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Operating Systems Software Upgrades Linux

Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window 70

Posted by timothy from the get-your-windows-joke-launchers-ready! dept.
hypnosec writes "The Linux 3.11 merge window is about to close, most probably this Sunday, and most of the pull requests have been merged, including feature additions and improvements to disk & file system, CPU, graphics and other hardware. Some notable merges are: LZ4 compression; Zswap for compressed swap caching; inclusion of a Lustre file-system client for the first time; Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support for R600 GPUs; KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64); and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC."
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Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window More

Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window

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  • Holding out for... (Score:3, Funny)

    by recoiledsnake ( 879048 ) on Friday July 12, 2013 @06:50PM (#44266337)

    Holding out for Linux 3.11 for workgroups.

  • Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WhatAreYouDoingHere ( 2458602 ) on Friday July 12, 2013 @07:10PM (#44266477)

    and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC

    I'm surprised the Slashdot headline didn't read "DRM Coming to Linux" or some other such nonsense. :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Opyros ( 1153335 )
      In the past, the summary has usually just mentioned "DRM" without specifying what it stood for. Someone was nearly always trolled, too. I was surprised to see Slashdot has finally started disambiguating the initialism.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )

      I wish they'd just rename the damn thing. I cringe every time I see the initialism DRM.

      -

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rdnetto ( 955205 )

      You think the editors read the summaries? You must be new here...

  • Motif window manager? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @01:45AM (#44268179)

    I remember learning Unix shell, compilation, basic C programming on X11 terminals (there were a couple hundreds of them) and something like Solaris 7. We were given an ugly login shell (black on white xterm), the motif window manager (mwm) and that's all.

    It was funny as it really looked and acted like Windows 3.1, only without the program manager, file manager or control panel. It also had alt-f9 to minimize, alt-f10 to maximize, alt-f7 to move etc. which is really cool and still found on Gnome2/Mate and Xfce at least.
    It was really fun trying to fo something useful in that environment, some guy had made a crude launcher (we had to walk into his home directory), I used aliases for e.g. launching a green on black xterm rxvt with nice font size and much bigger scroll buffer, we figured out how to have a background image on the "desktop".

    I looked for it in vain on linux, tried to download Lesstif but it's only libraries and nothing else. Now maybe we'll be able to use it at last?, lol. I hope they open source mwm, along Motif and CDE.

    It was also both minimalist (more so than say Fluxbox or jwm) and easy to use, unlike twm and myriads of "worse than Windows 3.1" window managers. One little issue was you lost everything when closing the login shell by accident (but you thus never get into a situation where all shell windows or all windows all closed and you can't open a new terminal)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shocking ( 55189 )

      Open Motif was opensourced quite a while ago, you find it as libmotif4 and mwm in most distros. CDE was opensourced last year - the sourceforge page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ [sourceforge.net]

      • Wow you're right, it's already in there! It was in the 'motif-clients' package, on ubuntu 12.04.
        I had read Open Motif was open, but not quite open enough.

        I'm now running it but it's not that good with too many firefox windows open.
        For some reason firefox is "maximized" at 2048x1536 (my res is 1024x768 currently) while every other stuff I've tried maximizes fine. Funny non-sense bug.

        Getting the menu to launch a terminal other than xterm was simple enough.
        Now I need to find a user to martyrize by changing his

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by shocking ( 55189 )

          Changing a user's session to that? That's just cruel. I used CDE for a while on Sun workstations back in the late 90s, but ended up using fvwm on Linux, Gnome 2, KDE, icewm and now I'm an xfce bigot.

    • It also had alt-f9 to minimize, alt-f10 to maximize, alt-f7 to move etc. which is really cool and still found on Gnome2/Mate and Xfce at least.

      How did I not know this???!

      D

    • basic C programming

      Is that C programming with lots of gotos? :-)

    • Motif looked and acted like Windows 3.0 because Microsoft was on the Motif WG. They gave input into Motif and then went forth and produced Windows and the two behaved the same (nominally) when it came to manipulating windows.

      If you want something like mwm then run fvwm2. You don't have to use all of its features.

      You can run a simple session manager from your .xinitrc (fvwm & ; xsm) so as not to have to fiddle with a shell.

      • Sure, I should investigate fvwm2, starting with a simple mwm clone configuration. I know it would give me support for things like maximized windows not covering a border area, or workspaces.

        As for mwm, when installing and running it under ubuntu (here linux mint 13) it doesn't have that braindead login shell, instead it has a menu when right-clicking on the root window (wow!) with "New window" (launching a terminal), "Shuffle up", "Shuffle down", "Restart" and "Quit". Thanks a lot for the suggestion still.
        x

        • What I couldn't figure out is how to automatically run stuff on startup (at least something like xsetroot -gray), the first times I ran it it seemed to do one "New window" action by default. It doesn't do it anymore. On the stupid Solaris session, we would put things in ~/.login (and it was one of the first things the teachers told us, along with .cshrc)
          I guess I suck at X11 sessions lol

          Well, I don't know about your conclusion. Here's what I've noticed about X sessions; the more modern the distribution, the more likely you are to have tortured ones with all kinds of directories and scripts to sniff through before you figure out which one does what. Start reading manpages (and digging through package contents!) at xinit, and see also xsm. If you don't have anything fancier, typically xinit will start xsm if it can dig it up, else it just tries to run a window manager and an xterm, which is

    • I actually install mwm (Open Sourced now) on lots of headless machines nowadays. I found it to work very well over VNC. Much better than a lot of the alternatives. And yes, I use VNC, because X over VPN is just painful.

  • About time with dynamic PM (Score:3)

    by fa2k ( 881632 ) <pmbjornstad@gmai l . com> on Saturday July 13, 2013 @04:20AM (#44268557)

    It's about time to have dynamic power management for Radeons (from a user point of view, don't know how difficult it is). It's just a bad default to have it spinning at full speed all the time, because most graphics card make a lot of noise when running at full speed. The alternative was to default to a low power mode, which reduces the performance for anyone who doesn't bother to look up the controls.

    The problem with dynamic PM is that many times you need the performance quickly and for a short time. Can the card switch modes in much less than a 120th of a second, such that you don't get an impact on performance (on at 120Hz monitor)? Can it detect that it needs to switch modes in a similarly short time? It's not that bad of a problem, because most cards can run the desktop effects in low power mode (didn't work for me on Gnome, but I assume that's a bug since it was great in KDE). The main problem would be with hardware video decoding or deinterlacing and gaming, but I don't think the open driver supports any video decoding, and deinterlacing should have a reasonably constant load.

    Overall, great to have dynamic PM. It may help with laptop battery life for many people who haven't bothered to check the PM settings before. For me who turns down the performance to low, I don't have to remember to turn it up before playing games etc.

    • I believe it was Sony who submitted the 150 patches to the video driver for ATI cards a few weeks ago and I, like you, was very happy that they included DPM. Without it, my laptop would overheat playing solitaire and it was quite loud all the time. Since I could never get the Low Profile to work properly, I always had to switch to the propietary ATI drivers, which are quite retarded. Hell, it wants me to restart X every time I change my (dual) screen configuration!

      I'm surprised the patches were accepted int

  • In a related posting about Linux kernel development I asked why embedded single-board-computer manufacturers always seemed to be way behind in versions and why they don't keep up with versions but I didn't really get a satisfactory answer. So let me ask this another way: are there any commercial single-board-computers or commercial embedded devices that use 3.11 (or the most recent stable mainline kernel)?

    • I think the closest you'll find would be the rasberry Pi.

      why they don't keep up with [linux kernel] versions

      Keeping up to date with the mainline kernel would be expensive, and would gain you very little in the embedded market... people there want cheap and reliable and will give up features to get it... That's my impression anyway.

  • For those that don't know AArch64 stands for ARM 64 this part of the ./ post might be quite misleading: "KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64);"

  • Zswap for compressed swap caching

    Is it full replacement for zram swap space?

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