Linux 4.4 Kernel To Bring Raspberry Pi Graphics Driver, Open-Channel SSD Support (phoronix.com) 67
An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.4-rc1 has been released. New features of Linux 4.4 include a Raspberry Pi kernel mode-setting driver, support for 3D acceleration by QEMU guest virtual machines, AMD Stoney APU support, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 support, expanded eBPF virtual machine programs, new hardware peripheral support, file-system fixes, faster SHA crypto support on Intel hardware, and LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD support.
Re:2015 (Score:4, Insightful)
no, new drivers get included with kernel updates. What do you think this is, Microsoft Windows?
Qemu 3D Acceleration (Score:4, Insightful)
This is actually kind of cool, especially if the performance isn't terrible.
Re: Qemu 3D Acceleration (Score:2)
Re: Qemu 3D Acceleration (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Where did you get that strange idea Linux 3D performance is terrible? I won't deny that OpenSource drivers can be less efficient that close source driver especially on devices that are not properly documented and must be reversed engineered. However, if you only consider the drivers provided by the vendors, the performances are usually similar to the Windows driver.
Of course, Windows is usually a higher priority for the vendors so there is often a small delay before a good driver becomes available on Linux
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Considering Linux host 3D performance is terrible, I wouldn't hold my breath that QEMU guests will have reasonable performance.
Uh, no it's not. The difference is in the noise with Nvidia drivers on Windows and Linux. I assume you're talking about that recent shit-fling from Ars Technica which also shows floating point performance drastically harmed on Linux, like an OS can even effect floating point performance (hint: they must have used different compilers). I'm sure there's software like the software Ars tested that is shit on Linux for whatever reasons, but my own benchmarks have never shown large performance differences between
Not quite "all in" though (Score:1)
I built it just a few hours ago... and /dev/video0 (or /dev/video or /dev/video[0-9]) are all missing. And mknod will create it, but it doesn't fly if you do. And dmesg shows that its not quite there. And so you have to wait till 4.4.1-rc2 or -rc3. So run an old kernel (I keep several old ones around and the last was 4.3.0). So all is well for now, we will test 4.4 kernel in another week or two. To be fair the kernel build showed that not all kernel modules were built (and that *is* quite rare).
Re: (Score:2)
So webcam support is broken in 4.4-rc1. Is that on the Pi or on x86?
Yeah, so? (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, so? (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, every single major revision of the kernel has been announced on Slashdot for at least as far back as I can remember (2.2 something).
So how you can't "expect" it to happen is a mystery indeed.
Re: (Score:1)
I think you guys are using different definitions of "major".
Re: Yeah, so? (Score:1)
If you don't want to read about such things, you're on the wrong page, mate. Perhaps Facebook or Newgrounds would suit you better.
Flash (Score:1)
Yeah, but how well does it run FLASH!? https://xkcd.com/619/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Oh man, are you behind or what? That got sorted out at least half a decade ago. (Also, XKCD is on 1604 by now.)
Re: (Score:2)
systemd (Score:1, Interesting)
Shut the fuck up about systemd. You all sound like old, grumpy men that can't adapt to any sort of change.
Read up on systemd and learn how to use it. If you spent half the amount of time learning systemd as you do complaining on the internet, you might find it's actually really good. It's like SMF, but even more flexible.
The Solaris people pissed and moaned about SMF, but now its considered a distinguishing feature of the OS, and I doubt any Solaris admin would trade SMF for SysV init.
Re: (Score:2)
Shut the fuck up about systemd
Touche my man touche. You are the first person to mention systemd here after all.
can't adapt to any sort of change
There's a difference between "can't adapt" and "don't like the new system". "change" is not sysonymous with good, no matter what many people in the tech world desperately want to believe.
you might find it's actually really good
Or you might not. It has some things which are better than the old ways and some things which are worse. The people who refuse to acknowledge
KMS is not something you advertise (Score:2)
Just for reference, KMS is something you shouldn't mention and hope that people forget how ridiculously behind Linux is in this area compared to ... Well everyone else that does anything other that 80x24 text.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Because that isn't the typical experience. For a start, the guy gets into driver parameters, testing kernels, and compiling from git. None of that is typical at all, hence why the Ubuntu etc. installation instructions say nothing about that. All a newbie user would know would be that some of his hardware isn't picked up in one particular distro. Maybe some older kernels work - who knows, did they test? What about the kernels in a STABLE version of a Linux distro that's aimed at first-time users? Did t
Re: (Score:2)
I thought that sort of run around ended with Itanium. Wow.