Slashdot Linux Story
The Break-In process of the new Linux kernel takes time. There is a significant change in Video Performance as the kernel break in. There is still a perception that Linux kernels have a short break in time or worse yet, don’t require break in. Some hackers used a second computer to break in the Linux kernel, and transfer the image to their primary computer. This method will not appreciably reduce the break in time required for the kernel. Linux kernel Break-In must be done in the position where you plan to use it.
The System Performance Stages of the kernel are as follows:
* First Stage of Break-In = The system will feel very open, clear and with good detail resolution and dynamics. The greens and lower reds will have elevated intensity levels. The lower output of the blue and green information is due to reduced bandwidth performance at this Stage. In some systems, especially with aluminum or titanium heatsinks, the greens and blues may appear edgy or even fatiguing. The visual stage will appear OK with some lack of Focus. It will take from 5 to 15 hours of break-in for the kernel to reach the Second Stage of Break-In.
* Second Stage of Break-In = The blues and greens will appear less elevated and up front as the monitor intensity level increases. This is followed by the reds starting fill in. The lack of Focus may become more noticeable and the visual stage will start to widen and have more depth. It will take an additional 15 to 35 hours to reach the Third Stage of Break-In.
* Third Stage of Break-In = The system response time will completely flatten out. The presentation will become very clean and less up front. The lack of Focus is disappearing and the imaging will improve as will the low level detail resolution. The Green comes in and it is very tight and you will see lower Red frequencies than your other kernel provided. In effect the visual signature of the kernel will seem to disappear and the X-window presentation will be very real and non-fatiguing. It will take an additional 30 to 50 hours to reach the Final Stage of Kernel Performance.
* Fourth and Final Stage of Kernel Performance = The Visual Stage will be wider than your monitor with excellent depth, height and precise localization of individual icons on the desktop. The hue of the icons will be very accurate over the entire desktop. Symbolic links have excellent referencing ability. The metallic sound of your hard drive is very lifelike. Rhythm, Pace and Dynamics are effortless. Many users find they are now viewing the X-window system at lower Light Levels due to the effortless presentation. You will start to see subtle visual cues like the programmer turning his head while he is programming. You will find you are viewing the Window Manager and forgetting about evaluating your system.
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In May 2008, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project (Adobe
link), which made the SWF specification available without
restrictions. Previously, developers couldn’t use the specification
for making SWF-compatible players, but only for making
SWF-exporting authoring software. The specification remains
incomplete, however, as it does not include any details regarding
RTMP or Sorenson Spark,[27] both of which are widely used to
distribute video through
Full EXA is provided for radeon, nouveau, and intel, the Big
Three. A lot of esoteric chips are supported too. They might not be
super-fast, but they’re still fast enough to do nearly anything.
(Getting that vaunted 1m glyphs/sec is tough though.)
Well, with SVG and the video tag, that is about to change! Big
time!
* First Stage of Break-In = The system will feel very open,
clear and with good detail resolution and dynamics. The greens and
lower reds will have elevated intensity levels. The lower output of
the blue and green information is due to reduced bandwidth
performance at this Stage. In some systems, especially with
aluminum or titanium heatsinks, the greens and blues may appear
edgy or even fatiguing. The visual stage will appear OK with some
lack of Focus. It will take from 5 to 15 hours of break-in for the
kernel to reach the Second Stage of Break-In.
The author is waiting on a Linux kernel patch to fix the Flash
issues he has with his Intel card.
* Second Stage of Break-In = The blues and greens will appear
less elevated and up front as the monitor intensity level
increases. This is followed by the reds starting fill in. The lack
of Focus may become more noticeable and the visual stage will start
to widen and have more depth. It will take an additional 15 to 35
hours to reach the Third Stage of Break-In.
* Fourth and Final Stage of Kernel Performance = The Visual
Stage will be wider than your monitor with excellent depth, height
and precise localization of individual icons on the desktop. The
hue of the icons will be very accurate over the entire desktop.
Symbolic links have excellent referencing ability. The metallic
sound of your hard drive is very lifelike. Rhythm, Pace and
Dynamics are effortless. Many users find they are now viewing the
X-window system at lower Light Levels due to the effortless
presentation. You will start to see subtle visual cues like the
programmer turning his head while he is programming. You will find
you are viewing the Window Manager and forgetting about evaluating
your system.
The Break-In process of the new Linux kernel takes time. There
is a significant change in Video Performance as the kernel break
in. There is still a perception that Linux kernels have a short
break in time or worse yet, don’t require break in. Some hackers
used a second computer to break in the Linux kernel, and transfer
the image to their primary computer. This method will not
appreciably reduce the break in time required for the kernel. Linux
kernel Break-In must be done in the position where you plan to use
it.
So if you wanted sound effects while you listening to music OSS
probably was not enough for you. These is where the sound daemons
came into play. They acted as a single OSS client and did all the
mixing operations for other software to connect with.
To nit-pick, however, the comic does seem to imply the kernel.
In the alt-text you find:
I’ll just use those features, and frankly, I can stand
“losing” even 50% of the users for it. Those are the dumbest part
of the population anyway. You only have problems with those. They
can go to AOL or whatever. I have enough clients.
The System Performance Stages of the kernel are as follows:
To me, I can see that comic and go “neat, that’s a lot of CPUs”
along with pegging Adobe for being a problem: “yeah, adobe sucks at
cross platform.” My friend goes “neat, that’s a lot of CPUs” and
“yeah linux is terrible in that area.”
Both pairs of statements are true. (And don’t call me on the
technicality that “linux is terrible in that area.” Quit being
hyperliteral; that’s my entire point!)
Reverse-engineering and making an open implementation of a
simple web plugin should be harder than reverse-engineering and
implementing Windows domain, RPC named pipes, and file sharing
protocols?
The advent of Windows 7 in October may drive Linux’s desktop
market share down even futher.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the penguin, however…
The comic didn’t imply the kernel. Purists that wash their hands
while saying “Linux is just a kernel, not my fault if it cannot
(run x, recognize y or perform z)” are the target of this comic
which tries to explain why linux (as a whole OS-and-software
alternative) is not ready for the desktop.
I’m not saying Linux is otherwise ready for the desktop (and
complaints about issues with Linux desktops themselves are
perfectly okay), but Flash brokenness is a silly example.
If it weren’t for the soul-crushing stupidity, it’d be hilarious
that people claim X is slow. X ran quickly on computers with 1/000
the performance of even a modest desktop system today, but it’s
slow on these modern computers? That makes no sense. People claim
that X’s network transparency puts it at a performance
disadvantage, but neglect that Unix Sockets, used for local
communication, are among the faster IPC mechanisms in existence.
Criticism of X as a platform is baseless.
When Markansoft says the above, it’s clear that he prizes
technical accuracy in the comic enough to forgo appreciation of the
general point of humour. However, is the comic’s implication really
wrong? I don’t know much about how Flash works with hardware, or if
it requires any specific support for a chipset. The author seems
pretty sure he needs a patch for his hardware set up before he can
get the same quality of Flash performance already enjoyed by other
Linux users. That certainly doesn’t remove Adobe and their
cross-platform unfriendliness from the situation, but Linux distros
are made from work arounds, and the comic’s target is the
priorities of developers, not Adobe’s open source policies.
I can’t really blame Adobe for this. There are quite a lot of
ways in which you can accelerate SOME drawing operations, but they
are not available on all desktops. Clutter comes to mind right now,
but it’s not really the best option for QT/KDE users. It’s hard to
create an accelerated, desktop environment independent piece of
software.
I have a friend who uses Kubuntu (which really is a terrible KDE
distro) who is definitely more adept in linux than your average
switcher, but he doesn’t spend his time memorizing internals or
rebuilding kernels either.
I’m a guy who took gentoo and rebuilt it in my home directory about
fifty times with a set of scripts I developed, getting smaller and
more specific every time until I could write it to a CF card and
drop it in my embedded router that runs at 33MHz, and still
run/startup faster than your average home router.
Thank goodness. I was so worried and depressed.
This is no excuse. The Open Source community has brought us
Samba for goodness sake.
There was a very interesting comment ] on
Slashdot a few years ago by Mike Paquette (who wrote Apple’s
Quartz) explaining why Apple didn’t use X11 for OS X. The funny
thing, in retrospect, is that every single feature mentioned
in Paquette’s post has now been implemented for X11, and that’s
with volunteer work. If Apple had invested resources into making
this happen for X instead of reinventing the wheel, everyone would
have been better off. Yet despite these additional features, we
still retain full network transparency along with full
compatibility stretching back to the 80s.
The kernel team is doing a pretty awesome job of speeding
things up. Kudos.
With the HD5850 and HD5870 weeks away (don’t buy a new card till
they’re out, you’ll hate yourself!), this means you have to be
three GENERATIONS behind the curve for this yet unreleased kernel
feature to be of use.
The same way mp3 became a standard and “linux” users must
install codecs “at their own risk”.
The same way linux-verboten WinModems became a standard that faded
only when they couldn’t keep up with ADSL.
The same way Realtek and Broadcom WiFi cards have become a standard
in most notebooks (and some desktops) and they still perform very
poorly under “linux”.
The same way NVidia and ATI have become the video adapter standards
and none has yet got full support (not even mentioning double
screens) under Linux.
The biggest problem is all the applications that are currently
written for X. You can’t rewrite everything, and it is not even
worth it. Really. X is working fine, and it’s getting better. The
same goes for the drivers, and everything that’s already in.
EXA is the backend acceleration we use right now in X. It
works.
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that
matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they
concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for
this one doesn’t work since the performance of Flash Player is
entirely out of their hands.
Whichever way you put it, the fact that this “basic thing that
everyone else takes for granted” doesn’t work is is Adobe’s fault,
not the Linux community’s fault. It would have made a lot more
sense if the complaint were about some actual bug in Linux distros,
not a problem with a historically shoddy proprietary plugin.
* Third Stage of Break-In = The system response time will
completely flatten out. The presentation will become very clean and
less up front. The lack of Focus is disappearing and the imaging
will improve as will the low level detail resolution. The Green
comes in and it is very tight and you will see lower Red
frequencies than your other kernel provided. In effect the visual
signature of the kernel will seem to disappear and the X-window
presentation will be very real and non-fatiguing. It will take an
additional 30 to 50 hours to reach the Final Stage of Kernel
Performance.
I’d like some green group to calculate how many YouTube videos
have been played and how many GigaWatt Hours of electricity have
been wasted on software colorspace conversion and scaling because
Adobe can’t figure out how to use well documented and commonly
available features on every video card made in the last fifteen
years.
No, it doesn’t imply that at all. It’s simply saying that Linux
desktop users brag about irrelevent new “features”, while basic
things that everyone else takes for granted don’t work
properly.
I agree that X works well for it’s designed purpose, and that
said I agree that we have further need as we move beyond what it
was designed to do (and into the issues we run into with a modern
desktop, such as gaming).
X’s code base is ugly at places, and writing pure-X11
applications isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but I can’t
think of (m)any shortcomings that lead to any trouble in real world
usage that can’t be fixed. Also, X has to offer a lot of things
that any new thing wouldn’t have. You might not use many of the
features you get for free with X, but some of us do. X’s
architecture can be seen as a shortcoming, but it’s also an
advantage in many situation. Remote X for example is a great
thing.
As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don’t care
who is at fault.
Totally wrong, you must be new here.
The drivers *are* in userland (well there, is enough in the
kernel to display basic images and text). KMS means the kernel can
change video modes, which allows early boot splash screens with no
“blink” transitions when X takes over and allows “bluescreens”,
that is, the kernel can print error messages to the screen even if
X locks up.
The ability to integrate Flash-like FX, Video and Audio
SEAMLESSLY with (X)HTML and CSS (and every other supported
XML language, like MathML), is just beyond words… It’s what I’m
waiting for, for at least a decade! And the performance of both
environments gets closer and closer to being equal.
With that, soon nobody needs or even wants Flash
anymore.
Linux foundner Linus Torvalds, first developed the operating
system for his desktop and it rose to promince as a commodity Unix
server.
Don’t even get me started on Flash Video.
FLV is a flash video format. Mplayer already plays FLVs just
fine. This has little to do with flash video sites, which use SWF
to create their own players for FLV content (and often the FLV
location is obfuscated and keyed, so you need to interpret the SWF
to get to it). It is impossible to get YouTube to work with only an
FLV player. Crude hacks like using Adobe’s plugin to download the
video to /tmp and then playing it with mplayer
aren’t really viable for end-users.
> I would like to hear from anyone who disagrees.
No shit. Trying to sell Linux at retail is a fricking nightmare
from hell. Which printers on sale at Walmart this week work in
Linux? Will these wireless cards at Best Buy work out of the box?
Damned if I know, and the poor bastard behind the counter at
Staples sure as hell ain’t gonna know either. Which is why i have
said time and time again there needs to be a stable ABI and a “Tux
the penguin” certification process. That way retailers like me can
just go “look for the fat penguin” and know that the items
As an ex-Mac user, and a video game fan, the rule is that the
Mac version of the number 1 game usually comes out about 3 months
after everybody else has already gotten sick of playing it to
death.
On the other hand, Adobe doesn’t really put that much
engineering force into X11 optimizations. Adobe Flash on a
non-accelerated Mac OS X (hackintosh using the included Vesa 3.0
driver) is still faster than on X11/Linux.
It is not a new FireWire stack, rather the “second” stack that has
been experimental for a few years is no longer marked experimental.
However, the maintainer still says to use the old stack for many
applications.
Flash is by no means “simple”. There are a bunch of different
speficiations and sub-specifications to be implemented
(ActionScript, FLV, RTMP, …).
Furthermore, memory flushing benchmarks in a file server shows
the number of major faults going from 50 to 3 during 10 per cent
cache hot reads.
Flash sucks everywhere, just to varying degrees depending on
platform. Go watch the fun in the netbook space as the Intel Atom
is being unfairly blamed by clueless pundits for the inability of
netbooks with the newer 1280×720 and 1388×768 displays to play full
screen Flash video (on Windows XP btw.). We nerds on slashdot know
better of course, the problem is Adobe being mindless idiots who
can’t figure out how to properly use a scaled video surface.
And if Google Chrome OS’s windowing system doesn’t support the X
protocol, I can assure you I won’t be using it.
I disagree. Do you have any reason why you want to get rid of
X?
The SWF format was completely closed un
You think that in the same situation Microsoft wouldn’t have somone
calling Adobe to get the full screen flash video working properly?
They understand that it is always the operating system’s fault when
something goes wrong, no matter what the truth is.
OSS existed both in free and non-free forms. The non-free
implementation was missing some featured and supported few cards.
OSS was very limited where mixing of multiple audio sources was
concerned.
I find I struggle a bit with X on each new install (I like to
switch around and use different Linux distros as the mood to tinker
comes and goes). After working in an OSX-based development shop
with Logitech MX1000s at each desk, I became spoiled on the 12
buttons (10 if you don’t count the wh
X works really good for what it’s designed for and I’d hate to
have to live without it. That said, what I also would like is a
custom version for gaming which turns down or off features not
needed for gaming. Wouldn’t it be nice if users could build a
custom X as easy as custom kernels?
The result is an improved desktop experience; benchmarks on
memory tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by
50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are
reduced to about one-third. That means X desktop responsiveness is
doubled under high memory pressure.
Indeed, the xkcd
in question ] (a link to the page, not the image)
doesn’t hang on technical accuracy. It’s absolutely a commentary on
issues with the “Linux Desktop”, with developers putting a
relatively rare server concern such as support for thousands of
CPUs ahead of something that pretty much every PC user expects to
have (the ability to watch Hulu smoothly).
I get the same question each time I ask the question: it matters
because I don’t manage servers anymore, and the news about
improvements to the “Linux Desktop” is much more relevant to me.
Not only because I like to play around with Linux and any related
innovations, but also because I believe that 1) Windows won’t
always be as easy to acquire without cost as it has been for as
long as I can remember, 2) I (or a friend/family member) won’t
always have money to spend on a Mac, and 3) with those conditions
on
> As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don’t
care who is at fault.
No, you are just a fool speaking of things he knows nothing of.
You should go into politics.
Don’t confuse “newer” and “better”. X11′s architecture is quite
good, and is among one of the better designs for a windowing system
ever created. It’s clean, extensible, fast, and
network-transparent. It defines mechanism, not policy, and does its
job extremely well. That it’s been extended to support all kinds of
modern features is a testament to the strength of its original
design.
How did they manage that before support for 4096 cores?
If you need a bleeding-edge card, you’re gaming, and to be
frank, Linux is not the best environment for gaming. If, on the
other hand, you’re interested in solid 2D work with decent
acceleration, a solid older card is just the thing. I just picked
up a dirt-cheap R400-based card myself. (I’d have stuck with my
trusty Matrox G450, but the driver will probably never support
modern multihead with xrandr 1.3.)
Actually the fault is split. 2D acceleration in Linux for most
video drivers is shabby at best.
Linux isn’t broken because Flash sucks, the “Ready For the
Desktop” moniker is broken if people consider it to imply Flash
support. Flash is a closed technology (the spec is only open if
you’re not writing a player), which puts any problems with Flash
playback anywhere squarely into Adobe’s hands. If being “ready for
the desktop” implies “Adobe plays nice with you” and there is
nothing you can do if they don’t, something is really wrong. What
is the Linux community supposed to do, hold Adobe at gunpoint until
they fix Flash?
Flash is a piece of shit. I most certainly can and will blame
Adobe for not putting more than one person on the Linux Flash team,
and I can point to the incomplete, buggy, largely hacked-up Gnash
as an example of a software rasterizer that moves much faster than
Flash despite also being lame.
Not to mention the fact that Adobe has made SWF, FLV, and RMTP
open specifications.
Seconded. It also says good things about the state of the kernel
and development team that they can focus on optimization and the
user experience. It wasn’t that long ago the focus was on getting
wireless to work. We’ve come such a long way. Very impressive. Well
done.
X11 is a whipping boy for anyone who’s ever had a complaint
about a Unix GUI. No matter whether it’s a badly-designed
application, an unstable driver, or poor kernel scheduling, or a
deranged toolkit drag-and-drop model, people always fault X11. And
no matter what the root cause of the problem, the solution
is always to throw out the X protocol and design something else.
People like you fail to account for the possibility that there’s
actually very little wrong with X, and that it can certainly be the
basis for a modern, functional GUI.
I’ll give 10-1 odds what you are actually wanting to replace is
GNOME, KDE, Qt or Gtk and you haven’t a fracking clue what part X
actually plays in your desktop experience. You ain’t the first
newbie blathering on about replacing X and you won’t be the last.
Some have actually attempted to do it… I didn’t follow closely
but they never made it past talking and d