Linux 4.7 Released

[jrepin]

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

[15DCFA8F]

I don't know who maintain those changelogs, but WOW, thanks for this great detailed and methodical piece of work.

[DeepYogurt]

I love that site :)

[voltagex_]

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...

2: http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9

[pmorici]

You have to look at it from their perspective. Why spend money updating something that works? The number of people who care that their device firmware uses a recent Linux kernel version is so infinitesimally small satisfying them wouldn't even move the needle on sales and you apparently bought one any ways so why should they care?

If you want hardware you can tinker with build your own from parts you know work with recent kernels or buy a product specifically marketed at that segment.

[di4na]

You also have to keep in mind that, sadly, most of the toolchain for embedded is... quite old and proprietary. There is a whole ecosystem that force you to stay stucked at old stuff.

I know a ton of embedded company that still have windows 98 or XP machine, because they need them to drive their flash tools or their debugger.

The whole industry stopped updating when the software part tried super hard to sell them Java... and it did not work that well...

[deepsun]

Check out Turris Omnia [1]. It's open-software open-hardware router with automatic updates.

1: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/

[grawlinson]

>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.

[INTPenis]

Curiously timed question because when the 4.7 kernel release announcement was sent out I googled one of the contributs on a whim and found that they worked for a company that builds embedded systems. And this guy is contributing to the 4.7 kernel. ;)

But that's just one guy, one company. I believe most companies like the stability of using something old and well proven.

[dominotw]

>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]

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.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

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]

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.

[jolan]

The RX480 w/AMDGPU-PRO works pretty well in most cases for desktop/gaming/OpenCL use.

AMD's Linux team is in the middle of a big push to modernize the driver and software stack. It seems they consider it a mostly working preliminary version.

You can choose-your-own-adventure with the totally open amdgpu+mesa stack or use the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO. You can follow development of the open source parts on this mailing list:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/

I do agree with others that NVIDIA is a better choice if you want something that just works and you don't care about proprietary vs. open source.

[Ruphin]

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.

[noinsight]

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).

[dopeboy]

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

[chrisper]

By default it is pretty bad. But if you install powertop and tlp you should be good. I get pretty good battery life on my Thinkpad this way.

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-man...

[dman]

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.

[jshap70]

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

[vacri]

Link for perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names

[Redoubts]

I always liked 3.11, Linux for Workgroups

[therein]

"Psychotic Stoned Sheep" sounds pretty good to me.

[frozenport]

     Greased Weasel

[qwertyuiop924]

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

[tangent128]

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

[broodbucket]

I'm a bit out of the loop on kdbus, why didn't it get merged? It was my understanding that it had a brief stint in linux-next, so it must have been getting close...

[dcgudeman]

why is kdbus bad?