This is based on MechCoder 's PR https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/7731. Hopefully it could pass tests. MechCoder I tried to make minimal changes. If this passes Jenkins, we can merge this one first and then try to move `__init__.py` to `local.py` in a separate PR.

Closes #7731

Author: Xiangrui Meng <meng@databricks.com>

Closes #7746 from mengxr/SPARK-9408 and squashes the following commits:

0e05a3b [Xiangrui Meng] merge master
1135551 [Xiangrui Meng] add a comment for str(...)
c48cae0 [Xiangrui Meng] update tests
173a805 [Xiangrui Meng] move linalg.py to linalg/__init__.py