Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.

Patch, less than 200 lines of code, soon will be included in main Linux kernel. Linus is very happy and surprised how feedback of desktop interactivity made better even on very high average loads.

Last week after many DRM improvements went into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel Linus Torvalds got a bit upset and wanted Nouveau merged into the mainline kernel. This essentially spells the end of the xf86-video-nv driver, which was never good and should have died off long ago.

Today kernel developer Con Kolivas announced that he will stop developing his Linux patch which improves desktop performance. For people who have followed recent discussions about his SD CPU scheduler and about the inclusion of his swap prefetching patches in the Linux kernel this will not come as a surprise.

There's already quite a bit of code that has been merged into the Linus 2.6 Git tree for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel tree, but the first pull request for the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) code has went in this morning.

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost.

In the United States, the end of Autumn is nearing and Winter is approaching, but there hasn't yet been any push to get Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel. What has happened? Well, we asked Shishkin.

The GNU diff and patch utilities let you compare files to generate a patch that describes the changes between files. You can then apply the patch file on that machine or another. You might think to use diff and patch on XML files, since they are just text files -- and depending on your application, diff and patch might serve your needs well.

Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel community, has merged DRBD, an open source data replication solution, into Linux as a fully supported component.