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

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

[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: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?

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?