Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released

An anonymous reader writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel: 'It's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time).' The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaces the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new Firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source-level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree."

What is this?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with slashdot?

I've read & reread the linked articles, and not a single mention of the iPhone - and it's been over 48 hours since an iPhone story. Seriously - it's like slashdot's turned into a linux site, instead of an iPhone site.

Let's not forget our roots folks - just because linux is the big hype story today.

Re:What is this?

[Corporate Troll (537873)]

You do justice to your nickname.

Re:What is this?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

You do justice to your nickname.

Thank you, but I do feel that there's a little too much redundancy in my nick. I mean, if I was called "mac fanboy", you'd assume whiney.

For that matter, if I was just called 'mac', everyone would read the implied 'whiney fanboy'

Re:

[Corporate Troll (537873)]

Nah, redundancy just enhances your whiney-ness, making it effectively recursive and without a stop condition that makes you infinitely whiney. Perfect for a Mac fanboy ;-) (1, Infinite Loop... and all...)

Re:What is this?

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

Indeed, you are a double pleonasm [reference.com], and should take pride in your superfluous redundancy.

Re:What is this?

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

Seriously - get 2.6.22 running on an iPhone, THEN we'll have a story!

SLUB much better than slab

[by Anonymous Coward]

Great improvement! SLUB is obviously better than slab, since it's all uppercase. I get a lot of emails these days using uppercase to distinguish their importance. I think it's a good thing the linux community is catching on to this IT trend.

Anybody

[Jaaay (1124197)]

have any information on how good the new wireless stack is? That's what I'm most interested in.

Re:Anybody

[b1ufox (987621)]

Current firewire stack is way too small in size as compared to old firewire stack.

Second now there are less threads in the firewire subsystem, which is indeed good because kernel threads are really really a very stupid idea.

Last but not the least i have used TI firewire chipset with Basler IEE1394 cameras under Linux and trust me they knock teeth out of Windows Firewire stack.It was good and performed good even with two cameras working in real time image inspections.

I suspect the current stack is going to work atleast similar if not better, though i ll bet on it being better.This is a good sign also, as there is no point in patching things but point is in writing the whole messy thing again.And here we are.... hey wait TTY layer ...any takers? please :-)

Linux 3.0.0

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Ok. You have a major release, it's permission to break all backwards compatibility, to completely change the face of computing.

Given the hardware around. What features should Linux 3.0.0 have?

 

Re:Linux 3.0.0

[backwardMechanic (959818)]

iPhone support?

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

Given the hardware around. What features should Linux 3.0.0 have?

• The ability to scale from supercomputers, mainframes to handhelds, without recompilation
• Transparent clustering. Run this process somewhere else with as much or as little user control is a required
• Fine grained security. Maybe something which lets you build a userland which can't be exploited in any way shape or form
• Built in support for virtual machines. Something like java in the kernel
• Better APIs for kernel modules. Being able to run some modules in a real sandbox

Re:

[LuckyStarr (12445)]

Easy. I'd like it to have these features [wikipedia.org] of course.

Though they gradually sneak into Linux anyway. So no big deal.

Re:

[KiloByte (825081)]

Here [lkml.org] you go.

It's going to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic.

Crashing soon a kernel near you...

[backwardMechanic (959818)]

To quote from the bottom of the page: [The mm-tree] can crash your machine, eat your data (unlikely but not impossible) or kidnap your family (just because it has never happened it doesn't mean you're safe)

I notice the patches being tested include Reiser 4...suddenly the above warning appears a bit more sinister.

Re:What's SLUB?

[b1ufox (987621)]

http://lwn.net/Articles/229984/ [lwn.net]

There for you, help yourself.

BTW in short plain english, it adds some voodoo stuff to struct page, removes a lot of metadata cruft from the slab allocator, adds lesser and simple locking after removing most of locks which are not required because of the changes in the cache layer.

So if you are running your kernel on a huge farm of processors of the order of thousand(s), you ll find a remarkable memory saving, which is a big overhead in slab allocation.

HTH

Re:What's SLUB?

[hmallett (531047)]

it adds some voodoo stuff to struct page

I believe that brings the amount of the Linux kernel containing Voodoo to 13%.

Re:GPL v3

[by Anonymous Coward]

Some other possibly unnoticed effects of the GPLv3 include:
- You can't use a CPU of the same manufacturer that has previously executed GPLv3 code in the same room as a computer running a Microsoft operating system. If you have exhausted all the alternatives and you still need to run your GPLv3-infected hardware in the same room, you can negate this by drawing a chalk circle around the machines running the MS software and sprinkling a ground-up printed copy of the GPLv3 over and around them. This is all standard as per Section 5.
- In the case the Richard Stallman's or any of his buddies' computer blows up (for any reason - read the license for full details), he's allowed to walk into your house and take your computer right off your desk and keep it, even if it has never run GPLv3 code!
- If left unattended, disks containing copies of the GPLv3 can become corrupted and mutate into GPVv3 (General Public Virus version 3), which will assimilate all carbon and silicon-based matter with in a 3 mile radius into a demonic, electronic, GPLv3 spreading zombie ox (or it might be a buffalo - that part is unclear).

This is why we should all boycott GPLv3. It is just too evil and virusy.

Wow; Informative?

[WindBourne (631190)]

The fact that you were modded up informative really shows that somebody is out here doing a a REAL FUD jobber. Few here, would say that if the kernel did switch to GPL3, that it would not even have a mention in the posting. That means that the modders are deliberate, not just ignorant. Considering that they are modding, shows that most of the time, they do not step off the deep end. That pretty much means that several ppl (30% informative), are most likely on a payroll.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand 70% of the changes listed and don't care about/don't use the rest of them. I know, I know... I must be new here. *sigh*

Not sure why that is modded Insightful and just above that is another user asking which usb device would be best to buy for a linux box, but that is modded "off-topic." I remember when slashdot was about news for geeks and sharing information about geeky things for linux/bsd/etc.. Now it seems like its just about modding up snarky comments and crap articles about

Re:n00b

[fbjon (692006)]

Slashdot has always been turning for the worse. In fact, it never was any better in the first place.

Re:question on the wireless

[Technician (215283)]

Anyways, I was thinking of adding one of these USB wireless accessories.. could anybody here recommend one that has a good track record of working in linux ?

I would recommend using one of the PCMCIA cards instead. Find one that uses the Anthros chipset. I picked up a D-LINK one that was recognised by Dapper Drake. I didn't need to install NDIS Wrapper of Network Manager. I don't remember the model number of the card, but setting it up was as easy as setting it up in Windows except I didn't need to use the setup CD that came with it. Dapper recognised it as an Unknown Wireless. Properties showed it has an Anthros chipset made by D-Link. From there I gave it a static IP on my LAN and plugged in the WEP key after picking my SSID from a list. I added some DNS listings and put in the gateway address of my router and I was online. There have been some difficulty with configuring many of the USB cards. Check the forums and purchase carefully.

Headline does not match the story

[dbIII (701233)]

Follow the links above if you really want to see how the above poster is misrepresenting things to embrace a much larger picture - it's clear whoever modded them up did not.

Specific complaints should be stated as such instead of rubbish about it all being broken. The Gentoo thread quoted above is about people discovering that writing to optical drives is horribly slow and puts a lot of load on the CPU in comparison to dealing with hard disks - looking up ATAPI may have been a good move at that point inste

Re:But is disk IO fixed on amd64?

[gmack (197796)]

"Because Linus said so" is in fact not a particularly valid answer. Yes, Linus has the right to choose the development structure the kernel is now using, but that doesn't mean it is the best way to do it for everybody. dropping the distinction between "stable" and "development" versions was a sloppy, lazy move that simply pushed the responsibility for maintaining stable released off onto the distributors. That has essentially duplicated the work a hundred-fold, because each distribution must do the work themselves. We're told that this is a "better" arrangement, but it is clearly only better for Linus and the kernel developers, because they get to do less work and be lazy when it comes to making changes: "Want to rip out the allocator and replace it with a largely untested one? Sure, why not! Making sure everything works is the distributors problem, not ours!"

Except that the old system didn't work at all. There were just too many changes to stabilize in any reasonable amount of time and while the debugging was happening the 2.4.x kernel was becoming so badly out of date that people (and distros) tried to back port changes from the 2.5.x tree.

The result was TWO unstable kernel trees and the vendor trees had a tendency to be even worse. The old system would have left those people using SATA in a worse situation then they are in now. Keep in mind that SATA came out after 2.6.x so the drivers would right now be somewhere in the 2.7.x series kernel still waiting to be debugged and the stable maintainers would be forced to try and backport the SATA drivers once again resulting in two unstable kernels

Re:New wireless stack? Firewire stack? WTF?

[cerberusss (660701)]

I've seen some insightful posts from you so I'm not assuming you're trolling. But this has been discussed to death. There are perfect kernels in the 2.6 series and they're created by your vendor. That's what Linus wants and that's how it goes.