Linux Kernel 4.6 Officially Released (softpedia.com)

An anonymous coward writes: Just like clockwork, the Linux 4.6 kernel was officially released today. Details on the kernel changes for Linux 4.6 can be found via Phoronix and KernelNewbies.org. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell support and Dell XPS 13 Skylake support are among the many hardware changes for 4.6. For Linux 4.7 there are already several new features to look forward to from new DRM display drivers to a new CPU scaling governor expected.
prisoninmate also writes: Linus Torvalds announced the final release of the anticipated Linux 4.6 kernel, which, after seven Release Candidate builds introduces features like "the OrangeFS distributed file system, support for the USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus (SSP) protocol, offering transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps, improvements to the reliability of the Out Of Memory task killer, as well as support for Intel Memory protection keys," [according to Softpedia].

"Moreover, Linux kernel 4.6 ships with Kernel Connection Multiplexor, a new component designed for accelerating application layer protocols, 802.1AE MAC-level encryption (MACsec) support, online inode checker for the OCFS2 file system, support for the BATMAN V protocol, and support for the pNFS SCSI layout."

Comments

Skylake P-states

[cerberusss]

One bit is very interesting to me:

A significant redesign to CPUFreq and P-State for allowing the kernel's scheduler to better communicate changes to the CPU frequency scaling drivers

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

It used to take some 30 ms for Intel CPUs to turbo-boost from a power-saving state (P-state). For CPUs in laptops, like the Core M series, this was noticeable when gaming. The latest-gen CPUs (Skylake) support very quick (1 ms) switching between P-states, and from what I gather, this kernel version now supports this. This means slight power savings and quick reaction from-and-to powersaving ("race to sleep").

Apparently it's very hard to get this right, because from what I read, the Microsoft surface tablets had a lot of trouble in this area.

Re:Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/Systemd, you mean.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[Anonymous Coward]

OrangeFS is a fork/continuation of PVFS, a filesystem for high performance computing clusters. I understand it's rather popular in that world, as is Linux itself.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Kjella]

But theres an MS Office for the mac and always has been, and it works just fine. I'm not sure how that reconciles with your theory? Wouldnt the mac be the bigger threat to windows desktops, being that its a significantly larger portion of the desktop market?

Office for Mac exists because of a deal/settlement between Microsoft and Apple, not because Microsoft wanted to. Nobody is in position to do the same for Linux. And Macs are a limited threat because you need Mac hardware and there's no centralized infrastructure like AD, they have a larger market share in that segment but got much less potential. If you could spin up corporate desktops with Linux/MS Office it'd start to threaten all their corporate efforts like Exchange, Sharepoint, Azure and so on. Sure, Microsoft will sell a home and student version but they know most people don't really need it at home, it's either so you can "graduate" to use MS Office at work or it's a home version because you already know how to use it from work.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

I recently installed Mint with the intent to migrate over. For real this time. Funny enough, the problem was not games.

Many recent games work in Linux. Well, at least Steam claims they do, and ... somehow, they do. Or might. I didn't get that far. The problem isn't so much games even. The problem already starts with hardware. Gaming hardware to be exact.

Mint had a problem with my mouse. And of course its maker did not provide a driver for it. Neither do keyboard or flight sticks. There are even no dedicated drivers for the mainboard or the sound card. The "nouveau" open source nVidia drivers that Mint insists in using don't work and I had to use command line options to disable hardware acceleration 'til I could install nVidia's own drivers.

That doesn't solve the other problems, though. Sound is a huge issue, and I'm not talking about having no 5.1 capability because, as I said before, no sound drivers. Two programs "competing" for using the sound card can well lead to one of them hogging it and not allowing anything else to use it. TeamSpeak, I'm looking at you there! Once there was even some sound related error that fubar'd xwindow badly enough that I had to kill and restart it. Which of course led to more problems where rebooting the system was actually the fastest option.

While the sound at least works most of the time, I did not manage to get the mouse to work correctly, I had to plug in a different one. And yes, I have tried whatever some people suggested on various boards. Forget it. No chance. Clicks don't get registered, sometimes it seems that only clicks to the current foreground window do, or to make things completely insane the keyboard ceases to work for some reason. Due to the mouse, no kidding.

Games are a completely unique matter anyway. Some work, more or less, some go apeshit when you try to adjust the resolution or they frizz out with some wonky sound errors. It seems that a lot of them go by "it compiles, ship it" when it comes to offering Linux support, like it's something that looks nice on the box but nobody will really ever use it so a token nod to it will do.

So I'm back to Windows for my gaming needs, as much as I'd love to move away. The problem is, as far as I can tell now, not the games themselves. Ok, yes, some more love and testing would go a long way, but the problem Linux has today when it comes to gaming is hardware support. Manufacturers of gaming hardware don't give a shit about Linux. And OSS drivers, where existent at all in the first place, suck.

The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[ras]

Please, for the love of $deity, lets this be true. We've been putting up with broken video on, well, just about every Intel GPU since they stated their driver update for Gen9 (Skylake). And that includes older hardware that used to work before this effort was started. I can understand the occasional glitch in a new kernel, but "doesn't boot into X, at all, ever" isn't just a glitch - and it's been going on for 5 kernels so far. Currently in 4.5 I can't reliably attach a second monitor.

What amazes me is this isn't just Linux. The net was full of people complaining the video their brand new Windows laptop ranges from slow to utterly unusable. Naturally they said are going to get it fixed under warranty. Ha! It infests everything. The BIOS on my laptop can't initialise a second monitor either.

It is getting better. 4.2 didn't boot for me. 4.5 works acceptably on one screen. The i915's bugzilla reports my current two monitor problem is fixed. Hell, maybe I'll be able switch on full GPU power saving in 4.7! But is it really this hard?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

PlayOnLinux has had an automated install wizard for MS-Office for many years now. Zero effort required.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Actually - your entire description of wine is several years out of date. Wine today, especially when combined with PlayOnLinux runs just about everything I throw at it not only well - but better than windows does.

I'm sure there are edge-case exceptions but they are extraordinarily rare these days. In fact, Wine is MORE compatible with pre-vista versions of windows than windows itself is (that is to say - there are more windows programs that run fully-supported under wine than there are older windows programs that work on newer versions of windows).

Re:Ob

[gweihir]

Systemd is not required by the kernel and, for example, Debian still runs well without it, and I expect it will stay that way. The push-back if they tried to make it unusable without systemd would probably fracture the project and making it the default init-system was hopefully a bad enough experience for the systemd-mafia. It is really advisable to not use systemd on anything needing stability or security and I doubt it will ever mature to the degree needed to fix that. The design is just not clean enough and its main designers do not even begin to understand why KISS is critical in solid engineering.

Re:DRM display drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Something completely different: Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Rights Management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager