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: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.

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).

4.7??

[110010001000]

OSX is already up to version 10.11.5. These Linux people better start producing in order to catch up with the quality that is OSX and iTunes. They probably aren't even Agile. I'll mention it at the next stand up.