Linux 3.9 brings SSD caching and drivers to support modern PCs

Improved Linux drivers boost support for Intel, ARM, and AMD hardware.

Read the whole story

 

[Gracana]

Oh wow, I guess the changes must have been made in the release candidates or something, because the 3.9 release announcement doesn't even mention this. I wouldn't have known if it weren't for this article! I've avoided trying this out before because it required patching the kernel, but now that support is officially in... I might have to give it a shot.

 

[Spazmodica]

jackstrop[/url]":jlxtl090]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

 

[jackstrop]

Spazmodica[/url]":2eon0mlf]

jackstrop[/url]":2eon0mlf]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

No, my point was are we approaching the time when desktop is deprecated to the point that having windows or not stops being incredibly important and Linux can make serious incursions?

If there is an official Linux driven Steambox release I don't see why it couldn't be feasible.

 

[przemo_li]

Castanova[/url]":3pgyf86a]Meh, it'll take a decade or more before Linux is widely supported as an official platform for video games. Until then, it's Windows.

As if Android wasn't popular platform for games...

 

[Raptor Apocalypse]

jackstrop[/url]":1wuyi6iq]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

 

[Tundro Walker]

Spazmodica[/url]":3olpe2qm]

jackstrop[/url]":3olpe2qm]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

If Steam makes a viable Linux game console, I think the desktop part will take care of itself.

 

[MatthiasF]

Xen support for hotplugging processors and memory components

Nice. Amazon AWS uses Xen, right? Does this mean you could possibly move a machine from one tier of performance to another without shutting it down?

 

[tialis]

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops.

Questionable? Linux' driver support is not questionable, it's outstanding. Compared to Windows, where almost nothing works out of the box on a fresh install, Linux has fantastic hardware support.

The bit that is questionable is support by the hardware vendors. If you are using Windows you can pop in the CD or go to the manufacturer's website. If you use Linux you often have to rely on somebody completely unrelated to the vendor (i.e. your friendly kernel developer) to get your hardware working. This is however a completely different issue.

 

[beebee]

I'm not so sure I want SSD caching. I rather just run the OS on SSD and put user data on HD. But I do realize there are database users than need transaction speed. I just rather keep it simple.

The new feature I like is the selective repair of raid. I only had a raid "degradation" once, but it was nerve-wracking. A quick fix would be way better than rebuilding the array.

 

[Deleted member 330960]

beebee[/url]":s1i6c3od]I'm not so sure I want SSD caching. I rather just run the OS on SSD and put user data on HD. But I do realize there are database users than need transaction speed. I just rather keep it simple

Simple is not micromanaging this stuff. Let the OS do it for you, trust me.

 

[hernias]

No, my point was are we approaching the time when desktop is deprecated to the point that having windows or not stops being incredibly important and Linux can make serious incursions?

The desktop is becoming deprecated because we've gone from running locked-down, closed-source proprietary software locally to running locked-down closed-source proprietary software from a Google or EC2 data center.

But we're using Linux as a thin-client endpoint now! Woo! Open source REVOLUTION!

 

[vartec]

Castanova[/url]":1uchvsur]Meh, it'll take a decade or more before Linux is widely supported as an official platform for video games. Until then, it's Windows.

Yeah, right... given that SteamBox is Ubuntu.

 

[ZerofaithX263]

I know the main reason I've never used linux as my primary is compatibility. I have a huge library of older titles that would need me to virtualize windows. At that point, why not just use windows?

I'm not saying Linux is inferior as a whole (the openness of it is great for many other things), but for my personal use it at least appears to me that it would be more work than to simply have a windows box for now.

Not trying to flame war... just saying, if they want to dethrone windows as the main desktop non console platform for games, backwards compatibility is their big hurdle.

 

[yababom]

tialis[/url]":a5xltxkn]

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops.

Questionable? Linux' driver support is not questionable, it's outstanding. Compared to Windows, where almost nothing works out of the box on a fresh install, Linux has fantastic hardware support.

The bit that is questionable is support by the hardware vendors. If you are using Windows you can pop in the CD or go to the manufacturer's website. If you use Linux you often have to rely on somebody completely unrelated to the vendor (i.e. your friendly kernel developer) to get your hardware working. This is however a completely different issue.

Your distinction between built-in support and a manufacturers driver that's only a download away is completely immaterial to me when I want to get something working. If I need to use something that isn't supported by the kernel, then my chances of getting that device working on Linux plummet; whereas with Windows, the chances of getting the hardware to work outside of built-in support are very good.

In the end, we are still back to the status quo, which is that many manufacturers of consumer grade peripherals make sure that you can get their device working withing 5 minutes on Windows; where as the consumer grade support for linux is very spotty.

Edited for grammar..

 

[HellDiver]

tialis[/url]":2gglfg9h]

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops.

Questionable? Linux' driver support is not questionable, it's outstanding. Compared to Windows, where almost nothing works out of the box on a fresh install, Linux has fantastic hardware support.

You've obviously never used Windows 8, then?

I installed the Ubuntu 12.04LTS on my laptop, the wifi didn't work, the video drivers (HD3000) were intermittent at best, and the laptop wouldn't resume from sleep. Everything works first time on Windows 8. Windows 7 only needed video drivers, everything else worked.

It's a Dell Vostro, a 2nd Gen i5 machine, so pretty much industry standard as far as laptops go.

 

[Alhazred]

Windows 8 and its tiles work quite well as a HTPC, where text and items can be harder to read at default size. But Microsoft is trying to merge a touch interface onto desktop users, which is not working out so well. If only they did not have their Xbox focus on (which is getting more and more apps and becoming a viable full time HTPC) we could have seen a Valve/Microsoft collaboration for a PC console box (cheaper bare bones Windows that only can run game store software of your choice).

Sure, but why even bother with Windows at that point? What does your HTPC need to do? Play movies and let you watch TV, maybe browse the web, and play games. What would the purpose be for the OEM to waste money on some windows license to be able to do that when there are a bajillion Linux distros that can do it for zero licensing with a slight bit of tweaking.

Windows hasn't had anything but lockin going for it for years outside the corporate network. That lockin is only good for the desktop and maybe laptop form factors (even there its questionable anymore) where existing apps are useful. Internet TV type things and HTPCs etc are almost universally using Linux anymore. Really THE main thing even keeping Windows at all in the running there has been a certain amount of video driver support (IE a lot of the little Atom boxes floating around have not had good hardware video accel support in the past).

Check out things like the Vortex Box (http://info.vortexbox.org you can also buy a fully configured box), Windows just cannot compete in that space, not unless MS releases a free version. Even then its unlikely to beat out open source Linux in that space.

 

[mr_dee]

HellDiver[/url]":2190gze0]Everything works first time on Windows 8. Windows 7 only needed video drivers, everything else worked.

Really? Like mobile broadband devices? Which only work at all on windows < 8 by pretending to be USB drives and loading their software on device insertion? One wonders what other market-driven background kludges you're blind to ...

And you install vanilla copies of windows with no OEM support? Right?

 

[tiggers]

przemo_li[/url]":1iwjqffg]

Castanova[/url]":1iwjqffg]Meh, it'll take a decade or more before Linux is widely supported as an official platform for video games. Until then, it's Windows.

As if Android wasn't popular platform for games...

Calling Android out as a Linux proof for games is like calling iOS out as the reason why OSX is going to be the Next Big Thing.

What I mean is that Android is such a Closed Source version of Linux that it may as well not be Linux in many regards.

There's a lot of good stuff in this latest build...that should have been in linux 8 months to a year ago. All three platforms--Windows, OSX and Linux--are moving forward. And that's great. But if your competition is moving forward faster than you are, then you may as well be standing still. And--I'm sure I'll get neg'd into the ground for this--Linus Torvalds is one of the big reasons why Linux is so sluggish about innovating. "My way or the highway" mentality does not take advantage of the power Open Source brings to the table.

 

[aaronb1138]

mr_dee[/url]":3sm9wqh3]

HellDiver[/url]":3sm9wqh3]Everything works first time on Windows 8. Windows 7 only needed video drivers, everything else worked.

Really? Like mobile broadband devices? Which only work at all on windows < 8 by pretending to be USB drives and loading their software on device insertion? One wonders what other market-driven background kludges you're blind to ...

And you install vanilla copies of windows with no OEM support? Right?

Such a "kludge" is an absolutely brilliant way to implement driver support for devices which are released during or after the development of an OS. At least with Windows, the driver only needs to support a few flavors, at most, 8 (XP, Vista, 7, 8 then X2 for x86 + x64) and that is excluding driver compatibility in most situations from Vista to 8.

Drivers for hardware not natively supported in the Linux kernel... umm, no thank you, it is too painful.

Going the Linux route, should a mobile dongle have a USB flash portion with source code so you can compile support for the device into the kernel, write the new kernel and reboot. Let's assume for one moment you have a mobile broadband dongle for exactly the reason they are marketed: you don't have internet access locally otherwise to download drivers, updates, and such things.

 

[5eb]

Available for download at kernel.org

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who already know where to get their kernel tarballs. And those who will be confused as to how to "install this linux-3.9.tar.xz file on my computer".

Linux is mostly hard to use due to misunderstandings.

 

[hobgoblin]

Spazmodica[/url]":2bqcylux]

jackstrop[/url]":2bqcylux]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

And in 2014 the death of the Desktop is declared...

Not that i would care much, as long as i can get the components i will continue assembling desktops.

 

[HellDiver]

mr_dee[/url]":22i22a9y]

HellDiver[/url]":22i22a9y]Everything works first time on Windows 8. Windows 7 only needed video drivers, everything else worked.

Really? Like mobile broadband devices? Which only work at all on windows < 8 by pretending to be USB drives and loading their software on device insertion? One wonders what other market-driven background kludges you're blind to ...

And you install vanilla copies of windows with no OEM support? Right?

I install from my Technet version, usually off my WDS server. Not OEM versions. So, I do know what's going on in the background, thanks.

I was talking about important things like video and sound drivers, and wifi drivers. Not USB 3G dongles. Linux couldn't cope with an Intel iGPU, nor could it cope with an Intel Centrino wifi chip. Jeesh, it's not like they're not common. These are fundamental, core devices seen in a massive number of laptops.

Try pulling your Linux-branded tinfoil hat up off your eyes and have a look around. The world has moved on past Windows XP.

 

[crhilton]

HellDiver[/url]":3ebhuifd]Linux couldn't cope with an Intel iGPU, nor could it cope with an Intel Centrino wifi chip.

Wat? Is there a new revision of these that's unsupported or something like that? Because it's been supported those for a very long time now. Heck, they're what you point people at to have the best possible Linux support on their laptop.

 

[hobgoblin]

tialis[/url]":33jjhmhx]

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops.

Questionable? Linux' driver support is not questionable, it's outstanding. Compared to Windows, where almost nothing works out of the box on a fresh install, Linux has fantastic hardware support.

The bit that is questionable is support by the hardware vendors. If you are using Windows you can pop in the CD or go to the manufacturer's website. If you use Linux you often have to rely on somebody completely unrelated to the vendor (i.e. your friendly kernel developer) to get your hardware working. This is however a completely different issue.

And this is what trips up Linux on laptops oh so much.

First they tired to turn off all devices they could during suspend to ram. But ever so often some part would not turn back on when prompted, requiring a reboot to get it back into working condition. This not because the Linux coders hard messed up, but because the hardware was using some wonky interpretation of the protocol that either worked under Windows (MS and their EEE), or was wallpapered over via the company provided Windows only drivers.

Then they try to turn off only devices that they know follow the standard properly, but then benchmarks lament Linux for resulting in worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware.

End result are coders throwing their arms up in exasperation and pointing to the distros and telling them to deal with it...

And that is just suspend. There is also the whole ACPI mess, where motherboards will return useless data if Linux claims to be anything other than Windows. Or the new lovely discovery on Lenovo workstations using UEFI that will not boot a distro unless it claims to be Windows (or RHEL, go fig).

 

[hobgoblin]

HellDiver[/url]":2ec1hl3u]

mr_dee[/url]":2ec1hl3u]

HellDiver[/url]":2ec1hl3u]Everything works first time on Windows 8. Windows 7 only needed video drivers, everything else worked.

Really? Like mobile broadband devices? Which only work at all on windows < 8 by pretending to be USB drives and loading their software on device insertion? One wonders what other market-driven background kludges you're blind to ...

And you install vanilla copies of windows with no OEM support? Right?

I install from my Technet version, usually off my WDS server. Not OEM versions. So, I do know what's going on in the background, thanks.

That is quite clearly not home user grade.

 

[beebee]

tayhimself[/url]":3o8jxzy7]

beebee[/url]":3o8jxzy7]I'm not so sure I want SSD caching. I rather just run the OS on SSD and put user data on HD. But I do realize there are database users than need transaction speed. I just rather keep it simple

Simple is not micromanaging this stuff. Let the OS do it for you, trust me.

Linux is about control. If I wanted to be spoon fed, I'd get a Mac.

You keep the OS on a small ssd. Easy enouigh to g4linux periodically. Big data goes on a raid array or NAS.

 

[WaveRunner]

You do realize the competition is shipping a Private Cloud OS...? I think Linux being behind Windows in 2012 is quite an understatement to say the least. Never mind how far behind it is compared to Windows Azure

 

[name99]

beebee[/url]":3lrjt2x9]I'm not so sure I want SSD caching. I rather just run the OS on SSD and put user data on HD. But I do realize there are database users than need transaction speed. I just rather keep it simple.

The new feature I like is the selective repair of raid. I only had a raid "degradation" once, but it was nerve-wracking. A quick fix would be way better than rebuilding the array.

For crying out loud. We went through this already when Apple introduced Fusion...

It is ridiculous how much something like this can help.
We all know about Fusion, so I won't describe that but something else. Because I had some old crappy drives just sitting around, I created a backup system (based on rsync) for my iMac to augment Time Machine.
Specifically I used AppleRAID to stripe together two 300GB drives (both about 10 yrs old, both about 25MB/s throughput, so new bandwidth is about 50MB/s). But, and this is the relevant part, I ALSO concatenated a small three years or so old 60GB SSD before this striped RAID. So I have a virtual volume whose first 60GB are SSD, and whose next 600GB are 50MB/s HD.

This thing runs like a bat out of hell. It is ridiculous how fast it is, given the age of its components. I attribute this to the fact that HFS+ defines a zone (the MD zone) at the start of each volume where it preferentially writes all metadata (the various B-trees, spotlight indices, the file system journal, etc) and then tries to pack small files after this zone.
So basically, even without knowledge of my exact HW, the file system, rather than continually having to bounce the write head between one region of a disk (to write metadata of various forms) and another (to write data) can just keep smoothly stream out data to the striped HDs, while reading (for rsync comparison) and writing metadata to the SSD.

I had an earlier version of this system which did not use the SSD, and that was, for my weekly rsync backups, at least 2x slower.

My points are
(a) SSD caching makes an incredible difference, IF it can work well. The ideal is something like Fusion, where both reads and writes are cached, but even intermediate solutions, when done well, make a huge difference. My experience with the Momentus XT was unsatisfactory, so unfortunately, the solution does have to be well implemented --- good algorithms and a large enough flash capacity...

(b) You can, if you want it, cobble together very useful solutions using some common sense. Certainly on OSX you can do this, thanks to the very powerful AppleRAID system, which allows both striped and JBOD disks, and stacking of the two; AND thanks to a filesystem with a good sense of locality and which works hard to use the MD Zone well.
I assume Linux' LVM is as capable as Apple's; what I'm not sure of is whether Ext4 (or maybe BTRFS) does as good a job of utilizing an MD Zone so that position an SSD at the start of a JBOD will cache all the metadata, and so allow the heads on the disks to stream data without ever having to change location.
I have no idea whether Windows even has an LVM, or how powerful it is, or how well NTFS utilizes an MD Zone.

(c) I'd be curious as to whether a solution like what is described here (where effort is being expended on write-caching, but you don't get the read-caching, especially of meta-data, works as well as my solution, which gives you much better read-"caching", but only write-"caching" of meta-data. The ideal, of course, would be a fusion-type solution for external disks as well as internal... Although you can create such a thing today with Apple SW, I'm not convinced it performs any differently to what I've already described, because there is (so far) no way to tell the fused volume that one of the disks is an SSD; all you can do is rely on the SSD being at the start of a JBOD and the MD Zone working well.
It will be interesting if Linux creates a consolidate Fusion-type solution for external disks before Apple does. (Apple, of course, would never announce such a thing or make a big deal about it, it's too techy. But they could add a verb or two to diskutil in 10.9 which would allow one to inform the file system which external drives have SSD rather than HD performance characteristics.)

 

[iniudan]

Sufinsil[/url]":29rwbrxs]

Tundro Walker[/url]":29rwbrxs]

Spazmodica[/url]":29rwbrxs]

jackstrop[/url]":29rwbrxs]Excellent. May the point of inflection between Linux and Windows be near?

With the absolute garbage that MS has been pumping out mixed with a societal move toward Android and iOS along with Valve's Linux support along with Google's cloud based services allow platform agnosticism it seems that the time may be approaching that will allow for Linux to begin a true incursion into the space.

In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

If Steam makes a viable Linux game console, I think the desktop part will take care of itself.

And like all console launches, the ones that fail horribly are the ones with limited games. 3DS and Vita are good examples.
Windows 8 and its tiles work quite well as a HTPC, where text and items can be harder to read at default size. But Microsoft is trying to merge a touch interface onto desktop users, which is not working out so well. If only they did not have their Xbox focus on (which is getting more and more apps and becoming a viable full time HTPC) we could have seen a Valve/Microsoft collaboration for a PC console box (cheaper bare bones Windows that only can run game store software of your choice).

The thing is that Microsoft is not one to cooperate with Valve, not that they didn't try since Orange box release, why do you think TF2 on Xbox360 is not a hat simulator ?

 

[sporkwitch]

hernias[/url]":2gvf12fy]

No, my point was are we approaching the time when desktop is deprecated to the point that having windows or not stops being incredibly important and Linux can make serious incursions?

The desktop is becoming deprecated because we've gone from running locked-down, closed-source proprietary software locally to running locked-down closed-source proprietary software from a Google or EC2 data center.

But we're using Linux as a thin-client endpoint now! Woo! Open source REVOLUTION!

Google and EC2, the cloud services ALL RUNNING LINUX?

Google the company that only uses UNIX (MacOSX) and Linux in-house, MSFT need not apply?

I get your (lack of) point, but it's self-defeating. It's still wins in the Linux collumn, and more devices running linux means more linux developers which means more linux applications which means more people using linux, and the cycle continues. The trick is reaching critical mass, which has been approaching slowly but surely, and lately been accelerating.

 

[JoepyDoe]

tialis[/url]":36km032r]

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops.

Questionable? Linux' driver support is not questionable, it's outstanding. Compared to Windows, where almost nothing works out of the box on a fresh install, Linux has fantastic hardware support..

Please stop using Windows 98 SE or Windows XP SP1.

I just did a fresh install of Windows 8 on a self-built box. Zero driver issues. None. Nada.

Welcome to 2013, trollboy.

 

[malor]

Spazmodica[/url]":10aa1v8o]In other words, "2013: the Year of Linux on the Desktop".

I think it would be more accurate to say, 2013: The Year Of Linux Everywhere, Except the Desktop.

It's omnipresent. It's getting to the point that you have to actively pay attention to avoid owning something running Linux, at least if you like electronic gadgets.

 

[hernias]

I get your (lack of) point, but it's self-defeating.

No, it isn't.

Open source is about controlling your software and your data. Being able to peek under the hood and see what your software is doing. To have complete control, both as a consumer and a professional, to avoid things like vendor lock-in and the privacy issues that get companies like Facebook into trouble. Can you peek under the hood of GMail? Do you know what Google is doing with your data? Can you download the "GMail platform" source code and install your own from compiled binary?

You can say "the Linux column", but at the end of the day what does this mean for me, a consumer [and in my professional life, a service provider]?

Sure, it's running Linux, but when it's abstracted away behind a firewall it could be running anything from an end-user perspective. The entire philosophical justification behind the open-source movement and Linux in general is removed. Linux simply becomes an inexpensive and well-known platform for large corporations to sell services on. Nothing changes.

 

[BeowulfSchaeffer]

Shit, I thought I had just logged into the Battlefront forum.

 

[hobgoblin]

BeowulfSchaeffer[/url]":4mu6mlex]Shit, I thought I had just logged into the Battlefront forum.

It's a field trip