Linux 2.6 Kernel Stability Freeze 378
An anonymous reader writes "Linux Creator Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.0-test7 Linux development kernel today and declared a "stability freeze". It has been made quite clear that from this point only "strictly necessary stuff" will be accepted, clearing the way for an official 2.6.0 release sooner than later... possibly at the end of this month."
Re:Time to upgrade! (Score:3, Insightful)
The stability freeze only means that no new features will be added. There are still lots of bugs to be worked out. Else we'd have a 2.6.0 release instead of a freeze.
In pratice (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course however I won't be putting 2.6 into production use until at least 2.6.8 or there abouts to make sure there are no nasty surprises in there
Rus
Re:Is it faster? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stability freeze: In related news.. (Score:2, Insightful)
theres a thin line between troll and funny.. and if something is modded funny it's much more likely that it will get modded funny instead of troll by the next guy modding as well.
though i'm pretty sure you wont bother to check back to actually read this answer since you're an ac.
Re:Blah blah (Score:1, Insightful)
Not a troll, truth -- The changelog indicates they have people working on EISA! For godsake, I even have an EISA box, and I think that's a profound waste of time.
Re:Stability? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux doesn't put out Linux releases, Linux is Linux. And Linux is used in several distributions - you can get a five nines Linux distribution if you like. Bugridden open source software does get flack -- distributions don't incorporate a kernel they don't feel comfortable with (RedHat's kernels are heavily patched for instance), no-one will touch wuftpd with a 50 ft pole, people wil nag authors with patches, fork or start competing projects (qmail, postfix vs. sendmail) etc.
Speaking about qmail and open source software getting flack, ever read DJB's comments on BIND and sendmail? Or ANY holy war? (BSD vs. linux, EMACS vs. VI,.. )
User-transmitted e-mail virusses? That's called a trojan horse. Recent worms -- exploiting holes on Microsoft's e-mail client running on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft's browser -- depend on bugs and design in Microsoft's software and that's squarely their responsibility (e.g. why is RPC even listening to anything but localhost by default? If you needed it to listen to the entire internet, you'd know and could change the default).
Besides, those crappy kernels you mention haven't affected me one bit. Whereas I've spent quite some time getting people to install patches, firewalls, and remove those darned worms.
Some people may have a certain amount of unfounded (or at least, not founded in technical fact) animosity towards Microsoft, but let's face it, most mature open source software we rely on is much, much more secure, stable and well-designed than MS Outlook and its ilk. And that most certainly includes the Linux kernel. Comparing apples and oranges, maybe (the 2k/XP kernel isn't half bad either) but that doesn't mean that Microsoft should get away with crappy products that aren't kernels.
Re:Stability? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember how Microsoft told us to never "Always trust content from Microsoft"?
Did you know that "Linux" is about 35MB of kernel source code only? Its not an operating system, its a freaking kernel. Mandrake, RedHat, SuSe and even Caldera are "Linux distributions". I installed several distributions in the 2.4 series, and at least a dozen different kernel releases, and never saw, experienced or heard about any file system corruption due to the kernel. Then again, most intellegent people don't load the freshest kernel on a production machine.
As a matter of fact, you don't change the kernel unless it has an errata that actually affects you, you need the new features, or you are foolish. At least with Linux, you have a choice of kernels. You show me a smart Linux admin, and I will show you someone using a kernel that is at least a couple versions back.
There are Linux viruses, btw. The difference is when a Linux box gets infected, it is designed with permissions that make it impossible to send it out to every other Linux box out there. Its by design.
Re:Stability? (Score:2, Insightful)
We can ignore the kernel releases that have had major problems because the only people who run them are the developers and the geekiest of the geeky Linux users already. The problem is then fixed before anyone uses, (hopefully), the kernel on a production system. The big difference here is that Linux is just the kernel, if Redhat released a distro/OS that caused massive filesystem corruption and major problems then people would indeed be posting here flaming RH for not testing an operating system and allowing major flaws of that nature. A kernel release is quite a bit different than an entire OS, you have certain expectations when you purchase/run an OS. Compiling the latest kernel on your system should not come with the same expectation of quality that you would expect from a full fledged and tested OS. But as we have seen with Windows 98a those expectations are not always met.
Well you must be living in a different world than me. The bandwidth that all of these worms are creating affects my servers every day. I drop thousands and thousands of packets targeting windows specific flaws every day. I have to filter out the "install this patch!" emails that are propagated by millions of idiot Windows users. Thousands of those emails. When the blaster worm shut down the part of the US govt that was reponsible for Visas it cost tax money out of my pocket to fix it. Same goes for all the other damage done by these worms and exploits, (regardless of platform), it's money out of my pocket.
You know that that article was a bunch of crap, people have been responding to that every time that you bring up the issue, the group who did the study has been repeatedly discredited. How do you define breached? Did it count all of the thousands of Windows servers that were breached with blaster, viruses, and the other various worms that make the rounds? As for the vulnerabilities in ssh/ssl, bind, sendmail... exactly how many million computers were taken down by exploits for those vulns? How much damage was done? What percentage of people had their boxes owned thanks to those exploits?
Re:Modular source code? (Score:3, Insightful)