Show Notes: podcast.asknoahshow.com/86

The post Linus Takes a Break | Ask Noah Show 86 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Performance tips for keeping your Linux install running like new, some basic tricks & some advanced tips.

Why Microsoft’s new Surface Book might be able to run Linux & we reflect on the larger issues behind the recent public exits from the Linux Kernel development team & more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

• Rover Electrical Upgrade | Rover Log 10

Feedback:

• A World Without Linux | The Linux Foundation

World Without Linux Episode #1: What’s the Name of That Song?

Remembering who sings your favorite song is a lot harder without Linux.

• N1 Is A Beautiful Open Source Email App for Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

N1 is a new open source e-mail app from Created by Nylas Inc., built using React, Flux, and Electron.

Like a web-browser or modern text editor, N1 is designed to be built on and improved through extensions.

Rover Log

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Surface Book – The ultimate laptop

Ultra-thin, meticulously crafted, with incredible screen resolution. This is the ultimate laptop.

• Hands On: Microsoft Surface Book | PCMag.com

The latching mechanism has a wide electrical connector, no doubt PCIe-based to facilitate communication between the GPU and the rest of the system.

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Keeping Linux Performing Well.

Tips and tricks for keeping your Linux box in top performance.

• If you gotta swap, swap on a sep disk

Creating your swap files on a separate disk can also help quite a bit, especially if your machine swaps frequently. It happens if you do not have enough RAM for your environment. Using KDE with all the features and applications that come along may require several GiB of memory, whereas a tiny window manager with console applications will perfectly fit in less than 512 MiB of memory.

• XFS – ArchWiki

Although the extent-based nature of XFS and the delayed allocation strategy it uses significantly improves the file system’s resistance to fragmentation problems, XFS provides a filesystem defragmentation utility (xfs_fsr, short for XFS filesystem reorganizer) that can defragment the files on a mounted and active XFS filesystem. It can be useful to view XFS fragmentation periodically.

• Is it REALLY worth Tuning your IO scheduler?

The kernel supports different schedulers for storage disk in-/output (IO). These are the CFQ scheduler (Completely Fair Queuing), the NOOP and Deadline. Another, the BFQ (Budget Fair Scheduler) is available in the linux-zen kernel.

A HDD has spinning disks and head that move physically to the required location. Such structure leads to following characteristics:

• random latency it quite high, for modern HDD it is ~10ms (ignoring a disk controller write buffer).
• sequential access provides much higher throughput. In this case head needs to move less distance.

In case if we have a lot of running processes that make IO requests to different parts of storage (i.e. random access) then we can expect that a disk handles ~100 IO requests per second. Because modern systems can easily generate load much higher than 100 requests per second we have a queue of requests that have to wait for access to the storage. One way to improve throughput is to linearize access, i.e. order waiting requests by its logical address and always choose the closest request. Historically this was the first Linux IO scheduler called elevator scheduler.

One of the problems with the elevator algorithm is that it makes suffer processes with sequential access. Such processes read a block of data then process it for several microseconds then read next block and so on. The elevator scheduler does not know that the process is going to read another block nearby and, thus, moves to another request at some other location. To overcome the problem anticipatory IO scheduler was added. For synchronous requests this algorithm waits for a short amount of time before moving to another request.

While these schedulers try to improve total throughput they also might leave some unlucky requests waiting for a very long time.

• Anything-sync-daemon – ArchWiki

• Linux Performance Tuning – Linux Foundation Training

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Going my own way

In the end it’s a mixture of just being tired of dealing with the crap associated with Linux development and realising that by continuing to put up with it I’m tacitly encouraging its continuation, but I can’t be bothered any more. And, thanks to the magic of free software, it turns out that I can avoid putting up with the bullshit in the kernel community and get to work on the things I’m interested in doing. So here’s a kernel tree with patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it’ll pick up some of the power management code I’m still working on, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But, until there’s a significant shift in community norms on LKML, I’ll only be there when I’m being paid to be there. And that’s improved my mood immeasurably.

Closing a door | The Geekess

I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
• Please upload videos to YouTube and submit a link via email or the subreddit.

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Post Show:

• Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles

The post Kernel of Truth | LINUX Unplugged 113 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Ozon OS promises to make Fedora approachable for the rest of us, Ubuntu makes the switch to systemd & then we’ll debate the likely effectiveness of the new Linux Kernel development “Code of Conflict”.

Plus feedback, story updates & more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

• Ozon OS Hydrogen Beta Available For Download ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

• Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Switches To Boot With systemd By Default ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

• Updated my Ubuntu 15.04 laptop, upstart removed, systemd added . All worked…

Catch Up:

• Ouch! Google crocks capacitors and deviates DRAM to root Linux
• Project Zero: Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

• Linux Training – THANK YOU LINUX ACADEMY!!!!!

• Chrome/Chromium Will Support Older, Non-TSYNC Linux Kernels

• Questions about MATE and Pi

LinuxFest Northwest 2015

Bellingham, WA • April 25th & 26th

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Linux adopts conflict resolution code

The Linux kernel development effort is a very personal process compared to “traditional” ways of developing software. Your code and ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed, often resulting in critique and criticism. The review will almost always require improvements to the code before it can be included in the kernel. Know that this happens because everyone involved wants to see the best possible solution for the overall success of Linux. This development process has been proven to create the most robust operating system kernel ever, and we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual result to ever decrease.

• On the Linux Kernel’s Code of Conflict

• kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git – Linux kernel source tree

Pull “code of conflict” from Greg KH:
“This file tries to set the rational basis for our code reviews, gives
some advice on how to conduct them, and provides an excalation channel
for any kernel developers if they so desire it”

[ Let’s see how this works ]

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Chrome OS Switches To “Freon” Graphics Stack To Replace X11

Released this past week was Chrome OS 41 and besides having improved WiFi stability, updates to the guest mode wallpaper, and other changes, some Chrome OS devices have been updated to Google’s new “Freon” graphics stack. _Freon further removes X11 dependencies from Google’s world and will yield performance improvements in the future. Freon isn’t based directly on Wayland nor Mir.

• Google replacing X11 with Freon

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
• Please upload videos to YouTube and submit a link via email or the subreddit.

New Shows : Tech Talk Today (Mon – Thur)

• Tech Talk Today Today | Jupiter Broadcasting

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The post Numixing Fedora | LINUX Unplugged 83 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.