
Linux 4.10 is out - ajdlinux
https://lwn.net/Articles/714943/
======
trome
This kernel brings nearly full support (excluding Mali support) for Allwinner
H3 based boards, and adds A64 support. I compiled 4.10-rc6 for my OrangePi a
few days ago, and HDMI, audio, NAND flash, gigabit, wifi and everything else I
tested worked well.

Finally got a super cheap version of a BeagleBone Black with the OrangePi Zero
($7), and with the OrangePi PC+ you get a board with a gig of ram and 8GB of
fast eMMC for under $20.

Hopefully the H5 based boards and Arm64 in general will get better support,
been having trouble getting NodeJS 6 or 7 running on aarch64 short of
compiling it myself :(

Edit: Also FriendlyARM has a couple fun H3 based boards with the Nanopi Neo
and a few others, might wanna look at those too!

~~~
megous
Nice to see Orange Pi PC being mentioned. It really is such a nice board. BTW,
Armbian has experimental "mainline+patches" support for Orange Pi PC2, have
you tried that?

~~~
trome
Yeah, I have a few OrangePi PC2 boards that I built a kernel 4.10-rc6 image
for, they seem to work fine (tho no working HDMI in my build) though I need to
test them more. I'm planning to use them for a Ceph cluster, with four JMS567
USB 3.0 to SATA bridges ($2ea) on each SBC.

I figure with 160MB/s of I/O and gigabit ethernet, it'll be able to push files
at a decent clip, dunno if it will max out my gig internet though.

------
ajdlinux
KernelNewbies change summary:
[https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.10](https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.10)

~~~
executesorder66
What I want to know is how this is completed, but the page for the 4.9 kernel
is not done yet.

I thought they normally waited for all the stable releases to be completed
before finishing the page.

~~~
josteink
> What I want to know is how this is completed, but the page for the 4.9
> kernel is not done yet

From the original post:

> On the whole, 4.10 didn't end up as small as it initially looked. After the
> huge release that was 4.9

4.9 was "huge". I guess volunteers trying to cook up a quick summary may have
given up on it :)

------
Zpalmtree
Hopefully the improved writeback management will mean my music doesn't start
cutting out while I copy a huge file.

~~~
trome
Yeah, I wonder how much of an improvement it will be on small, cheap, low I/O
devices, any insight if you can prioritize some I/O over other I/O (like user
interactive stuff vs Nautilus or cp duplicating a file)?

~~~
McCirculaire
Use or compile a kernel with BFQ and that kind of stuff takes care of itself
without manually having to prioritize I/O. I don't get why BFQ hasn't been
mainlined yet, it has the most sane I/O behavior for desktop use and stops all
the issues you can have on linux of the desktop slowing to a crawl or music
stuttering because you're compressing a 40gb folder or copying files.

Here's the page on the BFQ I/O scheduler:
[http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/](http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/)

Here's a list of precompiled kernels that have been patched with BFQ (and
often some more desktop-use tuning):
[https://liquorix.net/#install](https://liquorix.net/#install) for ubuntu and
debian

[https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/linux-
zen/](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/linux-zen/) for
archlinux

[http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tiwai:/bfq/](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tiwai:/bfq/)
for opensuse, BFQ as a kernel module

If you're wary of installing things outside of official repositories or
compiling your own kernel, then archlinux is the only distro with a kernel
option that has BFQ.

~~~
osandov
> I don't get why BFQ hasn't been mainlined yet

BFQ hasn't been mainlined because it is written for the legacy block layer in
the Linux kernel, which will be replaced entirely with the new block
multiqueue implementation. It doesn't make much sense to replace CFQ or add a
brand new scheduler only to rip it out in a few releases. Linux 4.11 will have
support for I/O scheduling for blk-mq. BFQ is currently being ported to blk-
mq; that work is the first big hurdle to getting it merged.

------
gigatexal
The virtual gpu stuff is really interesting.

~~~
trome
It is exciting, with virtual GPUs I think we'll see more lowend hosts (like
those on LowEndTalk) offer a portion of a GPU for a few bucks a month.

~~~
tyingq
I would watch OVH for that. They already do a fair amount of cheap VPS. And,
they already offer a server with 2 nice GPUs for $159/month:
[https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-
servers/gpu/](https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/gpu/)

So, they should be positioned to sell virtual GPU, since they already
understand both demographics.

~~~
trome
They just launched cloud desktops for about $78 USD a month, but those are
Win10 boxes on VMWare with a dedicated AMD FirePro GPU, which is way overkill
for most GPU accelerated needs.

------
chatmasta
Two nice improvements: UID routing and ability to only keep conntrack tables
for net namespaces that need them.

I'm working on a project right now using net namespaces. They provide very
efficient ways of routing multitenant packets without cluttering up the init
namespace.

------
cschmittiey
Awesome! I'm very excited for native Linux support on the Pine64 boards with
this release.

------
exclusiv
I'm new to using a Linux-based OS as my primary - do you all generally stay on
the latest and greatest? I setup 4.9.9 recently on my XPS DE. Is it risky at
times to upgrade?

~~~
antod
Just leave it to your distro. Don't bother with it yourself.

~~~
exclusiv
I did it myself for the power improvements for battery life. I'm on 16.04. Is
it risky to have a newer kernel than what the distro provides?

~~~
antod
It's not really riskier, just more effort than it's worth IMO. Note that there
will (or soon should) be some newer HWE kernels for 16.04 out.

------
josteink
> Better support for ARM devices .. such as Nexus 5X (Bullhead).

Does this mean that one day, some beautiful day in the future, we can expect
Android devices to ship with a modern kernel?

~~~
trome
They'll ship with a 4.x kernel eventually, but probably not until the specific
release is aged :P

The main issue with Android devices running a mainline kernel is device
drivers, these Qualcomm chips have a board support package which adds half
baked support for their chip to some year or two old kernel, then a device
vendor picks that chip and modifies android more, and then you end up with an
ancient kernel on a brand new device. The only fix is for Qualcomm to mainline
their device drivers.

~~~
Asooka
Or for the Linux kernel to settle down and have a stable ABI finally.

~~~
catern
Linux will (thankfully) never do that because that would be an example of
compromising technical quality for political reasons (mediating the problem
that hardware makers are not publishing source).

------
AsyncAwait
Looks like I'll finally be able to use the Type Cover 4 with my surface,
(support for type cover 3 was added in 4.8, but 4 is way better to type on).

~~~
scott_karana
Do those use bespoke protocols instead of just using USB HID classes?!

~~~
mcpherrinm
It is USB HID, but it seems there's a few quirks to adjust for. If you look
through the linux HID code, that doesn't seem to be uncommon -- there's a lot
of tweaking going on here. I'm sure the hardware was only tested against
Microsoft's HID driver.

I'm not super knowledgeable of HID, but it seems like you can't query the
device for HID Reports.

------
rodionos
I like that.

    
    
      Mart van Santen (1):
          xen-netback: vif counters from int/long to u64
    

[https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/726528/](https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/726528/)

Having related counters overflow at different times made it difficult to run
calculations around network statistics.

------
josteink
Let's hope this release doesn't contain "buggy crap" :)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/05/linus_torvalds_admit...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/05/linus_torvalds_admits_buggy_crap_made_it_into_linux_48/)

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cosarara97
KVMGT sounds really nice.

~~~
wtallis
Yeah, it's convenient that Xen won't be required for this any more.

~~~
trome
It opens the door for a lot of lowend providers to offer cheap GPU compute,
since most are on kvm or OpenVZ. Excited for some $30/yr GPU assisted offers
over on LowEndTalk :P

------
calpaterson
This is the kernel that is likely to be included in many distros as the de
facto "LTS" kernel. For example, Debian Stretch:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-
announce/2016/03/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-
announce/2016/03/msg00000.html)

~~~
justincormack
I think that is out of date. 4.9 is the LTS series not 4.10; that email was a
year ago when it was not clear.

~~~
calpaterson
Yes, seems like you're right. I wasn't aware things had changed, thanks!

------
jeffhuys
OBVIOUSLY!

