8 ms·

Linux 4.7 Released

226 points by jrepin 10y ago

jrepin 10y ago
New in Linux 4.7: https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.7 https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.7
- 15DCFA8F 10y ago
  I don't know who maintain those changelogs, but WOW, thanks for this great detailed and methodical piece of work.
  - jrepin 10y ago
    According to the info pages for last few releases, the most work was done by Diego Calleja <diegocg@gmail.com>
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    Could not agree more, fantastic tldr; of what's new and what to expect
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    Indeed, KN is absolutely awesome.
- DeepYogurt 10y ago
  I love that site :)
jshap70 10y ago
too bad we'll never get a name as good as 'Hurr durr I'ma sheep' again
- therein 10y ago
  "Psychotic Stoned Sheep" sounds pretty good to me.
- frozenport 10y ago
  Greased Weasel
- Redoubts 10y ago
  I always liked 3.11, Linux for Workgroups
- vacri 10y ago
  Link for perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names
dominotw 10y ago
>CPU accounting controller: Split cpuacct.usage into user usage and sys usage commit Has anyone used this to calculate how many containers can be packed onto a machine based on historical usage data?
- epberry 10y ago
  That's a pretty interesting idea... I suppose you would make a guess at first to allocate containers and then adjust over time automatically? But in a monitored environment you're already going to know those stats so actually I'm not sure how this helps.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    I was thinking more of a use case like CI system where we can use these values to figure out how many builds to run on a machine based on past history.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Just so long as kdbus hasn't been merged yet...
- dcgudeman 10y ago
  why is kdbus bad?
  - mackal 10y ago
    Because it's related to systemd.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      No, because it's an overcomplicated system that's putting things into the kernel that definitely don't belong there, because the userspace implementation was slow, which, according to Linus, was not an inherent problem with the idea of putting it in userspace, but was because the code was written by a bunch of monkeys at typewriters.
- tangent128 10y ago
  It appears that kdbus is being reworked into BUS1[0]; the new API looks a lot less warty. [0] http://www.bus1.org/bus1.html http://www.bus1.org/bus1.html
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    That looks... better, but still ugly. I'd rather the whole thing was killed.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Won't happen, as systemd relies on dbus too much (to the point that it may well panic the kernel by shutting down if dbus goes belly up). I do believe that right now you basically have to start dbus using initramfs so that it is ready for use by the time the kernel starts up systemd. Franky the number of things that they cram into initramfs on a systemd based distro is nauseating.
dopeboy 10y ago
Could anyone comment on the state of power management in Linux? Are we up to par with OSX and Windows yet?
- dman 10y ago
  Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450). On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    Make sure you also checkout TLP since you have a Thinkpad.
    - UncleSlacky 10y ago
      TLP works on pretty much any brand of laptop these days. There are some Thinkpad-specific extras, but the core functionality is brand-agnostic.
  - Zagitta 10y ago
    Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable. Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Thanks. Any mailing list threads / bugs I should follow for this? I haven't checked the state of Linux on the XPS 9350 since mjg59 posted that thing about everything being broken.
    - 10y ago
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I see there's support for the new Radeon RX480. I've been thinking about picking up a Radeon card. Can anyone speak to their experience of Radeon support on Linux and whether or not you think it's a good idea?
- nialv7 10y ago
  The kernel driver for newer AMD cards is developed and open sources by AMD itself . For the user land, you have choice between the open source driver, Mesa, or the proprietary one, AMDGPU-PRO. If you want to follow the advancement of Linux graphics stack (while having reasonable graphic performance), AMD is your choice. This is where the exciting new stuff, like Wayland, DRI3 etc. happens. The NVIDIA proprietary driver indeed has amazing performance, but is falling behind on this regard.
- noinsight 10y ago
  The open source drivers/cards were solid for a good while on my old computer but I bought a new one in May and I got actual hardware level PCI errors with two different AMD cards on the Intel X99 chipset (within seconds of booting I would start getting error correction messages in my dmesg and the computer would hang within hours). I managed to stop the errors with kernel flags (pcie_aspm=off or pci=nommconf, either seemed to stop them) but my system was still completely unstable as the drivers/cards eventually went nuts regardless. I bought an nVidia card and didn't have to touch anything and it's completely stable (in the same exact PCI slot). I might try AMD again in a year or two as I prefer their model of actually supporting and writing open source drivers in contrast to the scummy nVidia whose cards now require a signed firmware that they won't release to the open source community after we got the reverse engineered open source drivers (well, they did release one now for the 9xx series after they released the 10xx series).
- Ruphin 10y ago
  From my experience using AMD cards, the linux drivers have some serious issues, to the point where on-board intel graphics would give me much more stability. With AMD cards I would get excessive screen tearing just from dragging or resizing windows in a desktop environment. The advantage of AMD is that their open source drivers are acceptable, where nvidia's open source drivers are not great. In terms of stability, the proprietary nvidia drivers are simply the best, and gave me significantly less issues. For my daily workstation I even ended up replacing my (expensive) AMD card for an nvidia one because the desktop environment felt like it was running less than 10 fps, and it triggered me to no end. Even if AMD gets equal or even better performance than nvidia in gaming environments, I am not willing to compromise the desktop for that. If you don't mind using the closed-souce nvidia driver, I strongly suggest nvidia.
voltagex_ 10y ago
Honest question: how many years do you think it'll be until embedded device manufacturers (routers, various TV boxes, wifi hard drives [1]) ship recent kernels? A $200 modem/router bought 6 months ago ships with a hacked up version of 2.6.36.4 that's barely buildable - mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP [2]. 1: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/item/wireless-plus-gpl-fw-master-dl/ http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/item/wireless... 2: http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9 http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9
- grawlinson 10y ago
  >mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP In that case, never. Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility.
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    If you want to help the folks who are trying to get vendors to open source their Linux drivers/patches, check out these pages: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ http://gpl-violations.org/helping/ http://gpl-violations.org/helping/
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      I'm a big fan of both of those - but their backlogs are massive. I'm hoping there's another donation matching campaign at LCA2017 for Conservancy next year - I was able to donate somewhere close to $300 via that last year.
  - executesorder66 10y ago
    > Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility. I hate that this is true. Could anyone explain to me why though? Would it not make life easier for them if they just open sourced their firmware and let other people update/maintain it? (Sorry for the noob question, I haven't looked into this in detail)

Linux 4.7 Released

226 points by jrepin 10y ago

jrepin 10y ago

New in Linux 4.7: https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.7 https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.7

15DCFA8F 10y ago
I don't know who maintain those changelogs, but WOW, thanks for this great detailed and methodical piece of work.
- jrepin 10y ago
  According to the info pages for last few releases, the most work was done by Diego Calleja <diegocg@gmail.com>
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Could not agree more, fantastic tldr; of what's new and what to expect
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  Indeed, KN is absolutely awesome.
DeepYogurt 10y ago
I love that site :)

jshap70 10y ago

too bad we'll never get a name as good as 'Hurr durr I'ma sheep' again

therein 10y ago
"Psychotic Stoned Sheep" sounds pretty good to me.
frozenport 10y ago
Greased Weasel
Redoubts 10y ago
I always liked 3.11, Linux for Workgroups
vacri 10y ago
Link for perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names

dominotw 10y ago

>CPU accounting controller: Split cpuacct.usage into user usage and sys usage commit Has anyone used this to calculate how many containers can be packed onto a machine based on historical usage data?

epberry 10y ago
That's a pretty interesting idea... I suppose you would make a guess at first to allocate containers and then adjust over time automatically? But in a monitored environment you're already going to know those stats so actually I'm not sure how this helps.
- dominotw 10y ago
  I was thinking more of a use case like CI system where we can use these values to figure out how many builds to run on a machine based on past history.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Just so long as kdbus hasn't been merged yet...

dcgudeman 10y ago
why is kdbus bad?
- mackal 10y ago
  Because it's related to systemd.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    No, because it's an overcomplicated system that's putting things into the kernel that definitely don't belong there, because the userspace implementation was slow, which, according to Linus, was not an inherent problem with the idea of putting it in userspace, but was because the code was written by a bunch of monkeys at typewriters.
tangent128 10y ago
It appears that kdbus is being reworked into BUS1[0]; the new API looks a lot less warty. [0] http://www.bus1.org/bus1.html http://www.bus1.org/bus1.html
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  That looks... better, but still ugly. I'd rather the whole thing was killed.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Won't happen, as systemd relies on dbus too much (to the point that it may well panic the kernel by shutting down if dbus goes belly up). I do believe that right now you basically have to start dbus using initramfs so that it is ready for use by the time the kernel starts up systemd. Franky the number of things that they cram into initramfs on a systemd based distro is nauseating.

dopeboy 10y ago

Could anyone comment on the state of power management in Linux? Are we up to par with OSX and Windows yet?

dman 10y ago
Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450). On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.
- chrisper 10y ago
  Make sure you also checkout TLP since you have a Thinkpad.
  - UncleSlacky 10y ago
    TLP works on pretty much any brand of laptop these days. There are some Thinkpad-specific extras, but the core functionality is brand-agnostic.
- Zagitta 10y ago
  Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable. Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Thanks. Any mailing list threads / bugs I should follow for this? I haven't checked the state of Linux on the XPS 9350 since mjg59 posted that thing about everything being broken.
  - 10y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I see there's support for the new Radeon RX480. I've been thinking about picking up a Radeon card. Can anyone speak to their experience of Radeon support on Linux and whether or not you think it's a good idea?

nialv7 10y ago
The kernel driver for newer AMD cards is developed and open sources by AMD itself . For the user land, you have choice between the open source driver, Mesa, or the proprietary one, AMDGPU-PRO. If you want to follow the advancement of Linux graphics stack (while having reasonable graphic performance), AMD is your choice. This is where the exciting new stuff, like Wayland, DRI3 etc. happens. The NVIDIA proprietary driver indeed has amazing performance, but is falling behind on this regard.
noinsight 10y ago
The open source drivers/cards were solid for a good while on my old computer but I bought a new one in May and I got actual hardware level PCI errors with two different AMD cards on the Intel X99 chipset (within seconds of booting I would start getting error correction messages in my dmesg and the computer would hang within hours). I managed to stop the errors with kernel flags (pcie_aspm=off or pci=nommconf, either seemed to stop them) but my system was still completely unstable as the drivers/cards eventually went nuts regardless. I bought an nVidia card and didn't have to touch anything and it's completely stable (in the same exact PCI slot). I might try AMD again in a year or two as I prefer their model of actually supporting and writing open source drivers in contrast to the scummy nVidia whose cards now require a signed firmware that they won't release to the open source community after we got the reverse engineered open source drivers (well, they did release one now for the 9xx series after they released the 10xx series).
Ruphin 10y ago
From my experience using AMD cards, the linux drivers have some serious issues, to the point where on-board intel graphics would give me much more stability. With AMD cards I would get excessive screen tearing just from dragging or resizing windows in a desktop environment. The advantage of AMD is that their open source drivers are acceptable, where nvidia's open source drivers are not great. In terms of stability, the proprietary nvidia drivers are simply the best, and gave me significantly less issues. For my daily workstation I even ended up replacing my (expensive) AMD card for an nvidia one because the desktop environment felt like it was running less than 10 fps, and it triggered me to no end. Even if AMD gets equal or even better performance than nvidia in gaming environments, I am not willing to compromise the desktop for that. If you don't mind using the closed-souce nvidia driver, I strongly suggest nvidia.

voltagex_ 10y ago

Honest question: how many years do you think it'll be until embedded device manufacturers (routers, various TV boxes, wifi hard drives [1]) ship recent kernels? A $200 modem/router bought 6 months ago ships with a hacked up version of 2.6.36.4 that's barely buildable - mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP [2]. 1: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/item/wireless-plus-gpl-fw-master-dl/ http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/item/wireless... 2: http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9 http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9

grawlinson 10y ago
>mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP In that case, never. Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  If you want to help the folks who are trying to get vendors to open source their Linux drivers/patches, check out these pages: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ http://gpl-violations.org/helping/ http://gpl-violations.org/helping/
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I'm a big fan of both of those - but their backlogs are massive. I'm hoping there's another donation matching campaign at LCA2017 for Conservancy next year - I was able to donate somewhere close to $300 via that last year.
- executesorder66 10y ago
  > Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility. I hate that this is true. Could anyone explain to me why though? Would it not make life easier for them if they just open sourced their firmware and let other people update/maintain it? (Sorry for the noob question, I haven't looked into this in detail)