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Operating Systems Software Linux

2.6.19 Linux Kernel Released 51

diegocgteleline.es writes, "After two months, Linux 2.6.19 has been released. It includes the clustering GFS2 filesystem, Ecryptfs, the first developer-oriented version of EXT4, support for the Atmel AVR32 architecture, sleepable RCU, improvements for NUMA-based systems, an "-o flush" mount option aimed at FAT-based hotpluggable media devices (mp3), physical CPU hotplug and memory hot-add in x86-64, support for compiling x86 kernels with the GCC stack protection, and many other things. You can check the full list of changes in LinuxChanges."
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2.6.19 Linux Kernel Released

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  • This release has been pronounced perfect

    It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways.

    Note the marketing prowess on display.
    Sex sells, even if it's just an allusion to the "lookin' for love in all the ronngg places" variety.
    Stand by for the premiere of 2.6.20 on YouTu

  • I've never heard of it... a quick peek on their website shows [atmel.com]:
    For example, the AVR32 can execute quarter-VGA MPEG4 decoding at 30 frames per second (fps) running at just 100 MHz while comparable architectures require 260 MHz and more to decode the same movie stream.
    Sounds sweet... how do I get one? Free samples?
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      The Atmel AVR butterfly is an insanely cheap development platform (20 dollars). It comes with more things than you can shake your fist at. They are also extremely popular and sell out quick so good luck finding one! Speaking of... what do they mean by "AVR support"? They are true microcontrollers with very low clock speeds and very low amounts of storage and memory. Do they mean linux can now run natively on an ATMEGA in the same manner it runs on say a gumstix?! SWEET!!!!
      • Nevermind... it supports the 32bit arch not the 8bit one. BIG difference.
      • They are true microcontrollers with very low clock speeds and very low amounts of storage and memory. Do they mean linux can now run natively on an ATMEGA

        No, it looks like this is a new platform. Something different, to compete with ARM - you can tell because they talk about core licensing and IP in the description (ARM's biggest weakness, in some peoples opinion). The benefit here appears to be more horsepower per clock cycle, which should lower power consumptions (more MHz == more power usually).

        I can't wait to see!

      • Re:Atmel AVR32 (Score:5, Informative)

        by plcurechax ( 247883 ) on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:42PM (#17054050) Homepage
        Most people are familiar with the 8-bit Atmel AVR [atmel.com] microcontrollers, similar to the Microchip 8-bit PIC [microchip.com] microcontollers. The AVR32 [atmel.com] is a 32-bit microcontoller. I believe it was developed by Atmel to be a easy to mirgrate to target to compete with Freescale's 32-bit [freescale.com] offerings, and various manufacturers' low cost 32-bit ARM [arm.com] processors.
      • The AVR butterfly is from the 8 bit line of microcontrollers. The AVR32 is a much more power beast - the dev kit [atmel.com] sells for $499 ($544 at Digikey [digikey.com]).

        Don't get me wrong, I love the AVR microcontrollers - but we're talking a few K of RAM, 8 to 128K of Flash for the program, a smattering of EEPROM and a top speed of 16MHz. I would be impressed if you could run the Linux kernel on that.

    • Re:Atmel AVR32 (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:05PM (#17053258) Homepage Journal
      You can get the starter kit from Digi-Key here [digikey.com]. I only knew about this because I bought the AVR starter kit (not AVR32) which was dramatically cheaper - $100 rather than $550. Not sure if this even comes with an AVR32 chip, probably not, but they have that too (133MHz for $37.63 [digikey.com].) Not sure how hard these are to program, but the normal AVR has support for serial in-system programming and if you know your way around an AVR you might be able to use an AVR to make an ISP chip for an AVR32. :)
      • The AVR starter kit for $79 comes with an 8 bit processor, so I'm not sure you can take the AVR32 (a 32 bit processor) and expect it to work with the older board. I'm not a big micro-controller hobbiest/programmer, though. Would be nice if you could. :)
        • No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm quite sure you're right that you can't use the AVR starter kit with the AVR32. However, the AVR can be programmed with a fairly simple in-system programmer, using a serial interface between the programmer and the AVR. All you need is power, and I think you tie some line on the chip high to perform a write enable. What I'm saying is that if the AVR32 has the same in-system programming (ISP) functionality, it might be possible to make an ISP using a normal AVR in order to p
  • GFS2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by C_Kode ( 102755 ) on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:01PM (#17053162) Journal
    Anyone know if any reviews of GFS2 in actual use compared to other clustered filesystems?
  • All I can say is :-O
    • by bcmm ( 768152 )
      AFAIK, CPU hotplugging is for special hardware, and always involves more than one CPU.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 )
      Meh, enterprise platforms like Solaris has been doing this for years. If you want to do real HA, it's a very important feature to have.
      • Except that real HA doesn't come with SPARC hardware because they can't even put ECC on the cpu's cache. This generally causes a reboot which introduces the potential for dataloss. Sometimes it will just be an error though, which only occasionally causes dataloss.

        HA? Sparc procs? Not bloodly likely.
      • by dasunt ( 249686 )

        This is somewhat off-topic, but I killed an older Sparc running Solaris 10 within a few minutes of installing.

        Someone I know needed to test out a program on Solaris 10/Sparc. Since we had a smaller sparc (I believe it was the E4000) not being used, I installed Solaris 10 on it, doing the default install.

        Then I copied the code over, and uncompressed it in /tmp.

        The machine died.

        Ah ha, you are going to say -- you ran out of disk space in /tmp, and the machine couldn't make the temporary files it

    • notice that this is *physical* hotplug, you already were able to enable/disable CPUs at runtime with /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online (if you enable CPU hotplugging)
  • by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:31PM (#17053808)
    From TF post:
    It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways.

    You could send me and the kernel mailing list a note about it anyway, of course. (And perhaps pictures, if your dachshund is involved. Not that we'd be interested, of course. No. Just so that we'd know to avoid it next time).


    So.. Who has a dachshund and a camera? And what does a kernel doing unspeakable acts of perversion with a dog look like anyway?
  • by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:36PM (#17053886)
    there's a torrent of it on torrentspy...
    • by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) <{ten.yxox} {ta} {nidak.todhsals}> on Thursday November 30, 2006 @04:23PM (#17054882) Homepage Journal
      Dude, pirating Linux off of bittorrent ... how low can you get?

      It's people like you that make "Linux Genuine Advantage" necessary.
    • anyone want to have a go at justifying the thought that just occurred to me, that the release of a new linux kernel is probably more important than the release of vista?

      oh btw, totally of topic but i've just realised that if you search for something in firefox 2.0 it doesn't give you the choice of moving to the next result in the text like in firefox 1.5. i imagine this is a simple setting in about:config. anybody know which?
      • I'd say the release of Vista is less relevant than the release of Duke Nukem Forever, but more relevant than another point release of the Linux Kernel.

        A better faster linux kernel is a dog bites man story.

        Microsoft finally getting another OS out the door 5 years after Windows XP after countless delays and feature killfests is more in the realm of man bites dog.
      • Howdy,

        If you hit ctrl-f you get find with the [x]/next/previous/highlight all/match case widgets. If you hit / you activate quick find functionality which doesn't have those. No idea if there's a config setting to force quick find to have those widgets as well. // ville
      • After you type the text you want to find, hit F3 to advance to the next instance of it.
  • TPM encryption (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pausanias ( 681077 ) <pausaniasx@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Thursday November 30, 2006 @03:47PM (#17054136)
    Very interesting how ecryptfs [lwn.net] uses the TPM module for encryption. While there is plenty to worry about regarding treacherous computing [wikipedia.org], it is nice to see that the TPM can be put to uses that actually bolster privacy. This still does not prevent a possible future dystopia [gnu.org], but it still goes to show that devices such as TPM are not necessarily "pure evil."
    • Re:TPM encryption (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Marillion ( 33728 ) <ericbardes@@@gmail...com> on Thursday November 30, 2006 @05:07PM (#17055824)

      TPM is neither good nor bad

      How operating systems and applications use TPM can be good or evil

      In all that I've read about TPM, I've concluded that TPM is not much more than a glorified hardware based public/private key management system. The reference implementations I seen attach to the same slow hardware buses that PS/2 keyboard and mice sit. There is not enough bandwidth on that bus to encrypt/decrypt whole disks in real time.

    • Except that TPM could easily hide weaknesses, backdoors, or worse from the user. Furthermore, the nature of TPM would prevent the user from ever discovering said "features".

      No, not pure evil. But still not trustworthy, either. This is the kind of thing the NSA would love to have in every computer.

  • by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) * on Thursday November 30, 2006 @04:58PM (#17055646)
    Once again, slashdot reveals its pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux bias. Two stories, one about a new Linux kernel release, and one about Dvorak commenting on a not-quite-as-new Windows release. Which one gets a full story on the front page? I'm getting tired of all the Linux-bashing on this site.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by BiggyP ( 466507 )
      Has anyone read that changes document yet?
      First item under USB is Add Playstation 2 Trance Vibrator driver [kernelnewbies.org]

      Is this the first sex toy to be officially supported by the Linux kernel?! Surely that's enough for front page news.
      • by dylan_- ( 1661 )
        Is this the first sex toy to be officially supported by the Linux kernel?! Surely that's enough for front page news.
        Did you submit this as a story? You've even got the traditional slashdot question to end on!
    • by n3tcat ( 664243 )
      I believe you missed the point of the Vista article. They make Dvorak's articles all big and obvious for two reasons. First, people who enjoy his articles haven't yet figured out that those miniature headlines are actually links to full articles. Second, they want to make sure that everyone gets a regulated selection of a couple of sentences from his garbage articles to prevent accidental ingestion of an entire screen's worth before realizing who the author is.
    • by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Your comment was probably intended as funny, but if not, display depends on your settings. On mine, the front page wsa Vista, while the kernel news was hidden on the Linux page.
  • FWIW, I just started using the dm-crypt based cryptfs on my Gentoo system over the past week. (I'm actually running it on top of LVM, which in turn runs on top of the kernel's RAID1.)

    Pretty easy to set up, and no trouble so far, but annoying that it asks for the passphrase for each encrypted volume twice during boot, and and doesn't fail gracefully if you mistype anything.
  • and I don't even have a system available that I can try it out on.

    This homeless thing can be real inconvenient.
  • Vista? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Marton ( 24416 ) on Friday December 01, 2006 @06:36AM (#17063170)
    Way to steal Microsoft's thunder!

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