There is no shortage of EXT4 benchmarks from comparing this evolutionary file-system's performance on netbooks to how it battles the Btrfs file-system to its performance recession. In this article though we are finally delivering something that has long been requested and that is Reiser4 file-system benchmarks running directly against EXT4 and Btrfs.

Once upon a time, the way to get a patch into the mainline kernel was to email it to Linus Torvalds. A hopeful developer would then wait for Linus to release a new kernel tree to see whether the patch had been included or not. In the latter case, the more persistent developers would resend the patch. Often, developers had to be persistent indeed if they wanted their code to be merged.

Using the 2 June kernel from the Ubuntu mainline PPA no longer causes a major performance hit and all of the test result values have returned to their levels prior to this kernel bug that lasted about one week.

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.

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time.

The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) announced the release of the "Latest Stable" Linux mainline real-time kernel, based on Linux 2.6.31. The "PREEMPT RT"-based release will be demonstrated on Mar. 2-4 at Embedded World 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany, which offers a number of sessions on Linux and Android development.

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.

In May we shared that Multi-Pointer X (or MPX for short) was entering the mainline X server. While it was merged to master that month, X Server 1.5 was already branched out and therefore it won't appear in X.Org 7.4, but it will appear in X Server 1.6 (X.Org 7.5) until next year. While it's now in the mainline branch, Peter Hutterer, the chief developer of MPX, hasn't stopped there.

The 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX '09) will take place June 14-19, 2009, in San Diego, CA.