering System might be a more descriptive name?

Re:OrangeFS

[driblio]

And what filesystem do you put on that ramdisk that allows access from 10,000 different machines, simultaneously? And how does that single machine connect to the network? Do you have access top a machine with 1PB of RAM? We have a few 1.5TB machines, but our filesystem is more like 1TB. Basically, this has nothing to do with ram disks, other than that the servers will have huge gobs of ram cache.

Re:OrangeFS

[flyingfsck]

OrangeFS is a derivative of the parallel FS originally used for Beuwolf clusters.

Re:when is it going to be different?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This is what they've been saying about both AMD and NVIDIA since there was a linux and an AMD and an NVIDIA. They all say "open-source xxx with binary". So what, they are drawing the line somewhere else?

Sounds to me like an open source driver in the OS and an opaque firmware blob to be loaded into the peripheral and run entirely there.

Not ideal. But how (besides the complexity and ease of installing malware) is it different from doing a complex silicon design, with an open driver, and not giving the RTL description of the logic? Or doing an FPGA design, providing an open driver, but not giving the source to the FPGA load, only the opaque binary object that describes the logic to be emulated?

Re:when is it going to be different?

[Zontar The Mindless]

I have a GTX 660. I have it because the folks who built my system for me included it as part of a package that had everything else I wanted. I was a bit leery of it at first, but went with it after finding that it was listed as supported by Nouveau, and that Nvidia provided its own Linux drivers as well. Nouveau sucked: it did not support a number of features that it claimed to, and was flaky as hell. Got tired of of my desktop vanishing without a trace, so I decided to try the Nvidia drivers, which worked a treat. Sometime later, after a number of successful driver updates, I hit one that didn't go so well. Filed a bug with Nvidia, and found their tech support folks to be extremely polite, knowledgeable, and helpful--and they actually took the time to explain a few things to me.

I prefer to use FOSS software. But I also prefer to use a computer that works.

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.

Another Reason

[ytene]

There could be another reason for this. Do you recall how Creative Labs became very obstructive regarding design information for the X-Fi range of sound cards, to the extent that they would not release even basic info to the GNU/Linux driver community? The reason is because Microsoft sponsors them to write drivers for Windows. Just as Microsoft paid games companies to use DirectX over OpenGL. 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...

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?