The upgrade to version 4.0 of the Linux kernel happened quietly over the weekend, less a huge step forward than an incremental improvement. The most interesting feature for those who support Linux boxes will be the non-disruptive kernel patching, allowing you to apply patches without causing downtime; assuming you properly tested the patches that is. As well support for Intel's new Quark processor has been added and support for the Z13 found in IBM machines has also been improved. It was hinted to The Inquirer that version 4.1 is likely to see far more changes incorporated in its release.
"The new number isn't a sign of a major upgrade. As we've chronicled, Torvalds thinks that it looks a bit silly when version numbers go beyond x.19. He therefore decided it would be best to tick over from 3.19 to 4.0 for the sake of neatness, rather than to celebrate any particular milestone in the kernel."
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I started my career back in
I started my career back in 1995 building Linux routers that would connect an office to the net with modems. We’d scrape everything out of the kernel and compile it as a.out to get it small enough to boot off a floppy. I haven’t worked with Linux at that level in a decade, but it makes me happy to see so much activity still around that OS, with things like Steam OS and everything Google is doing with it.
That’s the nice thing about
That’s the nice thing about Steam OS, being open source and being able to be streamlined for gaming workloads, don’t need part of the OS for gaming don’t include it or its services in the build. With windows you get all of the bloat, and the snoop-ware, and crApp store ecosystem and runtime baked into the OS and no way to remove it. It’s going to be interesting, now that Valve is behind Steam OS and supporting Khronos’ Vulkan, to see how the Steam OS ecosystem will advance with everybody, and anybody in the gaming market able to contribute to Steam OS, and the Vulkan API/LLVM. Certainly the Steam OS will be gone over, and maintained and improved by all the interested gaming industry partners, and no other OS will be as streamlined for gaming, and this will be the what makes for a better gaming experience all around.
4.1 has some huge changes.
4.1 has some huge changes. Most notably we’ll finally have an all purpose IPC with kdbus!
Not kdbus in its current
Not kdbus in its current form, there are objections:
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1504.1/03981.html
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1504.1/03953.html