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Software Linux

Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released 273

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."
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Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released

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  • by Whiney Mac Fanboy ( 963289 ) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Monday July 09, 2007 @05:35AM (#19797789) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09, 2007 @05:54AM (#19797891)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jaaay ( 1124197 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:01AM (#19797927)
    have any information on how good the new wireless stack is? That's what I'm most interested in.
    • by Erwos ( 553607 )
      I have similar questions about what happened with the Firewire stack. I run a large number of 1394 drives, and I've always suspected the performance I was getting from them was rather sub-par, even when using the good TI chipets for the controllers.

      If anyone could shine a little light on this, I'd be quite pleased.
      • Re:Anybody (Score:4, Informative)

        by b1ufox ( 987621 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:13AM (#19798651) Homepage Journal
        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 :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      From a user perspective, it doesn't matter, but a number of drivers for releatively new hardware have been written to use it, which means that there will probably be a bunch more wireless cards supported by the mainstream kernel in the next few versions, and one fewer step to get drivers in 2.6.22. For example, Intel has a new driver for their a/b/g card that doesn't require a userspace regulatory daemon or anything (the firmware takes care of all of that), and this driver uses the new stack; they have plan
  • by Anonymous Coward
    For anyone in the dark, disk IO has been broken sometime after 2.6.17 on amd64.
    I thought I was going crazy, being on 2.6.18 and discovering that any disk activity slows down the whole system, let alone accesses to any other disk.

    Then I found a 19-page thread on the gentoo forums that says I'm not alone and it's not unique to a particular chipset:
    http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 450.html [gentoo.org]
    (with evidence that the deadline scheduler may alleviate _some_ of the problem but not the root cause)

    And
    • 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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cerberusss ( 660701 )

      Why can't we have a 2.7 kernel for this stuff?

      So, why the trolling at the end of an otherwise good post? I'll quote Wikipedia for the people who have been living under a rock since 2.4:

      The development model for Linux 2.6 was a significant change from the development model for Linux 2.5. Previously there was a stable branch (2.4) where only relatively minor and safe changes were merged, and an unstable branch (2.5), where bigger changes and cleanups were allowed. This meant that users would always have a we

      • by ari_j ( 90255 )
        My favorite part of this is that we now have two meaningless components of the version number when one was sufficient. The likelihood of a Linux 3.x is extremely low. But let's keep the 2 around just so we don't forget 1.x. Now that we have 2.6.x.y, what will it take to increment the 6?
    • I suspect libATA is the problem. Are you using the NF4 or do you also have an SIL3114? And which are supported by the newer libATA IDE mechanism? Check here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11695 [kerneltrap.org]
    • I just upgraded to Fedora 7 and hit this problem .. copying files using rsync from the old computer made the computer unusable until it finished. Glad to see it's not just me. Thanks for the post!
  • Linux 3.0.0 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:47AM (#19798127)
    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?

     
    • by backwardMechanic ( 959818 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @07:08AM (#19798241) Homepage
      iPhone support?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by b1ufox ( 987621 )
        > * The ability to scale from supercomputers, mainframes to handhelds, without recompilation

        Thats next to impossible for a modern fairly efficient operating system. Why? Because kernels which run on handhelds , supercomputers and mainframes have different constraints in terms of memory, power management and similar technical terminological stuff :).

        > * Transparent clustering. Run this process somewhere else with as much or as little user control is a required

        Oh boy!!! this is how SMP kernels wor

        • > * Built in support for virtual machines. Something like java in the kernel

          This is what VMI (Virtual machine Interface) does right now in the kernel along with the KVM(kernel virtual machine) and please do not compare and OS with Java stuff. Java do not deserve to be compared to a highly performing kernel.

          I don't think that's what he was talking about. KVM is used for hardware virtualization, not byte-code execution like the Java VM. That said, I don't understand what having the JVM built into the kernel would accomplish, besides giving slightly improving startup of Java apps and generally forcing the Kernel to consume more memory. It would also give rise to all the known problems of running multiple Java apps within the same VM instance, which is why the standard JVM doesn't do this already. I also don

        • > * Transparent clustering. Run this process somewhere else with as much or as little user control is a required

          Oh boy!!! this is how SMP kernels work when you run them on a multiprocessor systems.

          But not when you have multiple discrete single CPU systems. Or multiple discrete multiprocessor systems.

          Imagine all your machines automatically acted as a single box when they were connected to the LAN. Or other low latency interconnect like Infiniband.

          I think the closest thing is Mosix:

          http://www.mosix.org/txt_about.html [mosix.org]

          Then you're on to the network queueing systems like NQS, PBS, Torque, Sun Grid Engine, Condor ...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 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.
    • Here [lkml.org] you go.

      It's going to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic.
    • Linux 3.x wouldn't have to be compatible with Linux 2.x (that's the criterium for upping the major version number in the Linux kernel). So, we could have all sorts of exotic incompatible stuff :)

      I personally would love to see Posix as a compatibility layer in a much reworked OS with a object-relational filesystem done right. But that won't be done in the next decade or so, so I won't hold my breath ;)

    • A decent filesystem.

      Right now, ReiserFS is unsupported by many distributions because it's legacy "maintenance only" code. JFS is also not supported by many distributions (e.g. Kubuntu), I don't know why. And XFS is problematic [wikipedia.org]. I resorted to using ext3, which is just horrible from a performance point of view.

      What I really wish is that we could have ZFS or Reiser4. However, those are unlikely for obvious reasons.
      • What... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) *
        JFS is one of the better linux filesystems. And while you can't select it in the installer, you can definitely install the tools to support JFS from universe in Kubuntu, and it's similarly available in the Fedora base repositories. The kernels come with the modules pre-built already, so...

        And you can shrink and grow them. And it has nice backup and fsck utilities... Oh, and it supports extended attributes and ACLs and all that good stuff. And it's faster than XFS.

        So use it!
  • by backwardMechanic ( 959818 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @07:12AM (#19798263) Homepage
    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.
  • This is an implementation of TCP Illinois invented by Shao Liu at University of Illinois. It is a another variant of Reno which adapts the alpha and beta parameters based on RTT. The basic idea is to increase window less rapidly as delay approaches the maximum.

    Illinois Congestion control is helpful with network games as that tends to spike my connection.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, but does it run Linux?
    eeeh, strike that.
  • Torrent File (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Torrent File Here [mininova.org]

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