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Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.11 of the Linux kernel.
"So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm," Torvalds posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, adding "I'm much happier releasing a final 4.11 now.
So what do we get this time around? Among other things, Linux is now better at hot-swapping solid state disks and can now do journaling on RAID 4/5/6 volumes. While we're talking storage, there's also support for the OPAL self-encrypting disk drive standard.
The kernel has also gained support for the Shared Memory Communications over RDMA (SMC-R) (SMC-R) spec, an IBM invention that allows virtual machines to share memory and therefore speeds up communications between the machines, helps with load balancing and doesn't hurt when clustering Linux boxen.
Enterprise users and gamers will both be happy that the kernel adds improved support for Intel's Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, technology that lets a CPU figure out which of its cores is fastest and then increase its clock speed in response to a critical workload's needs
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 02 2017, @02:45PM (1 child)
I learned a couple of days ago that audio on an Asus Vivostick TS10, which is a SoC built around an Intel Atom x5-Z8350, does not work under Linux kernels through 4.10. The bug fixes are in 4.11.
There was a lot to figure out to get Linux working on that PC. It came with Windows 10, and I thought I'd turn it into a dual boot machine. First, just to get it to boot a flash drive, have to know the magic trick in Windows 10: hold down the shift key when selecting "reboot" in the Windows 10 exit menu. If you don't, the PC will ignore the flash drive and just boot Windows 10 again. Then Linux couldn't mount the Windows partition, couldn't shrink it and it took a while to learn why. They'd installed Windows 10 with this Bitlocker encryption enabled. Why did Asus do that, I wonder? Fortunately it's not too hard to turn Bitlocker off, just takes a while to process. Once that was done, the partition tools could go to work. Installed Ubuntu 17.04. and it all worked except the audio. After much hunting around, I gathered that kernels 4.5 and perhaps earlier through 4.10 do not have working audio for this particular PC. Ubuntu 17.04 uses kernel 4.10. So I rolled my own kernel, using 4.11-rc8.
I'd never used an SSD based PC before, and it took more hunting to figure out which kernel drivers were correct. SCSI? No. Surely not old ATA or older stuff? Nope. There's this NVE driver for SSDs on the PCI bus. No, wasn't that either. The correct drivers are the MMC ones.
Wish the default settings of the kernel configuration were much more "opt in". They've set the configuration to include just about everything, including a lot of debugging code. They think only kernel developers want to compile kernels? Takes a lot of digging to exclude all the unneeded drivers.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:01PM
It all depends on the type of flash storage. USB flash sticks use the USB mass-storage driver, which works through the SCSI subsystem. SD or MMC cards not attached through a USB card reader show up as MMC devices (this usually applies to your notebook's built-in card reader, and is also what the Raspberry Pi uses for primary storage). SATA SSDs (whether 2.5" or mSATA) use the SATA driver, which is also lumped in with the SCSI subsystem. M.2 storage can be either SATA or NVMe (direct attachment to the PCI Express bus); the former works like any other SATA device, while the latter uses the NVMe driver. (I got to sort out NVMe on Linux recently when I upgraded the SSD in a Dell Latitude 7370 from the 120GB SATA M.2 device it shipped with to a 480GB NVMe M.2 device.)