Pretty much. My home server cost me maybe $150 with two used (but still passing smart and running good) 4tb drives, I could get two more drives at that size for $40, and if I get another one of those servers that's going for $80 I can cannibalize the raid bay and have a total of 32tb for a total of $400 or so (though by then I'll be splurging for 6 or 8tb drives). Even all new equipment would be relatively affordable
also known as /dev/null
With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here's a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.
There is a lot to love about Linux 6.7... It's very heavy on new features and in fact the largest kernel merge window ever by size. Among the many highlights to Linux 6.7 are the Bcachefs file-system being mainlined, Intel Meteor Lake graphics are now considered stable, more Intel Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake enablement, continued work enabling next-gen AMD graphics hardware, NVIDIA GSP support in the Nouveau driver, scheduler improvements, optional support for disabling 32-bit x86 program support at boot time, and Intel Itanium support was removed. Below is the lengthy feature list for Linux 6.7 meanwhile my focus is now shifting to benchmarking the new kernel over the coming days and weeks.
Processors:
- Support to enable/disable x86 32-bit programs and syscalls at boot time.
- Arrow Lake nad Lunar Lake support within the Turbostat utility.
- Intel Lunar Lake M support in the LPSS driver.
- Improved x86 CPU microcode loading.
- Optimized TLB flushing and software shadow call stacks for RISC-V.
- MIPS AR7 is removed with that MIPS platform being used by routers and other networking devices from long ago.
- Perf adds support for Zen 4 Unified Memory Controller "UMC" events.
- Intel IFS Gen2 support for In-Field Scan.
- More work on Intel TDX for Trust Domain Extensions.
- Initial support for the AMD-Pensando Elba SoC.
- Initial support for a 64-core RISC-V SoC.
- Intel Itanium IA-64 support was retired and removed from the kernel tree.
- Intel Meteor Lake workload type hints support.
- More preparations for AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
- The AMD Versal EDAC driver was addedM for that AMD-Xilinx IP.
Graphics Cards / Displays:
- Intel Meteor Lake graphics are now considered stable.
- More work enabling Xe 2 Lunar Lake integrated graphics.
- AMD Seamless Boot now works for more AMD hardware.
- Intel DG2-G12 stepping support.
- Continued enablement on next-generation AMD graphics hardware.
- NVIDIA GSP support in the Nouveau driver for providing initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improving the support optionally for RTX 20/30 series hardware when making use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor binaries.
File-Systems / Storage:
- Bcachefs was finally merged as that file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code.
- Bcachefs work was followed up by a second round of improvements to better the performance.
- F2FS in Linux 6.7 supports larger page sizes.
- New Btrfs features.
- EROFS no longer considers microLZMA experimental.
- IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance.
- IO_uring mediation for AppArmor.
- Minor stability improvements for JFS.
- MMC is seeing 4~5% better random write performance for systems with Host Software Queue (HSQ) support.
- FSCRYPT will now work with more inline encryption hardware.
Virtualization:
- AMD IOMMU SVA preparations for Shared Virtual Addressing.
- LoongArch virtualization was added for KVM.
- KVM now allows up to 4096 vCPU support.
- /proc/cpuinfo will no longer show when AMD SVM is disabled by the system BIOS.
Other Hardware:
- Sensor monitoring support for more desktop hardware.
- New network hardware support and a nice performance boost.
- New Intel and AMD sound hardware support.
- Natively handle CXL link protocol errors.
- DisplayPort Alternate Mode 2.1 support "DP Alt Mode 2.1" for the USB Type-C driver.
- The Intel La Jolla Cove Adapter drivers have been upstreamed as part of the Intel Vision Sensing Controller.
- Cleaning up of the Intel Atom ISP camera driver.
- Dropping of the unmaintained QLGE Ethernet and rtl8192u WiFi drivers.
- New Dell and Lenovo keyboard quirks.
- ASUS Screenpad support.
- An ACPI Platform Driver for Inspur systems.
- Cooler Booster support for MSI laptops.
Other Kernel Features:
- MM performance optimizations as well as better handling for UEFI Unaccepted Memory.
- More FUTEX2 work.
- Scheduler improvements.
- Continued work on printk threaded print as a requirement for getting real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support mainlined.
- More Rust code has been mainlined.
Linux Security:
- Disabling Intel IBRS when a CPU is offline to help deliver better performance in some cases.
- Further cleaning up the AMD Inception/SRSO mitigation.
- >A new make hardening.config option for the kernel as sane defaults for building a security hardened kernel.
- Reducing the role for some insecure and obsolete crypto algorithms.
- LandLock access controls now cover networking.
- A cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports.
- Reworking the PE header generation to reduce the attack area.
Now onwards to Linux 6.7 kernel testing and benchmarking!
Thanks for all the great information! I'll take your advice on the spare drives and having about 2x the space.
HakuNeko Desktop is good for downloading. I use calibre and it handles my massive libraries well provided I tag the books that I bulk import.
I did manage to get it to work okay-ish since. Games also launch now and performance is decent.
I know how immutable distros work (or at least should work). My issue is that, from my experience, all immutable distros I tried (Silverblue, VanillaOS, NixOS, BlendOS) still require you to do stuff on the system level (with for example OSTree or apx) to get them to work properly.
It's an amazing concept for the cloud. Not really for the desktop, where it doesn't make too much sense. Desktop installs are nearly always going to require system-level customization as opposed to a cloud instance where it's just grab your docker/podman container and go.
That's just Apple without the brand recogonition. A lot of people buy Apple because it's Apple. I have an Apple believer close to me and I'm always astonished about how little you're actually allowed to do with these devices, especially for what they cost.
The thing that pisses me off most about 11 is that the "combine taskbar buttons" option can't be turned off, meaning you can't distinguish between shortcuts and minimized programs. It's mega-dumb. They're finally supposed to be patching the checkbox back in this year.
They're hiding even more, I think. Someone at MS is apparently unhappy with the idea of giving people options. Makes me suspect they've hired some gnome devs.
It ties into what I just wrote, somewhen in the last few years ignorance has become a virtue. Even in Linux circles where you'd think you'd meet more technologically apt users you get the impression that you have to justify why you want to have choice, go your own way or know how things work. God forbid you want to do or learn anything that's outside your usual range because somebody else surely "knows what's best". I find that personally very alarming and it's not limited to this stuff, either.
I mean, I'm already using JBOD which shows up as individual drives to the OS and not a pool. I could pull those drives out and stick them in a new computer and they would read as-is
