Linux News - Feb 24, 2013

1 Sony

• Gamers rejoice - PS4 announced (shipping end of 2013) - http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/02/sony-liveblog/. Moving away from PS3's Cell Architecture (PowerPC) to a PC Architecture (AMD X86-64) with 8 GB RAM. GPU is AMD Radeon based which they claim can hit 1.84 Terflops. So, PS4 won't run PS3 Games I guess.

2 Linux

• Linux 3.8 released. Get all the details from Kernel Newbies - http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8 and http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8_DriverArch.
• Mesa 9.1 released - http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-February/035097.html. Key feature - initial support for OpenGLES 3.x.
• Git 1.8.2 -rc0. http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1302.2/00406.html. Includes a port to QNX.
• Debian 6.0.7 released - http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130223

3 Minix

• Minix 3.2.1 has been released - http://www.minix3.org/releasenotes-321.html. Minix is a microkernel architecture (not like Linux but like QNX). As a student, Linus Torvalds used Minix to teach himself OS fundamentals. Debate on Microkernel vs. Monolithic Kernel between Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds is athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate.
• Minix kernel is itself quite small - around 6K and so, its a good read.

4 NetBSD

• 6.1 -rc announced https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_6_1_release_candidate. Includes improvements on ARM (esp RPI).

5 Voyager

• An Android Phone that stays in the car by AccelTelecom (An Israeli Company) - Corny Video at http://youtu.be/KQiT2ldUqbY.