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Arch Linux Is Now Officially Powered by Linux Kernel 4.7, Update Your Systems

Posted by msmash on from the good-things dept.

Marius Nestor, writing for Softpedia: After a few weeks from its official release, it finally happened, Linux kernel 4.7 has just landed in the stable software repositories of the popular, lightweight and highly customizable Arch Linux operating system. Linux kernel 4.7 is the most stable and advanced kernel branch, and only a few GNU/Linux distributions have adopted since its launch on July 24, 2016. It's still marked as "mainline" not "stable" or "longterm" on the kernel.org website, which means that it didn't receive a maintenance update at the moment of writing this article. As for its new features, Linux kernel 4.7 comes with an updated AMDGPU graphics driver with support for AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs, LoadPin, a brand new security module that ensures all modules loaded by the kernel originate from the same filesystem, and support for upgrading firmware using the EFI "Capsule" mechanism. Linux kernel 4.7 also marks the sync_file fencing mechanism used in the Android mobile operating system as stable and ready for production, implements support for generating virtual USB Device Controllers in USB/IP, supports parallel directory lookups, and introduces the "schedutil" frequency governor, which is faster and more accurate than the current ones.

54 comments

  1. Get Bent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    or Get Arch.

    1. Re:Get Bent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linux is a lifestyle choice.

      Through selecting what works best with out hours of tinkering and ricing up my own solutions, my home router is pfsense (FreeBSD), my NAS is FreeNAS (FreeBSD again), my laptop/workstations are Macs (Somewhat BSD in there again).

  2. I use Arch by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But I don't see the point of this being on /.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For the joke?

      Let me quote something from there

      but if you're new to Arch Linux and don't know what to do to update the kernel packages, just open the Terminal app and type the "sudo pacman -Syu" command.

      How does one manage to install anything in arch without knowing about pacman?

    2. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably to name and shame the other distros. I can understand CentOS dragging its heels but Debian? Fedora?

    3. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, it is news...

    4. Re:I use Arch by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      You need to use pacman to even install Arch, but it's mostly a cut&paste job from the wiki.

      I guess maybe someone is still running off a USB drive and has nothing except a shell prompt?

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    5. Re:I use Arch by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

      Isn't Debian stable supposed to drag its heels?

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    6. Re:I use Arch by geek · · Score: 1

      But I don't see the point of this being on /.

      There isn't one. Seriously, I can't recall the last kernel update that made me go "wow gotta have that"

      Really isn't news worthy

    7. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      manishs has very weird choices for selecting stories... he picks the most non-stories ever

    8. Re: I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is certainly dragging systemd thru the mud.

      Wait. That is the effluence left behind by systemd as it gobbles up systems

    9. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      How do you know if somebody uses Arch Linux?

      Don't worry, they'll tell you.

    10. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably to name and shame the other distros. I can understand CentOS dragging its heels but Debian? Fedora?

      You mean RHEL right? CentOS is just a rebuild of the RHEL sources so they're not doing anything that RHEL hasn't already done. If CentOS updated the kernel before RHEL then that would be considered a bug.

    11. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It seems to be a standard "Linux 4.7 is out, here are the features" summary, but the submitter framed it as "it's available on Arch already" way.

      I don't like the framing but the actual news is OK for me.

    12. Re:I use Arch by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      It felt more like a post about Arch than about the Linux kernel. I'm totally fine with news about Linux releases. But it seems very narrow to report on one package on one distro, when there are a huge variety of good distros out there.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    13. Re:I use Arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when btrfs came out I said, wow gotta have that

  3. already have by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    >Linux xxxxxxx 4.7.0-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Aug 8 22:05:58 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux

    tyvm

  4. EFI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do not want.

  5. lightweight? by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    oh that means it doesn't have systemd?

    1. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BURN!

    2. Re: lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lol

    3. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Swallowing log messages and stderr certainly make it lighter weight.

    4. Re:lightweight? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      Yes it does have systemd and here's the person who made that call on Reddit saying why he made that call.

      Also we have three out of six digits in common in our user IDs, that doesn't happen often for me and I have issues because that's the first thing I noticed about your comment. Cheers!

    5. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      True story, I have a computer where systemd-journald refuses to start, and I have no idea why because the command to start the service tells me to check the logs that aren't getting written for the explanation.

      I suspect something in my initial root disk is responsible for the breakage, but I haven't cared enough to look into it.

      To be fair though, it probably does make the system more 'light weight', because I remember journalctl being ungodly slow even when it did work.

    6. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      systemd has fewer lines of code than curl

    7. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      systemd's job is to manage some processes, while curl supports ton of protocols and all the crap that's needed to keep them secure.

      $ curl --version
      Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp sftp smtp smtps telnet tftp
      Features: Debug GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz TLS-SRP

    8. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think maybe your strcmp() is buggy!

    9. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it's fine. 86__7_ - those are the 3 out of 6 digits right there.

    10. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      True story, I have a computer where systemd-journald refuses to start, and I have no idea why because the command to start the service tells me to check the logs that aren't getting written for the explanation.

      I suspect something in my initial root disk is responsible for the breakage, but I haven't cared enough to look into it.

      To be fair though, it probably does make the system more 'light weight', because I remember journalctl being ungodly slow even when it did work.

      Come back to me when you get a real Linux OS:

      > ps -ef | grep systemd
      root 1 0 0 Aug11 ? 00:00:04 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 23
      root 660 1 0 Aug11 ? 00:00:03 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
      root 695 1 0 Aug11 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
      root 980 1 0 Aug11 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
      dbus 985 1 0 Aug11 ? 00:00:32 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation

      Querying the systemd journal using journalctl works fine and is quick on most Linux systems.

      Here's a question for you "What do you use to view an ASCII file?". Answer: You have to use an application such as more/less/cat/pg etc otherwise you can't read it. Using "journalctl" is akin to doing the same thing except the systemd logs are in a documented database structure instead of an ASCII structure. Oh I hear you say that is not Unix. My answer to that is Linux is not Unix and even so what it utmp or wtmp if not structured binary files that can be read with the appropriate applications and I guess you never worked on AIX.

      The bottom line is either you're lying or you really have screwed something up on your Linux system. Fix it or reinstall.

    11. Re:lightweight? by jbernardo · · Score: 1

      Nope, in the first post on that reddit is only what he describes is what he feels were the shortcomings of Arch previous init system. The real reason for choosing systemd is below:

      So why systemd over all those alternatives?

      First, we don't know if the other systems were really alternatives (at least I don't know).

      The answer is boring: Systemd solved many problems, it was there, it worked and we already used many of its tools in our initscripts at the time. There is no specific reason why we did not use $WHATEVER over systemd.

      So, basically, they chose systemd just because they were using it. No evaluation of advantages/disadvantages, impact assessment, nothing.

    12. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Arch runs fine with OpenRC. I switched one of the boxes over. It was quite easy (about 15 minutes of actual work) and now the system feels more reliable and controlable than before. But then I've been a Gentoo user before I switched to Arch.

    13. Re:lightweight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      journalctl is slow on copy-on-write file systems, with Btrfs being the biggest offender, because all the writes to the binary log results in the log file being broken into a bazillion fragments.

      You could probably fix it with chattr -R +C /var/log/journal, ideally on a fresh install since you can't change the copy-on-write flag on an existing file, but that's not included in your standard installation instructions.

    14. Re:lightweight? by erik.opnemer · · Score: 1

      journalctl is slow on copy-on-write file systems, with Btrfs being the biggest offender

      Don't format / as btrfs. You're welcome.

    15. Re:lightweight? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      my computer doesn't boot in slow motion because curl is on it though. systemd however...

    16. Re:lightweight? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      you miss the point with your stupidity, I can even use what's in busybox to read ascii file besides many, many other tools. you have no point.

      systemd is unnecessarily complicated bloated garbage that even hinders troubleshooting

  6. arch linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You need pretty up-to-date set of packages for software development, then this is your distro.

    1. Re:arch linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really, Debian testing exists

    2. Re:arch linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Gentoo allows mixing keywords, so you can have a rock-solid stable system and selectively have the latest cgit or Pelican, for instance. Best of both!

    3. Re:arch linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yeah, but while Gentoo might have a superior packagemanagement and be easier to slot in various versions of the same software, manage the kernel/boot environments slash allow an easy way to keep systemd off the system, it doesn't have a legion of fan boys and sheep dogs going on about it. :)

  7. Very very happy about this by Lisandro · · Score: 1

    My main computer is an Intel Skylake laptop and 4.7 does seem to run much better on it than its predecessor. Wuv me some Arch.

    1. Re:Very very happy about this by iampiti · · Score: 1

      What are you noticing? I'm curious as to why a kernel update could have such a noticeable impact on performance these days. I was under the impression that the kernel didn't change big parts these days. Maybe it's the frequence governor mentioned in the summary?

    2. Re:Very very happy about this by Lisandro · · Score: 1

      No idea to be honest, but my desktop feels way more snappier than before, plus power usage has gone down - it runs cooler and the battery lasts longer.

  8. Arch Linux is legit, especially Blackarch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Debian is FBI

    Slashdot is FBI

    Softpedia is FBI too. They also have served up malware for decades in their versions of bundled freeware. Fuck their news.

    1. Re: Arch Linux is legit, especially Blackarch by Jack_the_Tripper · · Score: 1

      I was thinking about having FBI for dinner tonight, think that might be the Subway $3 special today...or maybe it's BLT, mix those up a lot when my tinfoil hat is on too tight these days.

  9. i think this is mostly related to arch by orogorhotmail.com · · Score: 1

    Why this makes the news? Short explanation because every poster before asked
    Arch users fells the urge to speak about their distro, they re very vocal about it.

    I ll be downvoted to hell. But yes, arch users think themselves superior like in "arch is the first distro to ..." , "arch power users..." , "popular, lightweight and highly customizable Arch Linux". Digging a bit more you ll realise
    - It s mostly 1-2 years old linux users, amazed that they can use a command-line and paste wiki infos into it. Congratulating each others and globally pushing each other to use it.
    - peoples will like to see their package management and how it handle stuff like downgrading, not upgrading too often, release cycle, review mechanism, security management, security patches for yesterday version, the famous AUR repository and it s security, the less bloated packages which are actually more bloated.

    To be fair the distro also has some advantages but it s not the silver bullet its users like to tell

    1. Re:i think this is mostly related to arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The distro has been all downhill since Judd left. IMO.

    2. Re:i think this is mostly related to arch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Wow, I think you're the first person I've found who agrees with me on that. Phrakture didn't (doesn't?) seem to do any active leadership. Arch wasn't perfect when Judd was around (didn't have package signing, DNSSEC, etc) but I recall being able to actually talk with him and discuss the finer points of distros as a concept and his motivation. Arch's older brother CRUX is another interesting system that has very obvious "Arch is totally like this" cues.

      I used Arch for 5 years and switched to Gentoo, where I've been for almost 4 years now. There's bikeshed no matter which project you go to, but for me Gentoo provided all the choice and minimalization opportunities that I consider mandatory. Arch was great to learn more about Linux at first (since I came from Ubuntu and Debian prior), but with what I've learned with Gentoo, I feel like I could switch to LFS (or just run my own portage tree) if shit goes downhill and I'd be doing pretty good.

      When you control the source, you control your computing. Thankfully the folks at Gentoo do a great job of maintaining as many system configurations as is reasonable. eudev keeps you clear from (most of) the retardation and OpenRC generally works without a hitch in my experience.

  10. I use Windows!!!!1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so i'm going to piss all over articles which don't show M$ Windows in a pure, loving light.

    have a linux article? bam! instant M$ sock puppet reply, usually at the top of the page.

  11. HUH?????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Where is the update? I don't see it. I hit the start button and updates but Microsoft doesn't show it.

    1. Re:HUH?????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where is the update? I don't see it. I hit the start button and updates but Microsoft doesn't show it.

      I see the problem you are having. You did not bend over first.

  12. Non-news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do we really need a news on each kernel release, and then each time the new kernel is deployed by a distribution ?

  13. Screw arch with its systemD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Screw Arch with its SystemD it can shove it up where the sun don't shine. will just download the kernel from kernel.org and compile it myself on Slackware 14.2 like a real man. Slackware > Arch.

  14. Stuff that matters by allo · · Score: 1

    a linux distribution ships a new kernel release ...

    Wayne?