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Linus Announces the 2.6.25 Linux Kernel
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 17, 2008 08:40 AM
from the those-servers-need-a-workout dept.
from the those-servers-need-a-workout dept.
LinuxWatch writes "'It's been long promised, but there it is now,' began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, 'special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries.' There were numerous changes in this revision of the OS. The origins of some of those fixes is detailed in Heise's brief history of this kernel update."
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Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure that X11 is so lacking anymore - the recent versions have been making some nice improvements, an
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that has precisely what to do with the kernel? X is in user space. If you want to replace X with any other windowing system you like, just port it or write it. And when you've written something as powerful and stable as the X Window System, come back and tell us about it.
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, for pity's sake. Throw all your engineering discipline out of the window (ha!) and fall back on gut feel. and superstition. The fact is that Linux (with X Windows) performs much better on the same hardware than either Windows or MacOS. Why is this? Until you've shown that X Windows is a significant cost, then you really don't have any argument beyond hand-waving.
I have this to add: I personally have been using the X Window system for eighteen years. I've used it on hardware which had an 8MHz - MHz, not GHz - processor. I've used it on hardware that had 8Mb - Mb, not Gb - of RAM. The X Window system performs perfectly well on that hardware spec. It's always outperformed every other windowing system on the same hardware, and it still does now.
Basic engineering tenet, known to all old engineers (but obviously not taught to young ones): if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:4, Insightful)
That has to be the most absurd thing I've read in a long time. Either you're not a software developer, or you're an incredibly bad one. Either way, it's clear your opinions regarding X can probably be safely ignored.
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Funny)
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Behold! Thus sayeth Linus! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Funny)
I truely don't understand this mentality of making everything stupid user friendly. Once upon a time you actually had to know a little bit about the tools you were using to make them work. Now instead of creating powerful tools that require some understanding we want to replace them all with stupid proof crippleware? And people wonder why well over 90% of all email on the internet is spam. People wonder why Windows infection rates are so high (aside from the security holes allowing the stupid user tricks, the stupid user still clicks on everything presented).
In this I propose that we place large concrete barriers along every major highway and paint tunnels on them with overhead messages like "Do you want a bigger penis? Drive here!" or "Get rich in this tunnel!" and maybe even "Protect your car from theives, enter here!"
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Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux devs are working their asses off in their parents basements, hacking and testing drivers for hardware that they don't have access to the interface specifications for. If things still look a little shakey, just remember to be glad that they work at all, given the hours of work for $0 return.
When you are done giving thanks, complain to your hardware manufacturer, who does make money from the deal, and does have the full specifications - AND for reasons unknown, have turned down the offer of OSS developers writing the drivers for them, for free [slashdot.org].
*See also: Canon
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A better link to the post is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A better link to the post is... (Score:5, Funny)
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Almost slashdotted: copy of important stuff below (Score:5, Informative)
Also kernelnewbies.org seems to be very slow at the moment. Here is a copy of the important changes section from their 2.6.25 changelog page:
1.1. Memory Resource Controller
Recommended LWN article (somewhat outdated, but still interesting): "Controlling memory use in containers"
The memory resource controller is a cgroups-based feature. Cgroups, aka "Control Groups", is a feature that was merged in 2.6.24, and its purpose is to be a generic framework where several "resource controllers" can plug in and manage different resources of the system such as process scheduling or memory allocation. It also offers a unified user interface, based on a virtual filesystem where administrators can assign arbitrary resource constraints to a group of chosen tasks. For example, in 2.6.24 they merged two resource controllers: Cpusets and Group Scheduling. The first allows to bind CPU and Memory nodes to the arbitrarily chosen group of tasks, aka cgroup, and the second allows to bind a CPU bandwidth policy to the cgroup.
The memory resource controller isolates the memory behavior of a group of tasks -cgroup- from the rest of the system. It can be used to:
* Isolate an application or a group of applications. Memory hungry applications can be isolated and limited to a smaller amount of memory.
* Create a cgroup with limited amount of memory, this can be used as a good alternative to booting with mem=XXXX.
* Virtualization solutions can control the amount of memory they want to assign to a virtual machine instance.
* A CD/DVD burner could control the amount of memory used by the rest of the system to ensure that burning does not fail due to lack of available memory.
The configuration interface, like all the cgroups, is done by mounting the cgroup filesystem with the "-o memory" option, creating a randomly-named directory (the cgroup), adding tasks to the cgroup by catting its PID to the 'task' file inside the cgroup directory, and writing values to the following files: 'memory.limit_in_bytes', 'memory.usage_in_bytes' (memory statistic for the cgroup), 'memory.stats' (more statistics: RSS, caches, inactive/active pages), 'memory.failcnt' (number of times that the cgroup exceeded the limit), and 'mem_control_type'. OOM conditions are also handled in a per-cgroup manner: when the tasks in the cgroup surpass the limits, OOM will be called to kill a task between all the tasks involved in that specific cgroup.
Code: (commit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
1.2. Real Time Group scheduling
Group scheduling is a feature introduced in 2.6.24. It allows to assign different process scheduling priorities other than nice levels. For example, given two users on a system, you may want to to assign 50% of CPU time to each one, regardless of how many processes is running each one (traditionally, if one user is running f.e. 10 cpu-bound processes and the other user only 1, this last user would get starved its CPU time), this is the "group tasks by user id" configuration option of Group Scheduling does. You may also want to create arbitrary groups of tasks and give them CPU time privileges, this is what the "group tasks by Control Groups" option does, basing its configuration interface in cgroups (feature introduced in 2.6.24 and described in the "Memory resource controller" section).
Those are the two working modes of Control Groups. Aditionally there're several types of tasks. What 2.6.25 adds to Group Scheduling is the ability to also handle real time (aka SCHED_RT) processes. This makes much easier to handle RT tasks and give them scheduling guarantees.
Documentation: sched-rt-group.txt
Code: (commit 1, 2, 3, 4)
There's serious interest in running RT tasks on enterprise-class hardware, so a large number of enhancements t
It's a kernel, not an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
"numerous changes in this revision of the OS"
Asking people to call it GNU/Linux [gnu.org] is one thing, but it's not much to ask Slashdot not to call a kernel changelog an OS changelog.
CIFS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CIFS (Score:4, Informative)
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exec mode (Score:4, Funny)
It's an option in your system profile (usually /etc/profile).
Just add 'exec true' in there, and it'll start using the prefetch code. OK, so it's not a huge performance boost, but I'll take a free 5-7% any day of the week.
I think you can do it as a non-privileged user by adding it to your 'personal' profile (.profile or .bashrc typically) but obviously it's not then affecting the core system processes.
Re:exec mode (Score:5, Informative)
For the uninitiated: placing 'exec true' in your profile renders you unable to open a terminal (on 99% of linux desktops that use bash as shell)
(heh. Captcha: lecture)
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Re:I like that one (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Black monolith (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Black monolith (Score:5, Funny)
You're the proof that time travel is possible.
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