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Linux 4.17 Kernel Offers Better Intel Power-Savings While Dropping Old CPUs (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.17-rc1. This kernel comes with a significant amount of new capabilities as outlined by the Linux 4.17 feature overview. Among the new features are AMDGPU WattMan support, Intel HDCP support, Vega 12 GPU enablement, NVIDIA Xavier SoC support, removal of obsolete CPU architectures, and even better support for the original Macintosh PowerBook 100 series. Phoronix testing has also revealed measurable power savings improvements and better power efficiency on Intel hardware. The kernel is expected to be stabilized by June.
Only Apple drops old hardware.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Fewer problems to just run the Windows "Linux" (ie. without Linux) distributions!
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
things like Power4, Blackfin, M32R etc.
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
Obsolete = Nobody is stepping up to maintain the code.
Obviously someone still cares about the Powerbook 100 enough to do the maintenance work.
Proprietary software drops support when they no longer care. Open source drops support when you no longer care.
. Open source drops support when you no longer care.
Not Quite, it is when DEVELOPERS no longer care, what you personally want is irrelevant unless you are a developer capable of maintaining. Still better than many proprietary options as at least if it is important enough you can pay someone wads of cash to continue to support.
Kernel 2.6 works just fine thank you very much sincerely my bosses sticking with Redhat 5 and 6.
http://saveie6.com/
Anything before Skylake. Oh wait nevermind I thought we were talking about Windows 10.
http://saveie6.com/
Windows 10 is not designed to provide an inferior experience. Therefore, it only works on superior hardware.
Since when is the Powerbook 100 a CPU architecture? The Powerbook 100 was (is) powered by a Motorola 68000 and I am sure there are plenty of others that used that particular CPU.
Things like Unicore, Hexagon, S+core, OpenRISC, M32R, Cris i.e. stuff most people didn't even heard about.
The long version at (as always) excellent LWN:
https://lwn.net/Articles/74807... and
https://lwn.net/Articles/74929...
:wq
Of course, in the case of the processors being dropped, you just about have to be a developer yourself to have any interest in continued Linux support. It's not like you could ever just put a DVD in a drive and install Linux on anything that has one of those processors.
So if there is anyone out there who wishes support would continue, they weren't interested enough to actually do anything about it.
Not quite. If you care about something, you would be willing to put money into it, the same as unpaid developers contribute value in the form of their time into things they care about. And money can and does get things supported.
So they're dropping support for "obsolete" CPUs but somehow the first-generation Motorola 68000 in the PowerBook 100 doesn't qualify as obsolete? I mean, I was a Mac user in the '90s, and I still have some fondness for the some of the old hardware, but this is ridiculous. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to go through to keep 68000 but drop the much newer Blackfin DSP, and the M32R that still seems to be manufactured for embedded applications?
The article summary didn't do it justice and implied they might be dropping out some form of support for older chips regardless of architecture such as older X86 generations ..... That's not the case.
Win 10 and any post 7 is an inferior experience.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Do you have any source for the Powerbook 100 still being supported?
From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article it runs a 68000 with 2-8 MB memory.
If that is supported I should be able to get Linux running on my A500 (HD-interface have extra memory.)
I was under the impression that getting Linux to run without an MMU was problematic these days.
Are you sure it isn't the later Powerbooks that are supported? PowerBook Duo 2300c has a PowerPC 603e and up to 56 MB of memory.
Typically they'll leave old hardware in of anyone says they are USING it. It won't necessarily see new development. I've seen several lkml posts asking "is anyone using _____? If not, we'll remove it."
Typically old hardware isn't dropped if we know someone is using it. Of course there are exceptions when a stack gets a major rewrite. If there is discussion about dropping support for something you use, just let us know on lkml.
Which are all newer than the motorola 68000 in the powerbook 100.
I think that the ability of the code to "just break" is a bit of an achilles heel. The hardware doesn't change, so why would the code to support the hardware suddenly stop working? Answer: It doesn't, it's the other code that up and changed.
So this is a pretty nasty blame game. Shame on you, linus and your many many intertube friends.
With killer features like Meltdown.
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
The full list of dropped CPUs is Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score, and Tile. Also under consideration are Unicore32 and Hexagon, but they are not officially gone yet. Apparently this change removes about half a million lines of code, a substantial reduction in complexity. I had never heard of any of these before and I suspect most other people haven't either, so I don't think they will be missed.
Nommu is quite well supported, this said, security of a processor without an MMU is nonexistent. The same as a plain 8086,
Actually, how does Linux support the 68K CPU? It doesn't have an MMU that's required. I know there was a version of Linux called uCLinux that worked on MMU-less (and MMU-lite) processors like the 68K, but I've found it quite unstable. No hardware support for protection means a bad pointer literally will take down the system.
So it was neat, but completely pointless in the end. All it took was one bus error and you'd be rebooting.
Now, there were later 68K CPUs with MMUs (I believe the 68020 had an external MMU chip, but the 68030 was fully capable of Linux). Heck, there were a couple of bad instructions in the 68k that made a "modern" OS impossible (i.e., you can call them from user mode) - that's why it was revised into the 68010 to allow proper user-supervisor mode separation.
I had never heard of any of these before and I suspect most other people haven't either, so I don't think they will be missed.
Blackfin I've heard of, but don't know what it is. Tile is the instruction set used by Tilera's parallel CPU, which had 64 cores on a chip about 10 years ago. Looks like they switched the thing over to use ARM cores after the first couple of generations.
If you're an audio engineer, the Blackfin is used by the legendary Bricasti Model 7 (actually, the M7 uses six Blackfin processors). It's also used in devices like the DR-70D. I'm actually surprised they are dropping support for it.
why not quite, that is EXACTLY what I said.
Do you have any source for the Powerbook 100 still being supported?
Why don't you try reading TFS real closely? It's not many sentences.
Just FYI, Mikrotik's latest Cloud Core Routers use the Tile CPUs. I sure hope this mean's Tile isn't the end of the line for Mikrotik!
bullshit, I have had fixes I wanted made in the past to various Open Source products, where I can I have made the fixes myself, but sometimes that isn't possible due to complexity or simply the horrible pain of not being in the inner core group of developers for that product and saying I could just pay someone is unrealistic, I had an example a few years ago where I wanted a relatively minor fix implemented, was a set of incorrectly initialised variables that under certain circumstances would lead to a crash (I had those circumstances) yes I would have happily paid someone a couple of hundred to fix the specific problem, but the people actually qualified due to time and not giving a fuck as it didn't affect most people wanted a couple of thousand for what was essentially a half a dozen lines of code and going through the fuck awful submission process to get it included. It is fine if the software is worth 10's of thousands of more to you, but if it is just saving you a couple of hundred bucks you are often better off buying the commercial version.
Were likely feature-complete anyways.
None of them supported USB or later versions of USB, PCIe, etc. Meaning none of them have been gaining anything other than bloat from newer iterations of the kernel. Furthermore some of them may have been broken thanks to the minimum kernel size exceeding the maximum kernel image the bootloader could load (sparc ipx was limited to 1 meg maximum kernel size, which was impossible with later 2.4/2.6 kernels and the minimum features for bringup, notably ipv4 support.)
While I am disappointed in linux for doing this, the real solution is breaking out the arch-specific kernel code and possibly some of the bus code, then making the driver packages rely on defined interfaces to the kernel packages. Doing so would both make the arch specific kernels easier to maintain, as well as making the driver easier to maintain and verify against specific breakage of the kernel code, which has been happening consistently for 20+ years now. Almost no arches other than x86 have consistently been bug-free out of the box in a real kernel release in that long. Sparc, Alpha, Power, etc haven't been that reliable and anything embedded has usually been considered horribly broken. Google for old mailing list entries if you doubt me.
Soo it is yet not bug fixed. it become stable till june so is it under developer option.
@galaxyunlocks
To clarify this further: If you don't care enough to develop, to learn how to develop, or to pay someone else to develop; you don't care enough. If you don't care enough about the platform to get code written for it, why should anyone else?
... these days. Even before flakey audio and bluetooth management.
Seriously. Every other OS get's an easy 8 hours out of todays regular portable hardware, only Linux barely scrapes 4 hours. I'm a big Linux and FOSS fan but this is a problem that is really annoying and needs fixing ASAP. Windows, macOS and even Chrome have been on top of this for the better part of a decade and the Linux kernel still wastes gobs of energy. Unacceptable. This update is a step in the right direction. I hope it continues that way. Thumbs up for the kernel crew.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You know Linux desktop is popular with older hardware although I understand the complexity of supporting old hardware. When you look at the numbers, Linux desktop is just not doing well in terms of numbers. Choices are being made in order to stay remotely relevant for those using modern hardware and want Linux desktop to work as well with hardware as Mac OS and Windows.
Seriously. Every other OS get's an easy 8 hours out of todays regular portable hardware, only Linux barely scrapes 4 hours... Windows, macOS and even Chrome have been on top of this for the better part of a decade and the Linux kernel still wastes gobs of energy.
you do know that chromeOS uses the linux kernel?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Albeit no doubt modified. However those modifications should have been pushed upstream to the main line.
The power wastage in desktop systems probably comes from the bloated GUIs that tend to come as the default on linux these days (hello Gnome and KDE) which seem to have their processes permantly at the top of the "top" cpu usage list if my system is anything to go by.
fwiw a lot of that can be fixed by turning down the brightness on your laptop screen. The backlight draws a lot of power, and Apple aggressively dims the screen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Heck, there were a couple of bad instructions in the 68k that made a "modern" OS impossible (i.e., you can call them from user mode) - that's why it was revised into the 68010 to allow proper user-supervisor mode separation.
I think this is what you are referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It says "100 series" in the summary but I was curious and followed the trail on Phoronix.
The mention of a specific model is the Powerbook 190, produced several years later - whose specs on wikipedia have a 68LC040 (no FPU) and up to a whopping 40GB of RAM.
Whether that's backward compatible with other models is anyone's guess.
To much abuse, ridicule and disbelief, I’ve posted here many times about my problems with Linux on the desktop...
This hasn’t been one of them. I have an Acer Cloudbook which gets 12-17h per charge. It can’t hibernate properly, crashes on resume from suspend, bit the fact that it gets such wicked battery life while ON, means I just leave it running in my bag all day.
Although my audio stopped working, no fricking clue why. Who has time to deal with this stuff?
Really? Wow, so it IS an advanced system that can do things it wasn't even designed for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It may not have been designed for an interior experience, but it excells at delivering one.
That is not what obsolete means. That is what un-maintained means. If I am the only person using and maintaining the source for hardware I developed my self, then it would perhaps still be maintained, even if it is obsolete.
If nobody maintains the source even when there are millions of users, then it would be dropped. Hardly obsolete.
Yes, very often obsolete hardware will become un-maintained, as there are not any developers that have the hardware or the will to maintain it.
Obsolete =/= un-maintained.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Wrong priorities man. Take over the world *first*, and then you can have others fix all your computer problems.
Windows 10 is not designed to provide an inferior experience
So, this was just a happy accident?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
You're right about the stability; that's just the nature of the beast. When they refer to supporting the 68000, they're probably using a NOMMU system which is a quirky thing but within its several limits it DOES work. As you noted, some features of modern CPUs and MMUs such as memory protection are not available. uClinux's kernel work was folded into the Kernel during the 2.5.x series. As of 2016 they were still alive and kicking.
Getting modded down for posting facts is shit.
If they want to speak some other language, fine. But if they want to claim to be speaking English, then they ought to use the word "obsolete" to mean what it actually means, and not something else when there is a perfectly useful word that means what they are trying to say.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Blackfin was discussed. It's not being removed at this time.
A manufacturer using Blackfin, or someone who wants to keep support in newer kernels, will need to step up, though, or it will be removed soon.
Nice!
It's also used in devices like the DR-70D [tascam.com].
Is that running Linux, though? I was under the impression that Tascam used a "true" embedded system without kernel/userspace separation.
The 68000 have no MMU internally and no support for virtual memory even with an external MMU, the "bad" instructions just exposed system state making pure virtualization impossible. But virtualization isn't a requirement for a modern OS and x86 fixed their abstraction leakages much later (20+ years) and in a much more complex way (but with advantages).
The 68010 was hardware compatible with the 68000 but fixed both the virtualization problem and the MMU problem (the MMU itself had to be added externally).
I think blackfin is some sort of general purpose + DSP from Analog Devices (my memory is fuzzy). Agreed that I haven't heard of the rest, and I work at an embedded software company that supported a myriad of architectures for almost a decade. I imagine that the respective silicon vendors initially did a substantial amount of legwork to get support added and have since moved on to new architectures with these in maintenance phase. Quite frankly, given the upgrade-ability standards of the day, it's unlikely that there are many existing devices out there that even get software updates.
Which is quite interesting, given my experience with a Thinkpad Carbon X1 4th gen. I get around 10 hours on that running Windows, and can squeeze that to almost an extra hour if I really push hard on running nothing but Scrivener - but that requires Windows Update to behave, which it usually doesn't, pushing battery life below 9 hours.
Running Linux, with Scrivener in Wine, I get 12-14 hours on it without even trying.
In both cases WiFi is on, screen brightness at near minimum, and I'm using it pretty much constantly.
So now I have removed Windows.
Ok, maybe from the mainstream kernel, but space missions use old hardware and you don't encourage recycling eWaste this way.
Maybe have a tree of obsolete architectures, where those who want old stuff can go.
Better yet, since architectures are split off anyway, have a subtree for each architecture (inline or otherwise). Let arch-specific distros merge the architectures they want and no others, let developers cleanly see what does what. It should make adding new architectures to (and removing old ones from) the mainline easier if the mainline had the arch section assembled.
Regardless of whether anyone thinks either is sensible or even sane, I might have a go at building a mega-arch (triumphal arch?) project just for kicks. Well, the DEC VAX arch needs to be less obscure, assuming there's still a copy out there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Same as with any other kernel function - no verifiable use.
The problem is that this buggers up my plan to travel back in time and upload the latest Linux source into Linus Torvalds' head when he was a student. The architectures removed were the only ones around then. How's that going to convince him, it he can't run it?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Powerbook 190 shares nothing with the rest of the Powerbook 100 series (160,165,170,180) and is more like the 5300. It was a stopgap "value" model until PPC machines came down in price. All the rest of the 100 series (except for the original 100) have a MMU equipped 68030 CPU in them.
Checklist:
1. Are you running KDE, Gnome or Unity? If so, bury them with dignity at the bottom of the garden and install Enlightenment.
2. Are you running SystemD? Ditto and install OpenBSD's init or Gentoo's OpenRC.
3. Is the kernel tuned? It should not contain things you don't use. If power is a problem, that is the governor you should select. Run with the worst latency you can afford because you need more power to get equal performance with low latency.
4. You might want to use the hoard memory allocator over Glibc's malloc for some apps - you can set this using the dynamic library path.
5. You might want to use a lightweight libc to reduce system strain.
6. You might want to experiment with apps to see what causes netsnmp to scream in pain at the load levels. It's a good monitor. Once you've identified the problem apps, place them in a cgroup that is more restricted on resources.
Should you have to do this? No. Fact is, you do, because distro authors are going for mass appeal rather than usability. They always have, which is why MCC was the last distro I actually liked using.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe your speaker melted from the computer being left on all day while in a bag.
The biggest issues with power use is the hardware drivers. Many times open source drivers are written without any involvement of the hardware manufacture's company. The manufacturers often don't publish the open hardware/firmware specifications. If they do, they can be incomplete. To get the full specs, you often have to be apart of some big company and sign an NDA agreement. This is very incompatible with open source code.
This leaves devices driver writers often black boxing the driver writing process so it is easy to miss things or not knowing if they've written the driver in the best or most efficient way possible. Most of the time it feels like we're lucky if it works and is stable.
This is why it is important to support companies the actively support open source driver releases. Binary blobs don't count. They're products often cost more, but if you're running Linux, you're more likely going to have a better experience.
No good deed goes unpunished.
whose specs on wikipedia have a 68LC040 (no FPU) and up to a whopping 40GB of RAM.
That would be 40MB of RAM. 40GB would be more than enough for current desktop systems.
AFAIK the 040 doesn't need an external FPU since it has most of the FPU support built in. It also have some form of MMU so it should be able to do some swapping if necessary.
Do you use TLP?
"Wrong priorities man. Take over the world *first*, and then you can have others fix all your computer problems."
Not sure if this is a shot at humor, but I think you're bang-on with this.
Technology for me and many people on this site was a hobby once.
Sure, I can install a custom kernel to troubleshoot my hibernate issues, follow discussion forums for my laptop for audio issues, etc.. or I can do work.
What OS are you running? I used to have issues with older Ubuntu and Debian and basically anything that uses old PulseAudio. Most have switched to ALSA which isn't too much better but works. I used to manually have to strip pulse and force the OS to use ALSA. But those days are fortunately over. And for ease of use Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 9 from experience.
8.1 is pretty nice and fast, thank you
I don't get the complaint. Chances are the stuff in the new kernels won't even work on legacy hardware. Put your big boy pants on, download an older flavor and get some back ported security patches and you're in the game.. Problem solved.. Linux on old hardware is easy, sometimes. The hard part is finding a distro that works with little modification. If you're trying to run Linux on old hardware you're already doing it for fun anyways because if it was for production you would already.
The powerbook 100 isn't and couldn't be supported--it's a 68000, with no potential for an emu (other than that bizarre hack that used two, and stopped one mid-instruction on a fault, using the other to fix things before resuming).
Oddas it sounds, the Powerbook 100 was not part of the Powerbook 100 series.
Apple basically handed the Macintosh Portable to Sony and said "shrink it." The result got called the 100.
There was one insignificant difference, other than size, iirc, but I forget what it was.
hawk, who still has his MacPortable, albeit spread across a couple of shelves
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
The question is "obsolete" for who? Obsolete depends on who defines it.
Obsolete due to lack of users and lack of working hardware?
Obsolete due to lack of vendor support?
Obsolete due to lack of maintainers?
Ultimately in every traditional version of obsolescence one group decides quite arbitrarily when something becomes obsolete and it has nothing to do with the orderly discontinuation of products in a linear timeline.
If I am the only person using and maintaining the source for hardware I developed my self, then it would perhaps still be maintained, even if it is obsolete.
You're describing a vendor actively maintaining a product in active use. That by its nature means it's not obsolete.
Eternal April?
My memory is running on fumes here, but I recall early multi-user 68K based systems like the Apollo had two CPUs in order to implement virtual memory. There were some instructions in the ISA which couldn't be interrupted and saved to the stack to allow a kernel interrupt to service a page fault. Instead, one CPU ran the user-space code and actually got paused (no clock advance) while the second CPU took over to service a page fault and then resume the user-space CPU.
My wife has a T440s which runs forever using Fedora. I have a T440p and also use Fedora but it is a space heater. They are supposedly the same generation of CPU, but mine is quad core and hers is dual core.
Mine also has the extra discrete nvidia GPU. The intel GPU is the one driving the display panel, and the nvidia GPU is supposed to be powered off unless I explicitly try to use it when launching a program via 'optirun' or 'primusrun' helpers. There's no good way for me to verify that the nvidia really does power down, as I see conflicting messages from all the system logging.
Somehow, Linux has never been able to get my CPU down into those really low power states according to 'powertop'. The cores will show good idle states, but the package c-states never get into the deeper idle states.
It isn't a full 040. The 'LC', low cost, in the model number refers specifically to a variation where they left out the FPU.
Quite often the problem is even when you do care the majority of people can't do jack shit about it. I might care enough to pay $200 for a OSS product even though that is the same price as the commercial equivalent, but for that money no one competent would give you even the time of day, you aren't going to spend several years learning to develop and specialise in the code necessary and you aren't going to pay the thousands it would cost for qualified individual to do it. have come across this multiple times in the past where I care, but only up until the point I don't have to make very large personal sacrifices for very little gain. basically the only people that count in the OSS world is the developers themselves, as a user you mean even less in the OSS world than you do in the commercial world.
Wrong priorities man. Take over the world *first*, and then you can have others fix all your computer problems.
If you run the world and someone else runs your computer, who really runs the world?