The blue screen of death in Linux?

The blue screen of death in Linux?

Windows is infamous for the “blue screen of death” that millions of users have encountered over the years. But I’ve never heard of a Linux user getting one…until today. Yes, a Linux user actually got a blue screen of death. This may be the first time in history that we’ve seen something like this in Linux.

Marco Trevisan shared his blue screen of death in Linux experience on Google+:

So, for the first time in my life I got a BSoD in Linux…Thank you, radeon! :-/

Really, I did nothing… I was just trying to suspend my machine and… BUM!

I’m not that desperate to do a fake screen picture… It just happened while trying to suspend. It just happened, I’ve not a clue why.

More at Google+

Marco’s fellow Google+ users shared their thoughts :

Corey Drew Bruce: “I call fake as the screen is blue and if it was a kernal panic or the display driver not working it would be black with white text.”

Daniel Mitzlaff: “Were you still able to ssh into this machine and give it a regular shutdown/reboot command? ;)”

Filippo Angioli: “Awesome!!!”

Achille Benetton: “It’s a feature ;D”

Mirco Muller: “Well… see the positive side, you still have a good success-to-failure rate overall ;-)”

Edward Kent: “That screen looks fishy too me. That color blue is not normal for linux. Even if it is true it sounds like an improper install.”

Alberto Milone: “At least now you can’t say that we didn’t catch up with Windows :P”

More at Google+

Linux redditors shared their thoughts about the blue screen of death:

Xefelqes: “I thought that was a feature exclusive to Windows.”

Aszl3j: “Windows doesn’t even have a blue screen anymore. I saw my share of kernel panics in Linux and OS X.”

Sassywhat: “…I’ve had one Blue Screen on Windows 8.1, and it certainly still was blue, even if they changed the hue of blue.”

LazinCajun: “My laptop with 8.1 bluescreened in the middle of my first update. Some database somewhere got corrupted, and now there are critical updates that won’t install because of it. Reinstalling everything isn’t really an option for me right now. Hooray linux!”

Medevila: “…Windows has a powder-blue screen with a frowny emoticon.”

More at Reddit

Nvidia’s new hardware not open source friendly

Nvidia has had an…er…complicated relationship with the open source movement at times, particularly with Linux. And now it seems that some of Nvidia’s latest hardware isn’t very friendly to open source.

Michael Larabel reports for Phoronix:

While NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that’s only when using the proprietary driver… NVIDIA’s newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware.

With the Linux 3.19 kernel there was basic support added for the new NVIDIA GPUs to the open-source, community-based, reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. However, this initial support was limited to just mode-setting, a.k.a. setting up the display outputs without any hardware acceleration. For months we’ve known NVIDIA’s moving to requiring signed firmware images for their graphics processors and now it’s biting the open-source developers.

More at Phoronix

Linux gaming redditors shared their thoughts about Nvidia’s new hardware and open source:

Drbenway: “Why would someone pay $1000 for a card, then run the nouveau driver anyway? What would be the point spending that much on a card then reducing the 3D speed by about 80 percent?

CalcProgrammer1: “AMDGPU isn’t really what we want to look forward to on the open source front. It’s the new kernel driver that will be shared between open and closed drivers, but the real meat of the driver comes from the userspace Mesa OpenGL stack. That runs on top of radeonsi which will use either the existing radeon kernel driver or amdgpu. Essentially the real benefit of AMDGPU is that the proprietary driver no longer needs its own kernel module, but I don’t really give a crap what the proprietary driver does because the reason I buy AMD isn’t to use proprietary drivers at all.”

SxxxX: “Less money AMD going to spend on proprietary driver maintenance mean more money they can spend on open source driver development.

This also will let them mix best parts of open source and closed source stacks. As example AMD may abandon proprietary video decode/encode for Catalyst and instead use one FOSS driver have as it’s clearly superior.

Or for example they can keep proprietary implementation of OpenGL/OpenCL while using open source implementation of Vulkan for both drivers. With old driver model they would need to do the same work twice and open source driver isn’t win from that situation.”

Santsi: “In 2008 I bought AMD because I heard they have better open source drivers. Now I bought Nvidia cause I wanted actually to play games. Seems like my next card is AMD again (hopefully by then their open source drivers are on par with their Windows drivers).”

EustaceRJaywo: “Nvidia is unfriendly to anything that isn’t Nvidia.”

More at Reddit

Rsync mimics Apple’s Time Machine backup feature

Apple’s Time Machine is known as an elegant and easy way to backup data on Macs. But rsync offers a similar way for Unix users to do their own backups, without paying Apple a cent.

Michael Jakl reports for the Interlinked blog:

Rsync is one of the tools that have gradually infiltrated my day to day tool-box (aside Vim and Zsh). Using rsync it’s very easy to mimic Mac OS X new feature called Time Machine. In this article I’ll show how to do it, but there is still a nice GUI missing – for those who like it shiny.

Time Machine makes a snapshot of your files every hour. The files are usually stored on a external hard drive connected to your Mac via USB or Firewire. Earlier Leopard versions (ADC preview versions) had the ability to make the backups to a remote drive (I’ve heard).

So if you lose a file, or did a devastating change to one of your files, simply go back in time until you find your file or a version that’s not corrupted.

Incrementally backing up all files every hour so that you can access them in reversed chronological order isn’t that hard with standard Unix utilities like rsync. The only missing thing is a nice GUI for which Apple is known to be quite good at.

More at Interlinked

Linux redditors shared their thoughts about rsync:

Mcrbids: “ZFS + snapshots or BTRFS + snapshots makes rsync (even with hardlinks!) look like a bastard stepchild.”

Mr_Unix: “Provided that you keep {ZFS|BTRFS}+snapshots on a different box. Remember, RAID is not a backup. Gmail is not backup. Backup must be verified. Keep 3 copies of data you care about. Two isn’t enough. Use 2 different backup mediums (tape/dvd and disk etc). Finally, keep one offsite backup. Why? If the house or office burns down, how will you get your data back?”

Falcorian: “I’ve had good experiences using Back In Time which is a very nice GUI wrapper around rsync. I’ve backed up multiple systems with it for about 4 years without a problem, and have had to use it to do a full system restore. It also has an up-to-date PPA for Ubuntu.”

Mqrjoe: “…posted in November 2007.”

e_t_: “…the ‘snapper’ tool, developed by SUSE but packaged for other distros, offers timed snapshots. On OpenSUSE, it integrates with zypper to take additional snapshots when packages are installed/removed/updated, but I haven’t heard of similar integration for yum.”

More at Reddit

Did you miss a roundup? Check the Eye On Open home page to get caught up with the latest news about open source and Linux.