Linux 2.6.0 Kernel Released 837
thenextpresident writes "It's here! Just updated on kernel.org, the Linux 2.6.0 kernel has finally arrived! We've been waiting a long time for this, and it had been rumored it was going to be released tonight. Well, it's here indeed. Happy downloading." There's also a changelog online for this long-awaited update.
I've been (Score:4, Informative)
Seems this fixes a few bugs, and beefs up Wireless support. Sweet. Can't wait till we start seeing this in "production systems".
Mirror =) (Score:0, Informative)
Save the mirrors! Use bittorrent! (Score:5, Informative)
Got a torrent of it for ya'll:
Linux 2.6.0 final (tar.bz2) [alge.nlc.no]ide-scsi (Score:3, Informative)
Slackware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what is new? (Score:1, Informative)
ditching of ide-scsi (no more scsi emulation required to burn cds!)
deprication of OSS in favor of Alsa! Better sound support!
There's more, but those are my top 2 (running a desktop system here, no server)
SELinux (Score:3, Informative)
I eventually gave up. However, the SELinux extensions were merged into the 2.6 kernel [sourceforge.net] and it's apparently the plan of Fedora/Red Hat to put it into Fedora Core 2 sometime later this spring.
I, for one, can't wait.
Re:So what is new? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So what is new? (Score:5, Informative)
To the end user (me) 2.6 is much faster than 2.4 both in boot time and while operation. Kudos to all of the developers
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:5, Informative)
For a desktop, real time support. Low latencies, improved USB and Firewire device support, better i/o and less race conditions during heavy disk use. It just feels alot faster and performs much better.
Its a big upgrade with mostly server oriented features but it should be a nicer desktop OS and it can perform better under loads for your scientific computing cluster.
But remember do not install it if you do not have a real up to date distro! Module tools have been upgraded and are incompatible with older versions. You can wreck your system if your not carefull.
Re:DAMMIT! Cmd Taco and Cliff!! (Score:5, Informative)
Changes from 2.4 to 2.6 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:2, Informative)
RTFM ChangeLog [kernel.org] for a detailed explaination. Or go back to this slashdot story on the linux 2.6 kernel [slashdot.org].
Re:So what is new? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html
This is a great place to start. It's very comprehensive, and a worthy read.
But if you really want a ultra-summed-up explination, 2.6 has 63.8% more kickassedness than 2.4 does. That and ALSA support built in.
Re:DAMMIT! Cmd Taco and Cliff!! (Score:1, Informative)
The vanilla sources are called "vanilla" because they *arn't* gentoo sources.
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:5, Informative)
nvidia drivers/patches (Score:5, Informative)
the start of something [p2ptrades.com]?
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:5, Informative)
Linus' mail about 2.6.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:5, Informative)
But probably what you really want is Joseph Pranevich's Wonderful World of Linux 2.6 [kniggit.net].
2.4 to 2.6 (Score:5, Informative)
It's small but very helpful for someone that doesn't completely know what they're doing.
supermount and nvidia (Score:1, Informative)
but unofficial nvidia patch for 2.6 still sucks!
downloading...
and waiting to copy
Re:Yay (Score:4, Informative)
Whee for university bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what is new? (Score:5, Informative)
On single CPU life is now more interactive.
Thread support is *much* faster and less buggy provided you have the right version of glibc.
Schedular fixes.
IDE cd burning is less CPU intensive if you dump the ide-scsi module and use the newer cdrecord instead.
and the usual driver improvements.
That's all just off the top of my head so there are probably more.
I don't see a fix. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Re:unlike 2.4 (Score:5, Informative)
What are you smoking? Better USB support, much better firewire support, Apple G5 and AMD Opteron support, pre-emptive kernel, ALSA by default, blah, blah blah the list goes on.
Unless you have a 386-25 with 4 megs of ram, an EGA monitor, and 40 MB MFM hard drive, you should be pretty damn excited (at least if you are a normal geek like the rest of us).
Re:Yay (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:4, Informative)
Your cluster is going to ROCK, though, with kernel async I/O, better management of large memory, greater SMP scalability, hyperthreading and a bunch of other things. Databases are going to see huge improvements.
You WILL be pleased. I promise.
Re:I don't see a fix. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it was figured out [gmane.org] that the reported problems with preempt were really caused by user errors.
No kernel bug -> no fix needed.
Re:I just discovered Debian (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Congrats to Linux from an OS X user (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ide-scsi (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using ide-scsi to burn cds in 2.5 and 2.6 without any problems (and can't recall seeing any (OBSOLETE) notices beside the driver, either)
Re:Congrats to Linux from an OS X user (Score:5, Informative)
I tried it and it did not work, I read someplce that Apple changed something to do with the on disk format somewhat recently... It didn't damage the data, it just quit after a while. I didn't feel like mucking with it any longer so I just backed up and wiped the drive.
links:
Gentoo [gentoo.org]
Gentoo PPC FAQ [gentoo.org] mentions using parted
parted patches [xilun666.free.fr]
newsgroup post [google.com] from the above patch author
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:4, Informative)
It's still quite detailed, but it's easier to read.
Re:So what is new? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NOT OT (Score:3, Informative)
This functionality has only been built into the OS since WinXP. Third-party apps handled it before XP.
TW
Re:prepare for the... (Score:5, Informative)
[make mrproper]; make menuconfig; make; make modules_install
But it doesn't really make much difference
No it's not (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ide-scsi (Score:3, Informative)
The ide-scsi bug may or may not [lkml.org] have been fixed in the 2.6.0 release. I haven't checked, because I never want to go back to ide-scsi.
Re:Knoppix? Any CD bootable Linux 2.6 version? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:5, Informative)
Desktop users will benefit from significantly faster and less "jerky" performance.
New sound (ALSA) and video (V4L2) subsystems with improved features and performance.
Much better USB and Firewire support.
Increased hardware support, especially in the areas of bluetooth and wireless.
Under-the-hood changes (threads, reentrancy, preemptiveness, scheduler, block I/O) means your applications should all run a bit faster.
Your scientific cluster applications probably won't see any benefit unless you're hitting hard limits on memory capacity or network performance. In my experience, scientific applications are all CPU bound anyway and could be running on DOS for all it matters.
More accurate information at Wonderful World of Linux 2.6 [kniggit.net].
Running it! Damn that Radeon driver (Score:4, Informative)
Linux boxor 2.6.0 #3 Wed Dec 17 23:53:09 EST 2003 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
My Radeon binary drivers wouldn't work at first with it on my nforce2 motherboard but I've just found patches in Gentoo's portage tree. I'm currentely running Linux 2.6.0 final on an nforce2 computer with hw 3d acceleration enabled on my Radeon 9600 pro!
Re:I just discovered Debian (Score:3, Informative)
I'll answer the one I know about (Score:5, Informative)
I assume it's to try and respond to events faster but increasing it tenfold, isn't that overkill? I mean, it slows the system down by 1% which isn't horrible and if a real-time app has a problem with it, you can always modify the kernel yourself but couldn't they have upped the polling to 250 which is a decent increase but not a 10x one.
Polling 100 times a second has been the standard figure in the Linux kernel for a long long time. Meanwhile, the top CPU speed has increased by much more than one order of magnitude (say 300MHz -> 3GHz). Most desktop distributions have already been shipping with this set to 1000 already, since it makes the machine overall more responsive, something that's particularly important for a GUI.
I'm guessing that on a top-of-the line server pushing bits to this disk here, that NIC there at very high speeds, it'd be just as good as the old setting, keeping buffers flowing. That 1% quote is completely without context, and might be true on a really low-end machine where 1000 context switches takes up a lot of CPU time, but overall I don't think that's accurate.
Edit: I found this quote on a google search:
"I don't know what the costs of a higher HZ value might be, except for the obvious one: more cpu cycles will be spent servicing the timer interrupt. On my PPro, servicing the timer interrupt takes around 1500 cycles, so with HZ = 100 this accounts for fraction of a percent of the processor's time. With HZ = 1024, this still wouldn't be much more than one percent (I expect the figures to be similar for a K6)." So that figure might be accurate for a 150MHz Pentium Pro...
If you're running an embedded system or something else on limited hardware, you'd probably want to tweak that now, but then again you probably should have tweaked a lot of kernel settings in the past as well. So nothing new here, just staying with the times. Hell, on a GUI machine I'd consider experimenting with setting it even higher.
Kjella
Hey.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2003112400826NWKN
"There is still something strange going on that seems to be triggered by preemption, so for now we suggest not enabling CONFIG_PREEMPT if you want the highest stability. On the other hand, I'd love to have more testing, so that we can try to figure out what the pattern is - but please mention explicitly that you ran with preemption if you have problems."
Someone else reported that it was just a mistake on the part of one of the testers, which was revealed http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/16319
Who is a troll -- a person who follows what Linus says in official annoucements, or some random person who says, "works for me" in a rude way?
Up and running with 2.6.0! (Score:5, Informative)
-make xconfig looks really professional now /etc/modules.conf contains only OSS aliases, no alsa config files at all. so no sound at the moment...
-make / make modules / make modules_install has all been tidied up by the looks of it -- no more endless printout of GCC syntax. had me worried for a second that nothing was compiling but overall looks pretty slick
-alsa comes installed as default, but the configuration seems a little screwy (on debian at least) --
-usb mouse doesn't seem to work here when compiled in the kernel, but works fine as a module -- same problem i've had with 2.4.18-23
-the nvidia 2.6.0 patch available at minion.de [minion.de] works great, so i have a functional X11 server with nvidia modules
The only thing I can find to fault is that somehow the X11 server on the backup 2.4.23 kernel crashes on bootup due to some problem parsing the XF86Config-4 file. I'm not sure if this is a side-effect of the 2.6.0 install or something else (maybe some apt-get update X11 changes i missed?), and i've had the occasional problem before with older kernels becoming only partly functional after newer kernels are installed.
All around though, nice job! Compiling the kernel is getting easier and nicer to look at. And it seems the problems with mouse lagging during 100% CPU usage are gone, at least as far as I've tried it this evening.
Thanks to Linus and all that contributed..
Re:NOT OT (Score:5, Informative)
If you are complaining that CD-burning was not setup for you automatically (which has nothing to do with kernel 2.6), throw out your geek-friendly Gentoo, and use a user-friendly distro instead, which will setup things just like windows.
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:1, Informative)
No, it will not wreck your system, but it may cause your system to not function when booting to the new kernel; you can always reboot to the old, working setup.
Instructions for installing ANY new kernel (e.g. 2.4.x, 2.2.x, 2.6.x)
1) Compile Kernel
2) Leave Known Working Kernel (current) images in
(and, if wanted, # tar -cvf
3) Add entry for Known Working Kernel in Lilo/Grub config
4) Add seperate entry for New Kernel in Lilo/Grub config
(Debian kernel-package/make-kpkg does this for you)
Install new kernel and reboot
Extras for 2.6 Kernel IF you use modular kernels:
2a) Fetch package of known working module-init tools.
2b) Fetch and install package of 2.6 module-init tools.
Do you delete or keep the old tools? Debain renames the old tools so that they are present. (Paranoid of instances where modules need to be loaded before shell access is possible? Rename both new and old versions of the tools and have the normal name, e.g. modprobe, be a script that calls the correct tool.)
This kernel comes with the same risk of data loss as most other kernels. Your system will not be wrecked unless you completely remove all ways to boot from your current, working kernel.
Be aware of known security issues (Score:5, Informative)
You might want to keep an eye on your 2.6.0 machine if it's on a network that's readily accessible to the outside world. Apparently not all of the security fixes that occurred in the 2.4 line have made it into 2.6.0.
Dave Jones' post halloween document [linux.org.uk], which is mentioned in an earlier post as a good summary of changes, mentions the following (near the bottom):
Security concerns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Several security issues solved in 2.4 may not yet be forward ported
to 2.6. For this reason 2.6.x kernels should not be tested on
untrusted systems. Testing known 2.4 exploits and reporting results
is useful.
Notable Changes from a Sys Admin's Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
PPP Bug still exists (check syslog) (Score:3, Informative)
As shown below.
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: cdc_acm 3-3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM deviceBadness in local_bh_enable at kernel/softirq.c:121Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: Call Trace:
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [local_bh_enable+133/144] local_bh_enable+0x85/0x90
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1169403/2870650] ppp_async_input+0x2d7/0x5a0 [ppp_async]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1166374/2870650] ppp_asynctty_receive+0x52/0xb0 [ppp_async]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [flush_to_ldisc+160/272] flush_to_ldisc+0xa0/0x110
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_sleep_on+1947600/2407885] acm_read_bulk+0xbf/0x140 [cdc_acm]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+162921/2870650] usb_hcd_giveback_urb+0x25/0x40 [usbcore]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1216947/2870650] dl_done_list+0x11f/0x130 [ohci_hcd]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1219352/2870650] ohci_irq+0x84/0x170 [ohci_hcd]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+163002/2870650] usb_hcd_irq+0x36/0x60 [usbcore]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [handle_IRQ_event+58/112] handle_IRQ_event+0x3a/0x70
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [do_IRQ+145/304] do_IRQ+0x91/0x130
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [rest_init+0/96] _stext+0x0/0x60
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [common_interrupt+24/32] common_interrupt+0x18/0x20
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [rest_init+0/96] _stext+0x0/0x60
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [default_idle+35/48] default_idle+0x23/0x30
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [cpu_idle+44/64] cpu_idle+0x2c/0x40
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [start_kernel+332/352] start_kernel+0x14c/0x160
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [unknown_bootoption+0/256] unknown_bootoption+0x0/0x100
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel:
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: Badness in local_bh_enable at kernel/softirq.c:121
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: Call Trace:
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [local_bh_enable+133/144] local_bh_enable+0x85/0x90
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1166389/2870650] ppp_asynctty_receive+0x61/0xb0 [ppp_async]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [flush_to_ldisc+160/272] flush_to_ldisc+0xa0/0x110
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_sleep_on+1947600/2407885] acm_read_bulk+0xbf/0x140 [cdc_acm]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+162921/2870650] usb_hcd_giveback_urb+0x25/0x40 [usbcore]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1216947/2870650] dl_done_list+0x11f/0x130 [ohci_hcd]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+1219352/2870650] ohci_irq+0x84/0x170 [ohci_hcd]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [__crc_blk_start_queue+163002/2870650] usb_hcd_irq+0x36/0x60 [usbcore]
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [handle_IRQ_event+58/112] handle_IRQ_event+0x3a/0x70
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [do_IRQ+145/304] do_IRQ+0x91/0x130
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [rest_init+0/96] _stext+0x0/0x60
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [common_interrupt+24/32] common_interrupt+0x18/0x20
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [rest_init+0/96] _stext+0x0/0x60
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [default_idle+35/48] default_idle+0x23/0x30
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [cpu_idle+44/64] cpu_idle+0x2c/0x40
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [start_kernel+332/352] start_kernel+0x14c/0x160
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel: [unknown_bootoption+0/256] unknown_bootoption+0x0/0x100
Dec 18 01:30:12 ubik kernel:
Re:I'll answer the one I know about (Score:3, Informative)
and yeah, I got this from someone else's post (Score:2, Informative)
seems to be a pretty comprehensive description.
Desktop users should wait for the -mm tree updates (Score:5, Informative)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 00:15:50 EST
---cut---
Desktops and laptops may have more trouble at this time because of the much wider range of hardware and because of as-yet unimplemented fixes for the hardware and BIOS bugs from which these machines tend to suffer.
During the 2.6.0 stabilization period a significant number of less serious fixes have accumulated in various auxiliary kernel trees and these shall be merged into the 2.6 stream after the 2.6.0 release. Many of these fixes appear in Andrew Morton's "-mm" tree (...)
---cut---
Re:Cool (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So what is new? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PPP Bug still exists (check syslog) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NTFS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How does this benefit me? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Running it! Damn that Radeon driver (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Happy downloading. (Score:5, Informative)
The actual wire is gigabit, 1000Base-SX.
-hpa
Re:Laptop power management? (Score:5, Informative)
cpufreqd [freshmeat.net]
autospeedstep [freshmeat.net]
cpudyn [freshmeat.net]
Re:NOT OT (Score:1, Informative)
Why would one want to do this? Well, I prefer my CD writer to max out at 8x speed during read only operation, since it's much quieter then. However, hdparm doesn't like SCSI emulation so it's usually set to IDE interface.
Re:NOT OT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NOT OT (Score:3, Informative)
Once I bought a firewire enclosure and realized it still happened, infact worse than before, I decided to ditch it and bought a sub-$100 dvd+rw drive.
Re:NOT OT (Score:3, Informative)
Because it's broken in 2.6 [linux.com].
Re:Hereis my favorite change (Score:2, Informative)
sigma:~$ uname -a
Linux sigma 2.4.22 #2 Sat Oct 23 22:35:00 EDT 2004 i686 unknown
sigma:~$ cat
core.%e.%p
sigma:
[1] 450
sigma:~$ kill -BUS 450
sigma:~$ ls -l core*
-rw------- 1 rfc users 69632 Dec 18 10:44 core.sleep.450
Re:Direct booting from floppy is no longer support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ObGripe (Score:1, Informative)
Re:unlike 2.4 (Score:2, Informative)
I have several of those WITHOUT the hard drive just 16 meg of CF card on an IDE bus as storage and I'm super excited.
2.6 is an EXCELLENT kernel for embedded work on really slow/old computers.
Re:Existing LVM and 2.6.0 ? (Score:2, Informative)
LVM2 will find and activate LVM1 VGs.
It's been a long time since I made the transition, but I don't recall having any problems at all. In fact I remember thinking, "Wow, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be."
Re:NOT OT (Score:2, Informative)
Since SCSI is acctually a hardware independant protocol, SCSI-commands can be send just over any channel (there is even iSCSI whitch uses TCP/IP, if recall correctly). In FreeBSD 4.x cdburn could send SCSI-commands over the IDE-interface to the cd-burner. One coulnd't use cdrecord on ide-burners with it, because cdrecord needed pure SCSI-devices. With Linux 2.6 one can now also use the IDE-devices to send SCSI commands. New cdrecord releases support that, so there is no need to add "scsi-emulation" to the kernel any longer.
So both FreeBSD and Linux have the same features now, but they were added in reverse order *g*
Sorry, you are wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Also, I hate how people say "oh, well, it was only a local exploit..." It shows they dont understand the methodology used by malicious hackers. You use one flaw to give you remote access, then leverage that remote access into exploiting the local access flaw.
How else do you think Debian was hacked with a mere local access exploit?
Re:PPP Bug still exists (check syslog) (Score:3, Informative)
Andrew is in charge of 2.6 now and he'd probably include this patch in 2.6.1.
Specially the patch that would fix this problem would be this [kernel.org] and it could be applied to the vanilla 2.6.0 kernel without any problem.