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Linux v2.6 Begins Testing 361

Posted by CmdrTaco from the brace-for-destruction dept.
xose quotes Linus from the kernel list: "the naming should be familiar - it's the same deal as with 2.4.0. One difference is that while 2.4.0 took about 7 months from the pre1 to the final release, I hope (and believe) that we have fewer issues facing us in the current 2.6.0. But very obviously there are going to be a few test-releases before the real thing. The point of the test versions is to make more people realize that they need testing and get some straggling developers realizing that it's too late to worry about the next big feature. I'm hoping that Linux vendors will start offering the test kernels as installation alternatives, and do things like make upgrade internal machines, so that when the real 2.6.0 does happen, we're all set." You all know what to do ;) Update: 07/14 17:49 GMT by S : OverNeith writes "Joe Pranevich has done it again! He's written another summary document on what to expect in the new and upcoming 2.6 Kernel!"
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Linux v2.6 Begins Testing More

Linux v2.6 Begins Testing

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  • Clear this up for me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neophytus ( 642863 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:03AM (#6433167)
    What is it I have to do? Send loves and kisses?

    • Re:Clear this up for me (Score:5, Funny)

      by Surak ( 18578 ) * <surak&mailblocks,com> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:17AM (#6433229) Homepage Journal
      Flowers. Don't forget the flowers. And PLEASE remember to pickup a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread on the way home, okay, honey?
    • What is it I have to do? Send loves and kisses?
      Ralf Bächle:
      o mkiss
      Already taken care of.

    • I think Mr Linus would be happy with unmarked slices of gold, uncut diamonds and several kilograms (that's 1024 LoC^2dB for you emperial people) of opium. Portable wealth is great thing!

  • This is a big deal. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by TheDick ( 453572 )
    Anytime they start work on a new point release it means great things for the Linux OS.

    Linus isn't one to just slap another number on there, notice they are usuallly things like 2.4.25-10 and what not.

    2.6 should bringbig changes in lots of the core system components. We could get a new way to handle SMP or a new filesystem. I personally can't wait to skim the change logs.

    • Re:This is a big deal. (Score:5, Informative)

      by avalys ( 221114 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:18AM (#6433235)
      You don't have to wait - pretty much all of big stuff has already happened in the 2.5 series. 2.6 is the next stable series, which (usually) means no big architectural changes. What's going on now is testing to ensure that the 2.5 series is stable enough to be considered for a release as "2.6.0".

    • Re:This is a big deal. (Score:5, Informative)

      by sfraggle ( 212671 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:22AM (#6433253)
      I personally can't wait to skim the change logs.
      Kernelnewbies.org has a page [kernelnewbies.org] which usefully summarises the new stuff in 2.6.
    • how the hell did this get modded up??? EVERY well-informed linux user on the planet, ESPECIALLY slashdotters, know that x.EVEN.z releases are stable, x.ODD.z are development, and the transition from an odd to even release is entirely stability related. therefore, there will be NO new major revamps of core components (hopefully) unless an emergency comes up... like the 2.4.8 vfs fiasco.

      meta-moderators, you know what to do...

  • Sorry (Score:5, Funny)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:07AM (#6433178) Homepage
    There isn't an ebuild yet, and I'm too lazy to do it the old way...

  • Hmmmmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Arthaed ( 687979 ) <arthaed AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:07AM (#6433179) Homepage
    I know if I start downloading and compiling this kernel I am going to have a 'case of the Mondays' real quick.

  • Difference? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KillerHamster ( 645942 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:09AM (#6433186) Homepage
    For us newbies here, what are the relevant differences in the new kernel? Better performance? New hardware support?

    • Re:Difference? (Score:5, Informative)

      by pe1rxq ( 141710 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:12AM (#6433200) Homepage Journal
      The biggest change for normal users is the preempt patch, it will make your system very responsive to interactive tasks (ie a graphical desktop) also the new schedulers should help here.

      Jeroen

      • Re:Difference? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Libor Vanek ( 248963 ) <libor.vanek@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:19AM (#6433242) Homepage
        And better USB support with easier way for writing drivers for various USB gadgets.

      • Re:Difference? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by chef_raekwon ( 411401 )
        will they finally be including IPSEC directly into the kernel??

      • Re:Difference? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Urchlay ( 518024 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @11:45AM (#6434334)
        The new anticipatory scheduler seems to make a much bigger difference than the preempt patch did in 2.4.

        My test box is a Duron 750 with 384M of RAM, running Apache 1.3, Tomcat 4.0 (with Sun 1.4 JVM), MySQL 4.0, X11 + Windowmaker, usually running Opera and Mozilla.

        With 2.6.0-test1, I can run the load average up to 3.6 or so, and Mozilla is more responsive than it ever was on 2.4, even with a completely idle system. In fact, it's almost as responsive as the ancient Netscape 4.7 on this same system (compare Netscape 4.7 with any Mozilla 1.x release, if you don't know what I mean).

        I'm doing all this junk at once:

        - Recompiling the kernel in a `while true' loop
        - Recompiling a 100,000 Java project in a `while true' loop
        - Playing mp3s with mpg123
        - Untarring a kernel tarball, then deleting it, in another loop
        - Using Mozilla to hit locally-hosted Tomcat servlets, which make heavy use of the local MySQL server, which has pretty large tables (biggest 2 tables are 1.6G and 400M)
        - Reading /. in Opera :)

        I can't make the mp3s skip, and virtual desktop switching is instant. In 2.4, even with the preempt and lowlatency patches, either Mozilla or mpg123 will freeze up, and/or Tomcat/mysql will lag badly (of course, preempt/lowlat isn't supposed to help much with background server daemon processes anyway). 2.6.0-test1's performance under load also beats the 2.5.6x and 2.5.7x kernels I tried on this machine, though most of the 2.5's were an improvement over 2.4.

        It helps that all this activity doesn't cause much swap usage (hovering right around 200Kb of swap used).

        BTW, if you're already able to run recent 2.5 kernels, you should be able to just throw 2.6.0-test1 in and have it work (no need to upgrade anything you haven't already, to support 2.5).

        Executive summary: I'm a happy camper... If you're able to do so, you should try out this kernel on a spare box & see how you like it.

    • Have they fixed SBP2 yet? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cthefuture ( 665326 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:25AM (#6433272)
      You know, the firewire disk driver. Man that thing has never worked 100%.

      Just try corrupting a large (mine was 90GB) partition on a firewire HD and then fschk it. Eventually it'll start getting timeout errors and all sorts of crap, and will eventually trash the filesystem even worse. Then you can't mount the drive at all.

      I usually end up having to go to Windows because it's the only place that I can force a massively corrupted partition to mount (and it has better SBP2 support). From there I can copy everything that is still good off and reformat the drive.

      This hasn't just happened once. More like 3 or 4 times (both EXT3 and Reiser partitions) over the last year or so.

      • Re:Have they fixed SBP2 yet? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I've been using reiserfs on an oxford-911 SBP2 EIDE->Firewire(tm) adapter since the release of 2.4.21. I also tried out 2.4.20 for a bit, it sucked down huge chunks of CPU. The only problem I've had with Firewire on 2.4.21 is the bogus support for hot UNplugging, unplugging one device may kick off everything else, and no filesystem likes having the disk pulled out from under it.

      • You know, the firewire disk driver. Man that thing has never worked 100%.

        That's funny, because I've been happily using my QueFire firewire CDRW under Linux 2.4 and 2.5 with the native sbp2 drivers in the kernel tree for at least 2 years without a single hiccup, in about 10 kernels during that time, on one of my production machines. I've never seen a read or write error yet. Maybe IDE drives are different than the SCSI emulation layer, but I doubt it.

        Perhaps you have bad hardware? A bad controller?

    • Re:Difference? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wiz ( 6870 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:25AM (#6433279) Homepage
      The best reference I've found is Dave Jones' website..... Linux 2.5 core updates [codemonkey.org.uk].

    • BIO (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zonix ( 592337 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:26AM (#6433285) Journal

      If I remember correctly there's a new Block IO (BIO) layer included too, which should enable IDE CD burning without the need for SCSI emulation. Should speed things up somewhat.

      I'm not exactly sure if this is correct - I believe I heard it a the Linux Forum in Denmark back in march. The speaker was Jens Axboe, the current cdrom subsystem maintainer.

      z

      • Re:BIO (Score:5, Informative)

        by kill-1 ( 36256 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:36AM (#6433809)
        From Dave Jones' write-up (link in the post above)
        CD Recording.
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        - Jens Axboe added the ability to use DMA for writing CDs on ATAPI devices. Writing CDs should be much faster than it was in 2.4, and also less prone to buffer underruns and the like.
        - Updated cdrecord in rpm and tar.gz can be found at *.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/axboe/tools/
        - With the above tools, you also no longer need ide-scsi in order to use an IDE CD writer.
        - Ripping audio tracks off of CDs now also uses DMA and should be notably faster. You can also find an updated cdda2wav at the same location.
        - Send good/bad reports of audio extraction with cdda2wav and burning with the modified cdrecord to Jens Axboe
        - Currently only 'open by device name' works in cdrecord. cdrecord -dev=/dev/hdX -inq
        - More info at http://lwn.net/Articles/13538/ & http://lwn.net/Articles/13160/

  • This is a bad idea.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:10AM (#6433187) Journal
    I'm hoping that Linux vendors will start offering the test kernels as installation alternatives

    All I see is badness coming from this. If someone is good enough with unix to want to use the 2.6 kernel to develop software, odds are they already know how to download and install the kernel themselves. If, on the other hand, we have someone new to Linux see 2.6 and think "that must be better than that old 2.4 kernel POS", and proceed to choose that one, odds are is that the 2.6 kernel is going to result in a less-than-stable system, and is going to look badly upon linux in the future.

    • It depends... if vendor "hides" this into some "expert" options with big red label "This can destroy your data and kill your children" this cannot do any harm except few loosers

    • Re:This is a bad idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stinky wizzleteats ( 552063 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:25AM (#6433278) Homepage Journal

      All I see is badness coming from this.

      Linux is changing. The average Linux user of today doesn't recompile their kernel. What's wrong with Mandrake or Suse offering a clearly labelled "testing kernel"? One of the problems Linux development is having right now is that the testing community is so closed that they aren't getting a good cross section of production machines during testing. The end result is that the rubber doesn't really meet the road until the kernel goes "live".

      • Also, with RedHat's aggressive "enterprise" campaign, as well as IBM's openness towards Linux, many application vendors are now buliding their software for Linux. Having easy access to test kernels will make it much easier for them to qualify their products against 2.6, allowing them to get their products "blessed" for 2.6 as soon as it's generally available.
      • What's wrong with Mandrake or Suse offering a clearly labelled "testing kernel"?

        As I'm sure you have seen, many people blindly go around asking questions without RTFM, so what makes you sure people will take the "testing" label seriously? People may notice the testing kernel label, but when their computer starts having problems, they might not assiciate this with the development kernel and start getting made at KDE/Gnome or whatever for making crappy software, even when the real problem is the kernel.
    • I disagree.

      Once the 2.6 series is out of its "testing versions" it is considered STABLE.

      Other than a few cases, I have never had a problem moving to a new STABLE kernel.

      Sure, using 2.5.x might not be such a fantastic idea (2.1.xxx's were ugly, I never even bothered with 2.3.x's and certainly not 2.5.x's) but 2.6.x should be fine.
      • "Once the 2.6 series is out of its "testing versions" it is considered STABLE."

        This is not entirely true. First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be. Therefore, the test kernels have not seen as many strange hardware configurations nor the same usage loads. In fact, they probably haven't seen hardly _any_ true production loads.

        When the .0 kernels are released, many people view them as stable, so the testing base increases. This exposes a lot more
    • I don't think that would be a problem as long as the installer made it VERY clear that 2.6 is experimental and should only be installed if you really know what you're doing. Including test kernels could also be good for the few of us who don't have broadband and prefer to buy a distro now and then.

  • I don't know what to do - really (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nusuth ( 520833 ) <oooo_0000us@nOSPAm.yahoo.com> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:10AM (#6433188) Homepage
    OK, yesterday I was testing 2.5.75. Helpfully, the computer locked up and gave me an opportunity to send a bug report. So far so good. Only that I was in X, I wasn't doing anything particularly interesting or demanding (was playing kbounce), the panic report (if there was one) probably went to tty1 and I have no idea why the computer locked up. How do you report a bug when you can't see what went wrong with the kernel?

    • Re:I don't know what to do - really (Score:5, Informative)

      by pe1rxq ( 141710 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:15AM (#6433218) Homepage Journal
      You connect another computer to the serial port and use it as a console...
      Or use multiple monitors, one for X, one for the console...
      (with the serial solution you can automagicly log it and don't have to type anything from a screen)

      Jeroen

      • An old dumb terminal (or not-so-dumb terminal) attached to the serial port is my favorite method. Much less hassle than another whole computer sitting there...

      • I was hoping (but not really expecting) something simpler. I don't have multi-monitor capability on video card, nor have a spare card. I can't fit another computer in that room, what is the maximum length a null modem cable can be? Also is it possible to redirect only output to serial console?

        Perhaps I should just learn to read morse code.

      • Re:I don't know what to do - really - crashdump? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bored ( 40072 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:22AM (#6433701)

        I thought 2.6 was suppose to have crashdump support? If not, that's to bad, because often that is what is required to fix problems in the real world. Often the technical person isn't the same person who is using the machine. There needs to be a way for the technical person to figure out what went wrong after the fact. OOP's are about as useful as the BSOD data. Plus, unless its a repeatable problem usually by the time the machine crashes its a little to late to run out and hook up a serial console.

  • I got it before the /.ing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:12AM (#6433198)
    And ive just compiled it. I was quite surprised I managed to get it to boot without it panicing. I'm even typing from the new kernel now. But there is a word of warning though. The layout of the /dev folder has been rearranged. As a result some of my programs have broke.

    For example. /dev/hda, /dev/hdb/, /dev/hdc now become /dev/discs/disc0, /dev/discs/disc1, /dev/discs/disc2. So you will need to edit /etc/fstab to reflect the changes.

    • Re:I got it before the /.ing (Score:5, Informative)

      by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:17AM (#6433232) Homepage
      That's devfs. If you don't use that, they'll all be normal (hda, sdb, fd0, etc).
      At least it wasn't mandatory as of 2.5.69 anyway.
      Why isn't devfs the default now - it's been working fine for ages - for me anyway.

      • Why isn't devfs the default now - it's been working fine for ages - for me anyway.

        Because devfs is exploitable, slow, and is being ditched by all of the Linux distribution manufacturers. As one former coworker of mine put it so well:

        "Devfs is an over-engineered solution to a non-existant problem..."

        Seriously though, you need to look at the new work going on, udev [linuxsymposium.org], a userspace implementation of devfs.

        • Because devfs is exploitable, slow,

          Never heard of this... Do go on...

          Devfs is an over-engineered solution to a non-existant problem...

          Yeah sure, when you're installing Linux from scratch, with no connectivity to anywhere, and you have to try and remember what the major and minor numbers for /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 are, it's so easy.

        • devfs is also similar to what FreeBSD has had for years. Dynamic device files make sense, there is no way around it. Besides, your complients are the first I've heard of any issues. I've been using devfs for awhile (Gentoo's defaults to it on) and its nice not having to remember major/minor numbers for stuff like my iPod or my USB mouse.

        • Re:I got it before the /.ing (Score:5, Funny)

          by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:20AM (#6433684)
          Devfs is an over-engineered solution to a non-existant problem..

          That's exactly what I've thought for a long time now. I've come up with a much simpler solution that I call "drvlttrd". I'm going to submit the patch as soon as I do a little more cleanup. Basically, the devices get short convenient names that can be used like URL prefixes. Example:

          /dev/fd0 -> A:
          /dev/fd1 -> B:
          /dev/hda1 -> C:
          /dev/hda2 -> D:
          etc...

    • Re:I got it before the /.ing (Score:5, Informative)

      by bumby ( 589283 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:19AM (#6433239)
      For example. /dev/hda, /dev/hdb/, /dev/hdc now become /dev/discs/disc0, /dev/discs/disc1, /dev/discs/disc2

      That is called devfs, and as far as I know is an optional thing. At least it was in 2.4-series, and I really really doubt it isn't in 2.5 and will be in 2.6. So just skipp the CONFIG_DEVFS_FS and CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT and use your old nodes.
    • Doesn't devfs take care of all this?
    • /dev/disc...
      ^

      eeek! Somebody still can't spell.

  • NTLM in the kernel? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:12AM (#6433199) Homepage
    Steve French:
    o NTLMv2 password support and NTLMSSP signing part 1
    o ntlmssp signing
    o More NTLMv2

    I don't understand - why is this in the kernel? No entiendo.

  • Yea! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:18AM (#6433234)
    No more SCSI-Emulation for burning CDs with this.

  • Does Linux 2.6 permit decent video capture? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:20AM (#6433246) Homepage Journal
    I've been tweaking my cheapish bttv-style card and no matter what I do I can't seem to prevent any of the video recording solutions for Linux to capture a steady stream of frames. The easiest test is to tune the card to a news network and watch the moving text on the bottom bar -- it skips in a regular pattern under Linux, but works smoothly under Windows (i.e., it's not a slow computer issue, although there could be magic in the driver that isn't being duplicated under Linux). From what I've read, it's an issue with Linux timing, and perhaps a real-time kernel would work better, but I was wondering if they've been addressing this.

    Should mention that the sound capture seems to cause the problem -- without sound, the capture is smooth under Linux, but adding either ALSA or OSS to the mix guarantees problems.

    • Re:Does Linux 2.6 permit decent video capture? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That might also be because you are not using proper deinterlacing while encoding (if you're doing .avi mpeg4 or so) or while decoding (mpeg1, mpeg2).

      Also, have you checked that you have big enough dma buffers for the capturing card? I think you need to give some arguments to lilo to reserve some memory for the card..

    • Tried another sound card or different addres/int? 2.6 should allow decent capture(on bt* cards), as others do too. But it wont be a silver bullet to your problems i'm afraid.
    • It's not the driver, it's just that Linux Kernel 2.4.x is not preemptible. In other words, the kernel system calls, like read and write, are made to be interruptable in 2.6.x. Basically, it adds some code that allows something else in the kernel to run if one thing is waiting, say, for some sort of input, which improves latency for short periods of time. Linux Journal, May 2002 edition explained this and they had a latency graph of a system playing music under a load. Without the preemptible patch, there were huge spikes in latency (basically audible as gaps in the music) but with the patch, there were minimal changes in the latency. Just today, I noticed something similar to what you talked about. I was ripping CD's and then encoding them as Ogg. Apparently, cdparanoia does system calls that have high latency and since they can't be interrupted, working in X is slow. However, since Ogg encoding is mostly userspace, X was much faster even though more of my processor was being used. Recently, Slashdot linked to an article outlining the changes in 2.6. People have also been making patches for 2.4 for a long while to improve latency, and I think there is a backport of the low latency patch to 2.4.
    • Well, it is better, but not wonderful. I also have a cheapish bttv style card, and have run both 2.4 and 2.5.* and 2.5 drops fewer frames but I still lose quite a few, though certainly not in regular intervals. This happens using virtually any encoder (nuv, mpeg4) at anything over 480x480 (and my cpu is only at about 50% from the capture/encoding when doing 640x480 which is my normal recording setting). you may want to try the triton1=1 and vsfx=1 insmod options mentioned in:
      Documentation/video4linux/btt

  • Compiled, tested, working. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by indigo78 ( 464058 ) <michele...albrigo@@@poste...it> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:21AM (#6433251) Homepage
    Downloaded, compiled and installed. Working since 4 hours on a Slackware-9.0-current [slackware.com], asus L8460K notebook (p3/1000, 256mb ram, i440bx, S3 savage/MX, ess allegro) and quite standard compilation options (acpi, alsa, pcmcia, usb, netfilter, no ipv6, preemptible kernel). Applied patch as seen on LKML (see here [iu.edu]) for vfsmount.
    Happy testing!
    • Did an emerge sync, emerge development-sources, and did an xconfig (love the new xconfig) and configured with pretty standard options (added crypto/ipsec stuff). Running great on my IBM Thinkpad A21m (for the last 30 minutes anyway).

  • How's the must-fix list going? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bollie ( 152363 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:23AM (#6433264)
    Last time I looked at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/ must-fix/ [kernel.org] there were still some showstoppers. It seems like they were updated about a month ago, so I guess progress must have been made on them...

    The biggest problem I have with the newer kernels is probably some ACPI/IRQ routing bug in my board. It's a common problem with the NForce2 chipset (APIC doesn't work, so you have to boot with pci=noacpi or acpi=off). It's not the biggest inconvenience, but it causes half of my unused USB slots not to work...

    I must say the snappiness of 2.6 is great! I'm looking forward to beta-testing. AFTER I backed up my drive, of course!

  • SCO vs linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by VEGx ( 576738 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:23AM (#6433265)
    I hope they added a few lines like "This is not SCO code" :-P

    OK, So what if I'm a troll?!
  • Congrats and thanks, Linus. I was not expecting testing to begin so quickly after he expressed his opinion [slashdot.org].

  • Hmm... Devfs, Anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:27AM (#6433293) Homepage Journal
    Devfs is a nifty concept but configuring a distribution that isn't already set up for it is a bit intimidating. You really don't have a feel for how many applications go into /dev until you try to do that.

    Are there any distributions out there that are actually using devfs?

    • Gentoo uses devfs by default, but only half-assedly. The default devfsd configuration has it generate symlinks to emulate the old device names (i.e., /dev/hda, /dev/tty1, etc.), defeating the purpose of having devfs in the first place. There are a few apps in Gentoo that use the old names, starting with sysvinit (the default inittab uses /dev/tty[1-6]).

  • timeslice and 'hyperthreading'?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elwinc ( 663074 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:27AM (#6433294)
    Two possibly dumb questions (but this is slashdot, after all). (1) Can you change the scheduler default timeslice (10 msec seems a bit long for a multi-GHz CPU). (2) does it do the right thing for hyperthreading? (for hyperthreading, the scheduler needs to understand that one of the CPUs is sorta crippled, so jobs should flop back & forth between both CPUs).

  • Product release cycles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:31AM (#6433313) Homepage Journal
    Technical achivements aside, the most amusing thing about the 2.6 series of kernels is seeing all the large corporate entities with vested interests deal with the release schedule.

    That is to say, there isn't one. I especially liked the quote from Torvalds I recently saw in a CNet news.com that basically said, "it'll be done when it's done - deal with it".

    • Re:Product release cycles (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dotwaffle ( 610149 ) <slashdot@wals t e r.org> on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:34AM (#6433785) Homepage
      This quote may sound quite arrogant and that Linux isn't suited to the business world - but think about it for a minute - what he said was "We're going to do it our way, making sure it all works, rather than release it before testing properly". I'm glad someone has the sense to do this. How long was it before Microsoft Apps get patched? Something like hours after release? I'd prefer something stable (or as stable as possible) on release, and I thank Linus (and Alan, and Dave) for taking their time. I'm pretty sure we all can't wait until these new features come out - but I'd rather wait for them to become stable instead of risk my precious collection of... well... you catch my drift. =)

      • Though honestly, much of MS software is also sold shrinkwrapped. This gives a latency between the final build, documentation print run, CD pressing, packaging and distribution that doesn't exist with something like the linux kernel. During this time development continues, which is why you can have patches for a game or application avaliable before said product is even in wide distribution.

        And again honestly, I don't think you can argue that the linux stable series are released as "full quality" and don't

  • Initial support for USB 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FuzzyBad-Mofo ( 184327 ) <fuzzybad@gmaCURIEil.com minus physicist> on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:34AM (#6433334)

    Let's hope this supports USB 2.0 "Full Speed" or "High Speed", whichever is faster..

  • took me a while to make it work... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by C0vardeAn0nim0 ( 232451 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:39AM (#6433364) Journal
    and it still shows nothing on screen if i pass vga=normal during boot, and it took me several atempts before I relized that regular ps/2 keyboard can be left out or compiled as a module. well, this kind of changes were expected.

    after i managed to get it working (booting, with keyboard, framebuffer console, et. all) surprise... no DRM on X.

    happens that for some reason X doesn't detect working agp when a Radeon 8500LE in inserted in my kt266 based mobo. even with agpgart and radeon modules loaded.

    so here's a few sugestions:

    leave ps/2 kboard selected by default for x86 architectures, same for a way to display the console on text mode vga and check this radeon issue.

    except those minor stuff, the new kernel is great. really fast for regular use.

  • How to install? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KillerHamster ( 645942 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:48AM (#6433419) Homepage
    I know Slashdot isn't a support forum, but could someone point out a good tutorial for compiling and installing a new kernel? I'd like to give 2.6 a try, but I don't know where to begin.

  • Works, but no nvidia (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jethro ( 14165 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:01AM (#6433531) Homepage
    DLed it last night, and built it. Looked fine - I like that the make xconfig is no longer really REALLY ugly, but xinerama seemed to confuse it (;

    Anyway, I couldn't get the nvidia viddeo drivers to build for it, and it WAS 4am, so I'm back to 2.4.20, and maybe I'll play with it later. Hoping someone already did it and feels like posting. (:

  • word of warning (Score:5, Informative)

    by Maimun ( 631984 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:22AM (#6433700)
    According to Alan Cox, there are security issues with 2.5.* (and thus with 2.6-test1)
    Last time I checked there were remote DoS attacks and local root attacks present in 2.5.7x
    See:

    Re: Linux v2.6.0-test1 [theaimsgroup.com]

    The whole thread is here Linux v2.6.0-test1 [theaimsgroup.com]

  • Still the same problems since 2.5.68 (Score:5, Informative)

    by hacker ( 14635 ) <hacker@gnu-designs.com> on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:49AM (#6433897)
    2.6.0-test1 is MUCH slower than 2.4.21 or 2.4.21-preempt-rml here. I see that the timing issues are still not fixed in 2.6.0-test1, and haven't been working since 2.5.68. I've reported this at least a dozen times to the appropriate people, with no fixes eminent yet.

    To test this issue out, run Sawfish, and bind a key like Ctrl-Alt-B to a black-background xterm. Launch X, and run Sawfish. Hit Ctrl-Alt-B once and see what happens. It's consistant here across about 6 machines, all different hardware.. a 3-4 second delay, then anywhere from none to 4 xterms will open up. On 2.4.anything, it opens the xterm instantly, and only opens one of them, not 3, not none.

    The other issue is that there's some underlying change in the TCP stack/net drivers that cause rsync and anything running over ssh/ipsec to fail with weird dropped-socket errors from the applications using them. Again, on 2.4, it works flawlessly.

    It's very annoying, and both of these are blockers for me and most of the machines I'd be running this on. It happens with anything that involves keyboard shortcuts; menu accels, launched applications, keybindings, everything.

    Changing to the different schedulers does not help; deadline, as, or cfq. 2.5.68 worked perfectly, and didn't have these anomalies, but every single kernel since that time, has had it. I've diffed, and I can't tell which of the dozens of changes actually broke this.

    If anyone has a solution, I'm all ears.


    • You say that you've "reported this....to the appropriate people." Has that been in private conversation, or has that been through the LKML?

      I mean, it's hard to believe that only one person would have ever noticed this; but if so, I would expect that lots of people would care. And the more people on the LKML that know about it, the more likely it is for something to happen . . .

    • It seems hard to believe there is any kind of bug that is turning one keystroke into multiples and is not producing similar problems with every other X application (ie you type 'a' and get more than one 'a' in xterm).

      Therefore I would very much suspect an error in sawfish, that for some timing reason was not causing the problem with earlier Linux. Most likely other X events are coming in at unexpected times and due to some bug it is interpreting them as repeats of the keystroke. I would also suspect the r

    • The bug you're seeing is in XFree86, not the kernel:

      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cg i? id=76959

      It looks like it will be fixed in the next version of XFree86:

      http://www.xfree86.org.ru/develsnaps/

      However, this doesn't address the problem you're having with the kernel being slow.

  • wow... (Score:3, Informative)

    by sdaemon ( 25357 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @12:26PM (#6434659)
    holy sweet jesus, huge noticeable performance difference on my athlon 650, going to 2.6.0-test1 with the new scheduling algorithms and the preemptive kernel mod... much, much better performance under heavy loads than it was with 2.4.20

  • test kernels (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chunkwhite86 ( 593696 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @12:52PM (#6434946)
    "I'm hoping that Linux vendors will start offering the test kernels as installation alternatives, and do things like make upgrade internal machines, so that when the real 2.6.0 does happen, we're all set."

    That would be useful in getting these new kernels debuged quickly. The install should default to the latest stable release however, and should be very clear that the optional test kernels are infact not a final product release.

    Otherwise we'll have made the same mistake as Microsoft - shipping incomplete products under the guise of a polished solution - and having our paying customers debug and test them for us. ;-)

  • the article is incorrect about hyperthreading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @08:20PM (#6438836) Homepage

    It's not true, as the article claims, that making one process look like two doesn't buy you much. The reason is that cache misses are getting more and more expensive: without hyperthreading, a cache miss might cause the processor to wait a hundred cycles. With hyperthreading, we simply switch to the other process, and pay a far smaller cost.

  • First? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @08:57PM (#6439014) Journal
    From the article:

    Hyperthreading is the ability for a single processor to actually masquerade as two (or more) processors from the operating system perspective. What is absolutely the most amazing thing about this feature is that Linux was the first OS to bring the features to market, despite compatible processors being released by Intel almost a year ago.

    I find this odd, since my FreeBSD kernel has had an option for enabling HyperThreading support in the kernel since 4.8 (option HTT). FreeBSD 4.8 was released on the fourth of april this year. Linux 2.6 is not out yet. I hardly think this is a first for Linux.

    It does seem to be a common belief amongst Linux users that Linux and Windows are the only two operating systems in the world. Guys, there are other options out there. I hear even a little company called SCO has some kind of Linux-like OS...

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