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Linux Kernel 4.10 Officially Released With Virtual GPU Support (softpedia.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the tarballs-from-Torvalds dept.

"Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability of the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which add a great number of improvements, new security features, and support for the newest hardware components," writes Softpedia. prisoninmate quotes their report: Linux kernel 4.10 has been in development for the past seven weeks, during which it received a total of seven Release Candidate snapshots that implemented all the changes that you'll soon be able to enjoy on your favorite Linux-based operating system... Prominent new features include virtual GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) support, new "perf c2c" tool that can be used for analysis of cacheline contention on NUMA systems, support for the L2/L3 caches of Intel processors (Intel Cache Allocation Technology), eBPF hooks for cgroups, hybrid block polling, and better writeback management. A new "perf sched timehist" feature has been added in Linux kernel 4.10 to provide detailed history of task scheduling, and there's experimental writeback cache and FAILFAST support for MD RAID5... Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) could be the first stable OS to ship with Linux 4.10.
It required 13,000 commits, plus over 1,200 merges, Linus wrote in the announcement, adding "On the whole, 4.10 didn't end up as small as it initially looked."

5 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mean... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that we'll finally get a Nouveau driver that isn't a crash-prone piece of crap?

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    1. Re:Does this mean... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Your experience is the opposite of mine, then, which is that the *only* safe way to run Nouveau on a machine with an Nvidia card is to add nomodeset or acpi=OFF to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, or get used to random lockups. I've had this issue on 3 different machines (2 desktops and 1 laptop).

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  2. Re:Backported to 2.6? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, even the newest kernels (I can vouch for 4.9.x at least) have no systemd requirement. I run that and am still happily systemd-free.

    The bigger question I have is re. virtual GPU: would it finally be possible to use Wayland in a QEMU-based VM? It would be nice to get see how that works--but still I wait for Wayland to have some ability to work across networks.

  3. vGPU seems cool by Kjella · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Looks like you can get near-native performance even though you're sharing hardware. With this maybe instead of a dual boot PC you can have a dual VM PC, one runs Linux and the other Windows and both at near native performance and you don't have to dedicate a graphics card. That sounds like a real gateway drug, use Linux for the desktop and the games that run on it but be able to switch to your Wintendo and play that one must-have game your friends want. That said right now it looks like an an Intel tech, did anyone see anything about AMD/nVidia support? Because sharing that Intel iGPU wasn't really what I'm looking for....

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. Virtual gpu? by Kohath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can someone link to a concise discussion of what this does and some use cases? Thanks.