Linux 5.2 Will Be A Huge Release: EXT4 Case Insensitive, NVIDIA AltMode, Fieldbus + More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.2 Will Be A Huge Release: EXT4 Case Insensitive, NVIDIA AltMode, Fieldbus + More

Assuming Linux 5.1 manages to ship next weekend, the Linux 5.2 merge window will immediately kick off following that release. In our close monitoring of the different development branches in recent weeks, the Linux 5.2 kernel is shaping up to be an outright massive release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.2-Early-Look

[Jumbotron]

I wrote earlier that, IMHO, kernel 5.2 was a point release that looked like it would punch above its weight. But MAN...after Michael details what's in it, a lot that I had forgotten was in it, this is a FEATURE full release!! Hope that 5.2 or greater becomes the kernel for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Coupled with Mesa 19.x, perhaps 20, and the advancements of Gnome 3.34, Ubuntu 20.04 could be the most substantial release since 14.04 AND the culmination of what began with their move to Gnome with 16.04.

[jpg44]

Case insensitive file names will help support Microsofts trajectory towards Windows transitioning to the Linux kernel and Windows becoming a Linux distribution. I seriously believe they are headed towards this as their final goal.

It will be interesting to see when we can get bcachefs mainlined given its promise for XFS like performance with ZFS like features, which is a filesystem that Linux badly needs.

[oiaohm]

Case insensitive file names will help support Microsofts trajectory towards Windows transitioning to the Linux kernel and Windows becoming a Linux distribution. I seriously believe they are headed towards this as their final goal.

This is not understanding what is being done on the Linux side.

I use the term casefold. This is important not to think of it as case insensitive. Casefold is can in fact be per language. When windows makes a NTFS partition it writes a case fold table into the partition. There is only a slot for 1 of these and it based on the current language that Windows is configured to at the time.

Little bit of thinking does not take much to work out how Linux could implement casefold and be a absolute prick to Microsoft. Simple implement casefold as a directory configured casefold instead of a drive one. None of Microsoft made file systems support this. This also gives a technical advantage over windows.

Stage 1 implement basic casefold stage 2 extend it. Stage 3 watch MS WSL developers start cursing like they did with fork.

[Britoid]

Case insensitive file names will help support Microsofts trajectory towards Windows transitioning to the Linux kernel and Windows becoming a Linux distribution. I seriously believe they are headed towards this as their final goal.

I've never read anything so silly.

Windows isn't transitioning to the Linux kernel and isn't going to become a Linux distribution.

ever.

[starshipeleven]

Windows isn't transitioning to the Linux kernel and isn't going to become a Linux distribution.

ever.

The writing is on the wall. They are migrating all their core stuff on Linux, they dropped the ball and went Chromium for their own Edge browser, and so on.

As they seek to invest less and less in a non-profitable businness they will eventually switch to Linux.

[uid313]

Really nice with case-insensitive ext4, especially for the /home/ directory.
Like for the ~/Pictures/, ~/Documents/, ~/Music/ and ~/Videos/ directories.

[linner]

It will be interesting to see when we can get bcachefs mainlined given its promise for XFS like performance with ZFS like features, which is a filesystem that Linux badly needs.

Looking forward to this too. I think development of this filesystem would be far more along if the developer(s) weren't so humble. This thing deserves more recognition and developer's attention. The attitude is similar to the XFS devs where stability is front and center.

It badly needs snapshot support to compete with BTRFS and even XFS reflink.

[zoomblab]

phoronix
Are you going to write an update on the regressions that you found earlier on Linux 5.0?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-50-sliding&num=1

[Britoid]

The writing is on the wall. They are migrating all their core stuff on Linux, they dropped the ball and went Chromium for their own Edge browser, and so on.

As they seek to invest less and less in a non-profitable businness they will eventually switch to Linux.

They're not migrating core stuff. Chromium Edge isn't even coming to Linux to begin with, they're switching because of all the god awful Chrome only sites.

They'll keep to NT because NTs support model is different to Linux. NT for example supports out of tree drivers using stable ABIs that last decades. Linux does not. They would be loosing an awful lot of hardware support by switching to Linux.

Microsoft has customers with weird hardware that relies on that ABI stability (think hospitals). Also the Linux graphics stack is inferior to Windows. One of the reasons hybrid graphics sucked so bad on Linux was the tying of OpenGL to the display server. Windows never had this problem.

They have WSL, which gives them compatibility with Linux software, a company like Microsoft is perfectly capable of mantaining their own kernel. Hell, even Google is starting the process of dropping Linux and moving to its own kernel.