Linux Kernel 2.4.10

erinntriggs writes "Kernel 2.4.10 is out and available at the usual places." You know the drill people! Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

European mirror

[DeadInSpace]

For those in Europe, especially near/in the Netherlands:
ftp://galileo.luon.net/linux/

2.4.10 Changelog

[mnordstr]

final:
- Andrew Grover: ACPI update
- Al Viro: block devices..
- Andrea Arcangeli: fix list manipulation bogosity
- Trond Myklebust: 64-bit file locking fixes
- Brad Hards: USB CDC ethernet
- Chris Mason: reiserfs speedup
- Robert Love: re-merge AMD 761 GART support that was lost in -ac merge
- Adam Richter: check pci_module_init() return value

pre15:
- Jan Harkes: make Coda work with arbitrary host filesystems, not
just filesystems that use generic_file_read/write
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Hugh Dickins: swap device lock fixes - fix swap readahead race
- me, Andrea: more reference bit cleanups

pre14:
- Richard Gooch: devfs update
- Andrea Arcangeli: clean up/fix ramdisk handling now that it's in page cache
- Al Viro: follow up the above with initrd cleanups
- Keith Owens: get rid of drivers/scsi/53c700-mem.c file
- Trond Myklebust: RPC over TCP race fix
- Greg KH: USB update (ohci understands USB_ZERO_PACKET)
- me: clean up reference bit handling, fix silly GFP_ATOMIC allocation bug

pre13:
- Manfred Spraul: /proc/pid/maps cleanup (and bugfix for non-x86)
- Al Viro: "block device fs" - cleanup of page cache handling
- Hugh Dickins: VM/shmem cleanups and swap search speedup
- David Miller: sparc updates, soc driver typo fix, net updates
- Jeff Garzik: network driver updates (dl2k, yellowfin and tulip)
- Neil Brown: knfsd cleanups and fixues
- Ben LaHaise: zap_page_range merge from -ac

pre12:
- Alan Cox: much more merging
- Pete Zaitcev: ymfpci race fixes
- Andrea Arkangeli: VM race fix and OOM tweak.
- Arjan Van de Ven: merge RH kernel fixes
- Andi Kleen: use more readable 'likely()/unlikely()' instead of __builtin_expect()
- Keith Owens: fix 64-bit ELF types
- Gerd Knorr: mark more broken PCI bridges, update btaudio driver
- Paul Mackerras: powermac driver update
- me: clean up PTRACE_DETACH to use common infrastructure

pre11:
- Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
- Andrew Morton: console locking merge
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

pre10:
- Alan Cox: continued merging
- Mingming Cao: make msgrcv/shmat check the queue/segment ID's properly
- Greg KH: USB serial init failure fix, Xircom serial converter driver
- Neil Brown: nsfd/raid/md/lockd cleanups
- Ingo Molnar: multipath RAID personality, raid xor update
- Hugh Dickins/Marcelo Tosatti: swapin read-ahead race fix
- Vojtech Pavlik: fix up some of the infrastructure for x86-64
- Robert Love: AMD 761 AGP GART support
- Jens Axboe: fix SCSI-generic queue handling race
- me: be sane about page reference bits

pre9:
- Greg KH: start migration to new "min()/max()"
- Roman Zippel: move affs over to "min()/max()".
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA update (make sure not to IRQ-unmask a vt82c576)
- Jan Kara: quota bug-fix (don't decrement quota for non-counted inode)
- Anton Altaparmakov: more NTFS updates
- Al Viro: make nosuid/noexec/nodev be per-mount flags, not per-filesystem
- Alan Cox: merge input/joystick layer differences, driver and alpha merge
- Keith Owens: scsi Makefile cleanup
- Trond Myklebust: fix oopsable race in locking code
- Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update

pre8:
- Christoph Hellwig: clean up personality handling a bit
- Robert Love: update sysctl/vm documentation
- make the three-argument (that everybody hates) "min()" be "min_t()",
and introduce a type-anal "min()" that complains about arguments of
different types.

pre7:
- Alan Cox: big driver/mips sync
- Andries Brouwer, Christoph Hellwig: more gendisk fixups
- Tobias Ringstrom: tulip driver workaround for DC21143 erratum

pre6:
- Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
- Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
- Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
- firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
- NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
- Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
- me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
- Merge with Alan
- Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
- Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
directories in page cache
- Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
- Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
- Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
pl2303 driver update)
- David Miller: sparc and net update
- Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
overwrite ramdisks
- Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
- Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
- Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
- Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
- Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
- Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
- Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
- Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
- Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
- John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
- Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
- Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
- David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
- Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
- Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
- Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
- Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
- Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
- Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
- Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
- Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
- Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
- David Miller: networking and sparc updates
- Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
- OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
- Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
- Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
- Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
- Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
- Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
- David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
- Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
- Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
- Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
- Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
- Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
- David Gibson: airport driver update
- Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support
- Daniel Phillips: swap read page referenced set - avoid swap thrashing

Use the mirrors, people!

[Dwonis]

Some of the mirrors already have the files, so make sure to use them. Also, be considerate! Try to get the patch-*.bz2 files, rather than the linux-*.tar.gz files.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[XO]

jesus the VM in 2.4.2-2.4.8 sucked BADLY. 2.4.9 shows marked improvement.

Tip: after boot, issue a swapoff on all your swap space, get your X up and running, and all your other stuff, then AFTER that, su root and swapon your swap devices.

Makes my system run a TON faster.

don't waste bandwidth

[Ender Ryan]

And remember folks, don't waste precious bandwidth, download patches!

patch-2.4.7 [kernel.org]
patch-2.4.8 [kernel.org]
patch-2.4.9 [kernel.org]
patch-2.4.10 [kernel.org]

Links for the lazy folks ; )

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[gallir]

There are lot of changes in the VM. In fact it's almost entirely new with a big patch from Andrea Arcangeli.

Answering to another post, YES, it _should_ be better for listening MP3 files because the mmap used for most players should work nicely with the read-once technique.

Although cannnot be assure until is hard tested, Linus found several mistakes in the cache and page aging.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a kernel hacker (although I tried it ;-). I just knew it reading every day the linux-kernel mailing list.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Jeffrey Baker]

Well, AA contributed an enormous VM patch that basically changes the whole system. Apparently it has good effect for interactive uses like MP3 players and web browsing, but testers at HP labs say that the performance of the 2.4.10 VM is the worst of the (very bad already) 2.4.x series on their 4-8 GB machines with 30+ SCSI devices each. They make this conclusion based on NFS benchmarks.

On my machines, I've had tons of problems, and 2.4.10-preXX didn't make them go away. Until Linux drops the concept of memory overcommit, I'm afraid that the VM is going to continue to suck.

Links to mirrors

[TheEviscerator]

The kernel.org main ftp site is being hammered, but if you follow the link here, you'll be taken to a pretty exhaustive list of mirrors.

http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/

I'd put my money on tomorrow...

[Ami Ganguli]

Well, I wouldn't be a lot of money, but I think if the VM on 2.4.10 looks good then 2.5 will start very soon. Linus has been hinting at it for ages, but I don't think he wants to pass 2.4.x on to Alan until it's up to standard.

On the positive site, it looks like there's a ton of stuff ready to go into 2.5. This will be the first development kernel where the big boys (especially IBM, but also Compaq and SGI) have been involved from the beginning. They all started on projects during 2.3 that never made it into 2.4, but are now pretty much ready. The quiet time between 2.4.0 and 2.5.0 has also given a lot of other patches time to mature. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

There may be no downside

[marm]

Basically, why is this not the default behavior?

Well, the traditional view on this is that reducing latency by whatever means tends to lower overall data throughput, which is just what you don't want for a server OS, which is still what accounts for most Linux installations.

However, it may be that the traditional view is wrong. It may well be that the increased usage efficiency that comes with kernel pre-emption may actually increase throughput - high-priority disk I/O for instance now never has to sit waiting for the CPU to complete a syscall. There were some interesting results posted linux-kernel regarding this, see here. [theaimsgroup.com]

The linux scheduler ensures that no process is ever completely starved of CPU time, so no huge backlog of syscalls ever builds up.

The other reason that it's not the default behaviour is that it's an interesting and new approach to how to achieve a pre-emptible kernel. All other pre-emptible kernels have been designed as such from the ground up - Linux certainly hasn't. There are a couple of white papers, here [mvista.com] and here [mvista.com] from MontaVista (who kickstarted the pre-emptible kernel project) about the approach taken. They also detail a few other approaches to making Linux more responsive for real-time and interactive tasks.

Re:So what's the downside?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a "from the sidelines, subjective, IANAKH, LKML lurker" opinion. I've followed this one with interest.

This preemption code that's being discussed was originally worked on by Nigel Gamble but is now maintained by Robert Love.

I'd say it's not being included yet because:
- It's not considered SMP safe. However people have reported various levels of success running it on SMP so it's probably not a major job.
- It hasn't received a lot of attention until recently, when RML revived the code and posted a message to LKML. That was (from tech9 hp) Aug 26, 2001. Preemption has been discussed a fair bit before on LKML, with notable contributors being MontaVista (?who Nigel works for?) and Andrew Morton.
- The kernel hackers have been busy with other things ;) like replacing the VM and stuff. (Andrea's ~3000 LOC patch in pre11 iirc) My word.

Cheers
AndyM

Re:patches & RedHat

[Sapien__]

RedHat add their own patches to the kernel, so if you want the standard Linus patches to work you'll have to download a fresh kernel first.

Re:There may be no downside

[frleong]

Well, why isn't this configurable, requiring people to patch it? Windows NT/2000 has a similar setting (Optimize Performance for Foreground/Background) for quite a long time. It's time for the Linux kernel to add such a capability to gain more desktop accetance.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Explo]

X in itself should not be a problem with 64 megabytes of RAM - are you running something like Enlightment and Gnome too? The window managers differ quite a bit in their memory usage, and Gnome/KDE grab some of it too.

Personally, I still use Windowmaker without Gnome/KDE (or rather have the neccessary library stuff installed for programs that are for KDE/Gnome, but not actively using resources) even though I have 256 megabytes of RAM.

Re:UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[kimihia]

After installing 2.4.9 at a maximum my uptime would be about a month, except for an unfortunate hardware failure.

18:49:30 up 17 days, 1:31, 3 users, load average: 2.00, 2.02, 2.00

What kernel was the most recent a year ago? Would that be one of the ptraceable 2.2 series?

Re:Don't want to reboot my machine

[Anonymous Coward]

[andreak@www] ~$ uptime
2:20pm up 459 days, 2 min, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.07

[andreak@www] ~$ uname -a
Linux www 2.2.12-20smp #1 SMP Mon Sep 27 10:34:45 EDT 1999 i686 unknown