Linux 2.6.5 is Released 315
lamont116 writes "Featuring a 367.6 KB changelog, the next Linux kernel is now ready for action. As always, enjoy!"
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr
Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:4, Insightful)
You would think that the people developing the best project in the world would at least have the knowledge of how to become inaccessible to spam. There are billions of other ways to be contacted. How about a form that lets you email each user on the project? That would only take about a day to code and a few to perfect. So I'm not a dumbass (thank you very much) You, however, might be.
Re:A day? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, but creating code to allow users to add themselves and perform email redirects using the form might take longer than 20minutes. For real shit-stick code, how about 4min? For industry ready code, I never take less than a day on any app (just my ethics, sirrah).
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay! I'll write something to handle this, and post the source code at my site next week when I can free up some time. Maybe I'll write a changelog writing app and put in some extra features so the Linux team uses it (and anyone else)...
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2, Insightful)
Time to burn some karma....
For Moderator: They are on crack and did terrible injustice for dolo666. awx should be modded as flamebait, not dolo666 as offtopic because he has a good point.
These stupid act of random injustice seems to be rampant in Slashdot nowadays.
Okay, so go ahead and mod this down. For I have spoken.
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2)
If the higher-modded person is trolling, and the lower-modded person is insightful, then you should be moderating them as Troll and Insightful, not Overrated and Underrated. The over/underrated moderations are for weak-opinioned fools who are abusing the mod system.
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay! I'll write something to handle this, and post the source code at my site next week when I can free up some time. Maybe I'll write a changelog writing app and put in some extra features so the Linux team uses it (and anyone else)...
Having been involved with Linux Kernel development for about 9 years now, I can tell you that something like this would never be adopted.
1) Spam is a non issue to many of these people. Posting your email address doesn't cause spam. Besides, the whole point of Internet addresses was to give them out to facilitate communications.
2) Most of the developers are quite conservative when it comes to the use of the Internet and its related technologies. Many have quite a bit of disdain for Web Applications, especially when there are email clients that work so well, and many have written scripts through out the years that use their SMTP tools of choice. How do you think all those PATCH emails are managed? You need to subscribe to the lkml list for a while and see how the community works before you start trying to change it.
I subscribe to a number of mailing lists and use my main email address and I don't see spam or fake virus emails because I am running spamassassin and other tools, and so are the mailing lists.
Sorry, but you are not going to convince me or anyone else running blocking software that they are supporting spam. Its the lamer that actually buys shit from spammers that is supporting it, no one else. And I am not going to be coerced into giving up an mail system that has worked fine all these years on account of some low life scum (both the spammers and those that support them).
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2)
All plain text.....
Jeroen
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:3, Informative)
(Actually, the last time I posted to LKML, I didn't get spam, so the stated problem may be even less than you might think.)
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
I spend about 30 seconds a day deleting my spam.
If this is stopping you from working on Linux, you must not be very interested.
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're the one shrugging off spam, by saying that there's nothing we can do about it so we should all just give up and hide our addresses. Call me naive, but I think the dream of sending anyone a letter just by clicking the link by their name, yet still not getting too much spam, is achievable.
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps you should send out some e-mails advertising your services.
Re:Linux Changelog Email Publishing (Score:2, Insightful)
Performance... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Performance... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Performance... (Score:4, Funny)
So, talking about benchmarks, how does that stack up against gcc?
Re:Performance... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was able to apt-get the 2.6.3 release, and it "just worked."
Basically you can blast away at the disk and the system feels as solid as a rock - barely hesitates at anything.
It made windows seem so annoying by comparison that I finally switched.
Debian with 2.6.4 and it works like a charm. (Score:4, Informative)
TLS libraries, for instance, as well as pcmcia and alsa changes. 2.6 is also doing substantially more hardware discovery, which caused me a bit of trouble on my annoying Vaio laptop until I figured out what kernel modules to remove from the tree so they couldn't be installed.
As you already know, installing a later tertiary kernel version is very easy under Debian.
Bob-
Wahoo (Score:3, Funny)
the PPC64 work is looking real nice (Score:5, Interesting)
One day PPC64 will be just as common as AMD64 in the server room
Sunny Dubey
Re:the PPC64 work is looking real nice (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the PPC64 work is looking real nice (Score:3, Interesting)
This [theinquirer.net] is why I ask.
And with IBM's recent "open" hardware initiative for PowerPC, things are looking tantalizing: Open OS and Open hardware.
Re:the PPC64 work is looking real nice (Score:2)
Re:Pro Apple Troll (Score:2)
PPC already is huge in the server market, and it will get bigger in the lower segments of that market.
Jeroen
Re:Pro Apple Troll (Score:2, Offtopic)
Wow this is ironic, you should see some of my previous posts, you'll see I'm anything but apple friendly.
I think you are confused as well. IBM created the PPC64 hardware, not Apple. (Additionally IBM did so even before Apple needed to use PPC64.) Therefore, PPC64 != Apple. I root for PPC64 for many reasons, but mainly be
Re:Pro Apple Troll (Score:2, Offtopic)
The platform is very mature, this was another good
New Kernel (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Alsa with Intel8x0 ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Alsa with Intel8x0 ? (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to upgrade your kernel to install the latest ALSA drivers. Just download the source from the ALSA site [alsa-project.org], build and install it. I never use the ALSA drivers in the 2.6.x kernels (they never seem to work correctly for me, if at all). I never have problems with the official source versions though.
BTW, if your card is working ok with OSS emulation, what's the problem?
Re:Alsa with Intel8x0 ? (Score:2)
I have to use OSS instead of ALSA because my Line-In quits working with ALSA.
Re:Alsa with Intel8x0 ? (Score:2)
OSS does work but I get a whopping 2-channels on a 5.1 setup.
I'm going to buy a seperate soundcard, personally, and shy away from everything onboard motherboards unless I know for a fact that they are well supported. This is first and foremost my fault for not researching Linux compatability before buying a motherboard. However, it is also Nvidia's fault for using binary drivers and not keeping them up
Re:Alsa with Intel8x0 ? (Score:2)
Stick with 2.6.2 (Score:2)
Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddites? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone got upgrade instructions for Debian 3.0, or other 'old' distros? Believe it or not, not everyone wants to be on the 'bleeding edge' in all areas. Nevertheless, to be able to try new kernels would be nice.
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:2)
davej has a nice list of big changes in the 2.6 series that's commonly referred to as the post Halloween document [codemonkey.org.uk] that you may be interested in looking at.
The big change for users is to install module-init-tools, which is packaged in debian. (I don't recall if it's made its way to stable, though.) In any case, have a read through that document.
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:4, Informative)
Just get the packet "module-init-tools" from www.backports.org installed, if you plan to use modules.
The configuration dialogs are heavily restructured, but you'll find your stuff I guess. "make-kpkg" works fine.
If you have some rather peculiar stuff running, like LVM, there are some undocumented pitfalls, though.
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:2)
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:2)
Re:Instructions for 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades for Luddit (Score:2)
Where can i browse online through the source? (Score:2, Interesting)
is there a site where i can just browse through the sources without downloading them?
Re:Where can i browse online through the source? (Score:2, Informative)
The highest it goes is 2.6.1. But it has all the architectures.
Stable? (Score:4, Informative)
For example:
- The conversion to ALSA works great, but the modules for OSS compatibility segfault whenever an app tries to use them. Segfaults in the kernel are fun! There is pretty much nothing to do but reboot after that.
- Firewire and sbp2 support is completely broken. Ironically this has, I believe, more from "experimental" in 2.4 to a normal feature, yet it worked fine before and now doesn't work at all (the linux1394 forums forums reflect that I am not alone in this). Trying to copy data to sbp2 drives segfaults, hangs, and worse. Beware of connecting to 2.6 if you have a firewire drive with data you hold dear...
I'm sure there is more, but I am forced to return to the land of 2.4 most of the time. Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it, but I am questioning to what extent 2.6 should have been released, if even after four releases basic things are completely broken...
Re:Stable? (Score:5, Insightful)
(I, for one, use snd-pcm-oss with gstreamer all the time without issues, so the ALSA people would definitely be interested in a bug report from you. No clue about the ieee1394 issues; obviously it works for someone, though, or it wouldn't have been released without being marked EXPERIMENTAL.)
Re:Stable? (Score:5, Informative)
Firewire problems. (Score:2, Informative)
So, my advice is, try the latest kernel with the latest subversion tree from the linux1394.org website. Hopefully, that will solve your problems. 8)
Re:Stable? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, as of 2.6.3 or so they actually started working mostly normally for me. It detects all the drives and I don't have to go through the whole disconnect/reconnect routine every time I boot up. I haven't had any time-out errors like what used to plague the system. Not to say that is fixed, I haven't tried a full fschk on a large ext2 drive recently. That used to always fail with timeout errors and would completely bork the drive.
Interesting that other people are now having problems. All version previous to 2.6.3 were a huge pain in the ass for me to use.
So I guess I can continue my rant on how Ben Collins doesn't seem like a very good programmer (or he has too much on his plate or something). I wish someone with more time (or more talented) would once and for all fix the damn 1394/sbp2 system.
Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it
Well it depends. I'm sure as usual I'll catch more flak for saying the drivers suck and that I should write them myself. However, I just don't have time to learn all those subsystems. Nor do I want to use precious brain power on commodity items like that. Drivers should "just work", I don't care how they work. Remember, that's just my personal desires. I like application programming and I'm good at it because I'm dedicated to it (just like drivers writers like doing their thing).
The reason I think complaining is OK is because I don't think you should write software if it's going to be half-assed. Even if it's free/volunteer work. Because if you do, it might keep someone else that wouldn't do a half-assed job from working on it. They think you're taking care of it or "it works good enough" and it just sits there and rots while you diddle around.
Re:Stable? (Score:2)
Daniel
Always drivers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Such things depends mostly on luck, since obviously it is the drivers that are problematic, and some hardware are owned by few kernel hackers, so hard-to-fix kinds of bugs in them can take much time to fix, while it is reasonable of Linus et al to start flagging the kernel as "stable" if it works on 50~75% of the machines.
It seems that there are more hardware companies than excellent kernel hackers for many operating systems (maybe even Windows), so driver quality will always be a problem on any OS for a long time to go...
Re:Stable? (Score:2)
Re:Stable? (Score:5, Informative)
I love the speed increases that the 2.6 kernel has achieved on the desktop (and for things like media: mplayer never bugs out with that charming "YOUR COMPUTER IS TOO SLOW" message anymore). However, I don't know if it can be considered even remotely stable. Since switching, my uptime has been a Windows like joke.
[...]
- Firewire and sbp2 support is completely broken. Ironically this has, I believe, more from "experimental" in 2.4 to a normal feature, yet it worked fine before and now doesn't work at all (the linux1394 forums forums reflect that I am not alone in this). Trying to copy data to sbp2 drives segfaults, hangs, and worse. Beware of connecting to 2.6 if you have a firewire drive with data you hold dear...
It's important to keep some perspective. Usually whenever anyone says something is full of bugs, they mean that they keep running into the same bug over and over. If you're having problems with Firewire, very likely you're running into one bug in your driver repeatedly. The other people complaining may have the same chipset and the same problem.
My point is that you can't make any generalizations to the entire kernel series (or even subsystem, like 1394) being more or less stable just because you encounter a single bug that you didn't used to. Look more closely at the oopses and your system logs, see where it's happening, file a good bug report. They'll probably have it fixed in a couple releases.
People use "stable" or "unstable" to mean a lot of different things:
...and #3 really needs to be qualified with "for me" or "with this exact hardware, doing this". Because otherwise, you're saying the whole series sucks because of a single bug. And very likely, a bug in a driver. When I read kernel traffic [kerneltraffic.org], lwn [lwn.net], or kernel trap [kerneltrap.org], I frequently see mention of fixing some unsafe coding practice...in the core kernel. Drivers are left for their maintainers to update. Some do so quickly and well. Some don't.
Ideally, a system would be so rock-solid that you would never run into even one stability or performance bug. But I don't think that's much more realistic for Linux 2.4 than it is for 2.6.
(This message is not just aimed at you. I see this a lot.)
Re:Stable? (Score:3, Informative)
The OSS drivers are marked deprecated.
The OSS compatibility modules are not deprecated. They are what allows OSS-based apps to run in an ALSA environment.
He is not having problems with the OSS drivers.
Re:Stable? (Score:3)
Yeah, rebooting once every two weeks is getting really really old.
802.11g support (Score:5, Informative)
Yes! Finally! (Score:2)
[PATCH] fix the disgronification build again after subarch memory breakage
The patch to check "disgronif=N" early broke by putting memdef (a variable which is only exported by subparse.c) into parse_memory_region_early().
Finally! I have been having so much trouble with the MIPS port because of a memory leak from the improper disgronification check since 2.6.3. This is a very crucial patch. Way to go!
Alan Smithee is going beyond films ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Installation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Installation? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Installation? (Score:2)
Re:Installation? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not specific to Ferdora, but it should be enough to get you through it. It looks pretty generic and is very similar to what I did before I began using Debian's kernel-package [sourceforge.net] system to manage my custom kernels (which BTW, is one of the best things about using Debian, especially if you are using more than one box).
You may want to familiarize your self with the command, and possible with the file (use in an xterm to read it) in order to be sure that you're not leaving out support for some of your hardware. Read the help file for anything you don't know about, and don't hesitate to read the device specific files for items that you might need (if they have them).
Be sure to use the Fedora users list [redhat.com] for questions that you can't figure out from the docs. I'm sure there's lots of helpful folk there. If it's anything like debian-user [debian.org] you'll have no problems getting prompt and helpful answers. (If anyone gives you an RTFM, follow the provided link if there is one, if they did not provide one, then list the docs you've already consulted and ask if there's something you've missed and where it might be). Using the lists is not scary and, despite the *ss-hats who think otherwise, RTFM is not an insult. You'll learn much faster if you read the material yourself and ask questions afterward.
Be sure to set up your to boot from more to one kernel (if you're using grub you'll need help from sonmeone else for this). Move your old kernel into the new place (usually, I use for this) so you'll have a working alternative if you screw things up.
Be patient, take your time, check everything twice. It take's quite a bit of time to do this the first few times, but once you know your way aroiund the kernel config you realize that it's realy not all that difficult.
Re:Installation? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.newtolinux.org.uk/tutorials/linuxker
It introduces all the basics of the kernel, including what it contains, and how to start playing around with modules. At the bottom there are some links to tutorials on compiling your kernel, and then setting up your bootloader.
In all, they should get you through all except odd problems.
DMA API changes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scheduler? (Score:3, Interesting)
I googled for a mandrake-specific bug but found nothing... Anyone else had the same problem?
Re:Scheduler? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scheduler? (Score:2)
Re:Scheduler? (Score:2)
I would strongly suggest looking at your install (fresh and not an upgrade right?)
and/or your hardware... maybe the 2.6 kernel + MDK10 uncovered something that is wrong?
Re:Scheduler? (Score:2)
Re:Scheduler? (Score:2)
Some people in this thread suggested preempt but honestly, in 2.6 I think its pretty much useless (I have it disabled in all my kernels). 2.6 doesn't seem to have the latency to require preempt.
They again, I'm one of "those people" that has a horribly tweaked out kernel. I'm running the w
DMA (Score:4, Interesting)
This has bitten me enough times in the past that I assume it any time a "media" file skips. Thanks for posting it first, from the rest of the comments it didn't occur to too many folks.
Bob-
version.h (Score:3, Interesting)
Made my ATI binary driver fail the compile, though by copying my 2.6.3 version.h file fixed it.
I thought the version.h file where used by several other prgograms that compiles against the kernel.
Am I missing something obvious here ?
Re:version.h (Score:5, Informative)
Re:version.h (Score:3, Informative)
Reiserfs (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure I could wipe and reformat the array, but the bugger is 100GB and my last restore took 48 hours.
Re:Reiserfs (Score:2)
If a user owns a file but can't access it: try copying it (as root), deleting the original and then renaming the copy to the original and with the original's chown/chmod values.
I did not test reiserfs this time round because I migrated my last two reiser partitions to xfs just before upgrading the kernel this morning.
I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
I'm halfway through configuring it when I noticed a message in an IRC channel that 2.6.5 has just been released.
Time to grab the latest patch file.
VM/swapd (Score:4, Interesting)
[PATCH] Narrow blk_congestion_wait races
[PATCH] kswapd throttling fixes - comment "The logic in balance_pgdat() is all bollixed up"
[PATCH] shrink_slab: math precision fix - comment "In shrink_slab(), do the multiply before the divide to avoid losing precision." !!!!
[PATCH] vmscan: avoid bogus throttling
[PATCH] fix the kswapd zone scanning algorithm
If we're weren't currently having VM issues with 2.4 (servers with 8gig+ memory) I wouldn't care. But we're seriously thinking of using 2.6 in production to resolve it. No, stop laughing, really.
Actually I don't think I'm going to read any more kernel changelogs. It's like being at a restaurant, sometimes you just don't want to know what's going on in the kitchen. Except with open source, the kitchen is more like a public urinal. And the food is one big shit sandwich that everone... ok I'll stop now.
Re:VM/swapd (Score:5, Funny)
Mini ITX & i2c (Score:4, Informative)
Bit Torrent (Score:5, Informative)
Increase in crap (Score:3, Funny)
Again (Score:5, Interesting)
* X piece of hardware now works
* We made X faster
* X is more secure now
* X is more stable now
stuff like that is useful because I can grep for X and see if anything I use is changed. With the current changelogs I get stuff like.
I chose this at random What the hell does this mean? Obviously the netconsole return code was changed. 2 lines were added and two lines were removed. But wtf does this mean for the end user!!?! You know the guy who compiles and uses the kernel, but never hacks the source. Make a changelog for me!
Re:Again (Score:4, Funny)
The lack of detail, is intentional.
Re:Again (Score:5, Insightful)
In most other projects, this is called the "release notes".
Laptop Mode (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Laptop Mode (Score:3, Informative)
Not the same as -rc3 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the same as -rc3 (Score:2)
Re:Not the same as -rc3 (Score:2)
Linus gets a lot of his patches from other maintainers, like Andrew Morton and Benjamin Herrenschmidt, who have their own kernel trees which get lots of testing.
Re:Yeah !!! (Score:4, Informative)
No, since this is only the Linux kernel, it only fixes kernel bugs. However, if KDE didn't function properly because of bugs in the kernel, this could be solved by this new kernel release.
Re:Yeah !!! (Score:5, Funny)
No. The KDE bugs will be fixed in the next Gnome release.
Re:Cut and Paste (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is Slashdot a kernel.org announcement board? (Score:2)
It's Synaptics + USB on boot... (Score:2)
However, if I boot with a USB mouse plugged in, the touchpad stops working (no output at all if I cat the
I've seen things posted around about this, they tell you to look in the BIOS (no suitable option on mine) and there seems to be some talk on LKML, but I've seen no changes (thought it'd be fixed in 2.6.5, there are some promising things on the changelog).
Re:It's Synaptics + USB on boot... (Score:2)
Re:It's Synaptics + USB on boot... (Score:2)
Re:Nyah, nyah, nyah... (Score:2)
Nothing to do with "new make parameters" (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, make install can depend on the contents of
This has nothing to do with "new make parameters".