Linux Kernel 4.10 Officially Released With Virtual GPU Support (softpedia.com) 90
"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."
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."
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Version 10 (Score:2)
Does this mean... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that we'll finally get a Nouveau driver that isn't a crash-prone piece of crap?
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In theory it's possible to use the Nvidia driver on an Optimus laptop using something called bumblebee. I seem to recall there's a successor project to that now. In either case, all the detailed info I've been able to find online about it seems to be geared towards *disabling* the Nvidia card, which seems to me to be a big "WTF?".
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If you use the nvidia driver directly on a optimus laptop, the nvidia GPU is active all the time. The whole point of the optimus system was to turn off the power-hungry nvidia GPU and use only the intel GPU when it's sufficient (so pretty much all the time except when dealing with 3D graphics of any sort). AFAIK that's what the bumblebee project does - it enables the user to turn off the nvidia card when it's not needed. I'm not sure if it works, since my laptop (or as I've come to call it 'portable desktop
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My laptop is an Intel Skylake integrated GPU and Nvidia GTX 960m discrete GPU.
Running Fedora 25 and nouveau works fine using PRIME to select whether something should run on the Intel or the Nvidia chip.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:4, Informative)
The nouveau driver is great for what it does, but if someone is going to be using google earth you need the one from nvidia. Both are rock solid for what they do IMHO (and the fans on video cards are frequently shit).
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Personally I prefer the driver which gets the job done, and while Nouveau is a solid effort, it just doesn't.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:4, 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).
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In this case things like the "new" gnome (nearly ten years and still slow) which relies on a GPU may come up to the speed of the old one on hardware that isn't a 1337 gamer box.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that we'll finally get a Nouveau driver that isn't a crash-prone piece of crap?
Sure, it's virtually yours! ;)
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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.
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I'm running 4.9.9. No systemd. The problem is your distro.
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I'm running 4.9.9. No systemd. The problem is your distro.
That is funny I am running 4.9.9-200.fc25.x86_64 (Fedora 25 for those that don't know) and I have never had an issue with systemd in over six years.
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Good for you. That wasn't the gp's question.
Re: Backported to 2.6? (Score:5, Informative)
Running 4.9 on 4 physical machines in my home. And also running 4.9 on over a dozen VMs in a datacenter without systemd.
There are a few distributions that don't push it down your throat. There are even a few others that offer (optional) alternative kernels and init systems.
Personally I use funtoo [funtoo.org].
Take a look at www.without-systemd.org [without-systemd.org] for more.
Why did you write that? (Score:5, Informative)
Now I hate SystemD far more than most due to it causing actual failures for me in production, but spreading disinformation about it is dishonest.
Re: Why did you write that? (Score:1)
While you are correct that systemd runs in userspace, there are certain kernel features required by systemd that I do not believe are available in the old 2.6.x branch.
Backwards world (Score:2)
However you do not need SystemD to run those kernels which seems to be what you and the other poster are implying.
SystemD is Lennart's special little empire building project and separate to the kernel.
Re: Backwards world (Score:2)
No that's not what we are saying.
Though nearly every mainstream distribution has moved to systemd, making it nearly impossible (or atleast infeasible) to run a modern version of many of the popular/mainstream distro's.
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I agree. That's why I use Funtoo. OpenRC is my favourite. It provides all of the UNIXy goodness, easily scriptable, backwards compatible, and fast.
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What is the real reason for you taking this line?
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It seems that is the only kernel everyone and their brother uses these days and no SystemD dependencies seems to be a big factor
May I ask what has systemd to do with a new Linux kernel version or the kernel in general.?
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no SystemD dependencies
The linux kernel has zero dependencies on Systemd. It provides support for cgroups that systemd then implements on the desktop but adoption is entirely up to the distribution.
And it's a good thing which is why so many distributions have adopted systemd in the first place.
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The problem is all of the mainstream distributions have made systemd a requirement.
So some users are opting to stick with older releases to avoid systemd, and that means losing out on new kernel features.
As I mentioned in my other comment [slashdot.org], some distributions do not require systemd, and still offer modern kernels.
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So mainstream distributions made a decision on merit, open source provided alternatives for those who don't want, and this is now somehow a problem. Got it. Don't understand it, but got it.
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For many distros, once you find the documentation of their prefered way to package and install the kernel, it is almost trivial to build a new kernel.
vGPU seems cool (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....
Re: vGPU seems cool (Score:5, Informative)
there is definitely support for nvidia [youtu.be]
Vgpu seems very very cool. Now how can we turn this into something commercially viable?
-dk
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Is this like the pass through feature on ESXI? I always thought about running OS X and Windows together.
Re:vGPU seems cool (Score:5, Informative)
This 'virtual GPU' stuff is supposed to make allocating GPU resources between VMs closer to how it is with CPU time or memory, where all the guests and the host can't exceed the capabilities of the machine they are running on; but they can all have access, with relatively modest overhead, to the same device.
I don't know if things work as pleasantly as desired yet; but in principle it should be a lot more convenient than full device passthrough. Especially in cases where you might be interested in the GPU for its computational capabilities, video transcoder, etc.
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ESXi does have a very similar mediated passthrough. Here's a quick google hit for installing vgpu on ESXi [vmguru.com]. The two approaches are approximately equivalent in functionality, and should be similar in performance.
In a nutshell, there are four ways to do high-quality graphics in a virtual machine ... you can fully emulate a graphics card (which nearly everybody does, but it's slow); you can forward DirectX/OpenGL calls to the host (which works great for Mac-on-Mac, and not much else); you can directly pass thro
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Re: Linux Wns. Trump Wins. (Score:2, Offtopic)
WTF?? More revisionist history. The republicans are the party that supported the civil rights act. http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/10/... [cnn.com]
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The reason for this, is as I noted, in 1964, the racists were still Democrats. Almost *all* Republicans were in the Northern States.
Civil Rights Act of 1964:
House of Representatives:
Democrats for: 152
Democrats against: 96
Republicans for: 138
Republicans against: 34
Senate:
Democrats for: 46
Democrats against: 21
Republicans for: 27
Republicans against: 6
I misspoke wh
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Lets clarify.. Republicans - Ended slavery, Democrats opposed to the point of a shooting war. Republicans - Pushed Civil Rights, Democrats (specifically their honored KKK member like Robert Byrd with the help of Al Gore) opposed Republicans - Pushed for women to vote, Democrats opposed.
Almost all true.
Civil Rights legislation was pushed by Northern Democrats. Northern Republicans simply rode the wave after balking for a decade.
You could argue the Dems stole their win on that one, but it's also important to understand that the Democratic party was split into 2 very separate parties at that point in time, more or less, along the mason-dixon line.
Again, the bigotry espoused by the Democratic party, which absolutely cannot be denied, was a north/south issue, not a democrat/republican issu
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DNC split into 2 parties, as you said, and 51 of the 54 that split went back to the DNC for life and were welcomed.
That's not really relevant, but it is true. It's not relevant, because it says nothing about the voters and the fact that Republicans came to take up the positions those Democrats held. Today's Republican platform is the Dixiecrat platform of the 60s, in terms of social policy.
Again, I ask you, did the south magically go from 100% blue in 1964 to almost 100% red today because the voters all had a change of heart? Or did the parties change to reflect the voters?
Nothern Democrats came to dominate National
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Did the South become Republican in the 20th century, or did the Republicans become beholden to the Southern Vote?
The geographic representative map for the vote on the CRA/1964 makes it pretty clear who was against Civil Rights, and it wasn't a Party. it was a geographical location.
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That's just retarded. Google's mobile empire is built on the Linux kernel, and even MS has Linux offerings these days.
Virtual gpu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone link to a concise discussion of what this does and some use cases? Thanks.
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It's not exactly concise, but this video shows what it can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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How about you get nothing, and like it?
Jeez. Entitled little creeps.
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I find it rather funny that an NVIDIA guy (in the video) is explaining GPU passthrough as how things used to be done up until now.
The thing is both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI have been hard at work to block exactly this kind of use, and a crapload of hacks had to be introduced to fool their Windows drivers into functioning in this scenario.
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Yeah, I was hoping for a paragraph or three somewhere.
Does virtual GPU support mean that I'll be able to (Score:2)
run Windows CAD packages under Wine and have the graphics work properly? I've been looking/waiting for a decent CAD package for Linux for years. The closest thing to good CAD that I've seen for Linux is OnShape's cloud based package that runs in a web browser.
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No, but it would help you run Windows CAD packages inside a Windows VM and get near native GPU performance both in the Windows VM and Linux host. vGPU lets you share a single compatible GPU across multiple VMs running on the same system. This way each VM can benefit from full hardware accelerated 3D rendering as well as access to OpenCL and/or CUDA even though only a single physical GPU is present in the system.
Wine wouldn't benefit because it already has direct access to the GPU as long as it's associated
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Great! I'll give it a try in VMware when the new kernel is released. I have attempted to run CAD in VMware before and failed miserably with the graphics. I don't mind loading a VM with Windows if that's what it takes, I just don't want to be stuck with Windows as my main OS simply because I need it to run CAD.
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Run them under vmware instead. Their graphics driver is pretty good. It's good enough to where you can actually play many games on it, let alone use CAD. Of course, then you actually need a copy of Windows in a VM, which you may find offensive.
This is great news!!! (Score:2)
OK.. so I am not sure why, but it is.
See, at work people always get praise for "going the extra mile", working overtime to get the job done. The people who rarely get the accolades are the ones who work effectively and efficiently at just doing the work. They don't get "recognition awards" for getting things done on schedule. That's just their job. But the downside is that to prove your worth, it is in your best interest to create a little chaos so you can step up and put out the fires.
Kudos to Linus an
ZFS? (Score:3)