Linux Kernel 2.6.24 Released

LinuxFan writes "Linus Torvalds has released the 2.6.24 Linux Kernel, noting that he and most of the other key Linux developers will be flying to a conference in Australia for the next week. As the whole team will be down under while the kernel is being tested by the masses, Linus added, "Let's hope it's a good one". What's new in the latest release includes an optimized CFQ scheduler, numerous new wireless drivers, tickless kernel support for the x86-64 and PPC architectures, and much more. Time to download and start compiling."

Re:Merge Window?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just wondering, should a core group be traveling together? What will the impact be if that plane impacts the ground?

Anti-Fragmentation?

[kripkenstein]

The updates most interesting to me are the anti-fragmentation patches,

Tests show that about 60-70% of physical memory can be allocated on a desktop after a few days uptime. In benchmarks and stress tests, it has been found that 80% of memory is available as contiguous blocks at the end of the test. To compare, a standard kernel was getting ~1% of memory as large pages on a desktop and about 8-12% of memory as large pages at the end of stress tests.

Perhaps someone can clarify exactly what this means? Reading the beginning, it talked about 4K pages, device drivers, and such, so I assumed it would just be relevant to the internal workings of the kernel. However, the quote I pasted above seems to indicate it might impact desktop performance as well.

I commonly see on my desktop, after several days uptime, that quite a lot of memory is being used (and I know how to ignore cache/buffers, as well as swapcache - that isn't the issue). Logging out and logging back in returns memory to reasonable levels (and the system becomes more responsive, but then I guess if I bought more memory I could accomplish that as well). Now, I've generally read that the problem was indeed memory fragmentation, e.g. here [gnome.org], but this would be internal fragmentation inside an app, and thus not relevant to the kernel, I believe? If someone can explain this issue I'd be grateful.

Re:Mirror list

[TeknoHog]

Is there an active and/or "official" Bittorrent site for Linux kernels? The local mirrors take some time to update, so global torrents would make more sense. Besides, people who download kernel sources are usually the kind that appreciate the benefits of BT and know how to use it.

Re:Catching up to Windows on power

[JasterBobaMereel]

What you do is you get the hardware manufacturers to write their device drivers to your specs so you can rely on devices going to sleep and waking up properly and reliably then you can write easily make the system consume very little power

The you write the system so that it uses more memory than you have and so swaps to disk constantly so that it uses huge amounts of power when working and only saves any power when the whole system goes to sleep ....

Re:Catching up to Windows on power

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you probably heard wrong. You might be confusing it with ACPI support - a standard which Windows does not implement correctly, which Microsoft give away defective tools for implementing (resulting in defective support for ACPI on many machines, particularly laptops), and which manufacturers support by testing against Windows only. It works in Windows only because hardware manufacturers make it work in Windows, but tends not to work so well in Linux.

In all other respects, Linux is way ahead on power consumption. Things like a tickless kernel, or tools like PowerTOP simply don't exist on Windows. If you have a laptop that's well supported under Linux, it'll tend to last a lot longer than it does under Windows.

Comparing to Mac OS X is a different matter entirely.