Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents 305
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
Re:I for one... (Score:1, Insightful)
"charset=iso-8859-1"
Welcome to 2000. :|
Nice start... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite Vista's WDDM abilities in dealing with GPU RAM, but a nice start that people other than MS are actually taking GPU RAM allocation seriously beyond simple context swtiching.
It's Christmas! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:2009 (Score:2, Insightful)
This is really getting old. How do these guys still get modded funny?
Re:For me, it's something else (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's agree: "Linux" as implemented by the many distros right now is ugly out of the box!
I've actually never seen Linux, except for a few messages during boot. What's the shape of the invisible system that interfaces with your hardware?
Hint: You're talking about distros. We're talking about a kernel.
Re:For me, it's something else (Score:3, Insightful)
Multimedia handling is still wanting on Linux. To make matters worse, even Linux advocates will prefer to create video files on Adobe's [proprietary] flash instead of .ogg! This makes you wonder which master Linux fan-boys serve. Heck, we can't even eat our own food?
Playing flash videos as in downloaded videos with a .flv extension is no problem. In fact, I don't remember last I had trouble playing any codec in a normal container format like avi, mpg, mkv, mp4, mp3, aac and so on even though Blu-Ray/HDDVD playback still needs work. The problem is flash, the universal crap plugin. If all the video sites could start using a x-flashvideo mimetype for that and leave x-flash for flash games and other ugly stuff that needs the real flash, half the issue would be solved. Of course the HTML5 video tag would be even better, but...
Re:2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
The moderators are drunk on Christmas spirits.
Best Christmas Gift, in the Kernel way (Score:4, Insightful)
A new and single sound stack (valid for the next 10 years); with the added promise of discontinuing (deleting from the main tree) all the others by 2010.
Re:2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because every year is the year of Linux. Its just funny that some people haven't realized it yet.
ext4 is stable enough -- for others (Score:3, Insightful)
Forgive me for being a cynic -- I am going to wait until others have really tested & debugged ext4 before I trust it with my own data.
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me put it to you in a way that should impress you: Kernel modesetting allows things like the Windows BSOD and the Mac Kernel Panic, which means that when your kernel dies you can get a direct, immediate error message with details.
Those STOP messages in BSODs are pretty important for figuring out what's wrong with Windows, I imagine with the open kernel of Linux, you could have much more detailed errors.
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:5, Insightful)
That really does not impress me.
You're not supposed to be impressed, you're supposed to be able to easily fix your graphics (or any other driver/configuration) setup with more-or-less your expected setup. Non-expert users will be impressed by that. Or at the very least less pissed off by the problem they're experiencing.
Cry me a river.
Yeah, fuck all those people who don't want to learn X configuration file formats off-by-heart! But I bet you'll be the first person bitching and moaning when vendor X doesn't provide Linux drivers and vendor Y's software doesn't support Linux. Newsflash genius, it's the masses that bring the recognition and the cash to make the vendors take notice. If you ever want Linux to do all those things that "Year of Linux" spouters have been droning on about for the last decade you're going to have to realise that making Linux useable, maintainable, and fixable by average Joe's with as little fuss as possible is the only thing that matters to the long term future of Linux as a desktop OS.
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:5, Insightful)
This allows people who are not so technically proficient to fix their computer without having to resort to using a command line.
Cry me a river.
May you be forced to debug some WTF message without any browser but lynx to help you. Of course, you're probably among the 1% that knows that lynx exists and is able to navigate your way to google and find the answers without a mouse to click. Great that you're built that way, but l33tnix is over there ------------> and the rest us of would like a system that isn't more arcane and user-unfriendly than necessary.
Not sure about GEM (Score:2, Insightful)
Im not so sure about putting graphics stuff in the kernel? Why? Why not make it a part of X and thus platform independant. Now we will have a class of drivers locked to linux. Great, just what we need, incompatabilities.
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:3, Insightful)
No problem. Just add "nokms" parameter to the kernel command line and it'll start kernel without kernel mode-setting support, in a plain old console.
Re:For me, it's something else (Score:3, Insightful)
Flamebait? No way. I've heard a global estimate of 30,000,000 desktop Linux users versus several billion "hidden" Linux devices, from servers routers to televisions to cell phones. This story is about the 99% of Linux computers that don't have a desktop interface and where such a thing wouldn't even make sense. That's why I said the OP was off-topic - we're not discussing anything remotely related to a GUI or other user interface.
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:1, Insightful)
They're not trying to impress _you_. They're trying to solve the real world problems they're facing.
Re:Best Christmas Gift, in the Kernel way (Score:1, Insightful)
Ummm... looks like ALSA is what you want and will be around for the foreseeable future. If you're talking about pulse, it's a user-space application that allows a much richer set of controls over system sound (i.e. redirect it over the network, per-application control, etc).
OSS has also been removed AFAIK except with respect to maintaining an OSS-compatability layer overtop of ALSA for old non-ALSA drivers.
Re:Nice start... (Score:5, Insightful)
In Vista, the DWM prevents GDI commands from being accelerated, which represents a regression relative to XP. The compositing does mean that moving windows can be smoother, but when the contents of the window change, Vista is liable to be slower (in addition to using twice as much memory for that window due to a pixel format mismatch between DirectX and GDI). Thus, legacy applications are not likely to be able to draw any faster on Vista than on XP.
Compare this with Quartz 2d Extreme, now known as Quartz GL (and not abandoned as you say). Existing applications can have their drawing accelerated at the cost of a potential for glitches or performance problems (due to limited bandwidth from the CPU to the GPU), and new applications can enable acceleration at the discretion of the developer.
Re:For me, it's something else (Score:4, Insightful)
With Linux, you first have to look for those Microsoft web fonts before you call a potential convert to have a look!
That's never been my experiance (I stopped installing MS TrueType fonts when I realized they didn't do anything for me), but there is <whisper>Red Hat's Liberation fonts</whisper>
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
You must be new here..
Re:To clear somethings up (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you can use a LiveCD to fix your linux install...
While it's rare to require the command line on windows, this is primarily because the cli isn't powerful enough to make it viable for most tasks.
Most tasks in linux are possible without the CLI too, but when you ask an expert for advice they will often tell you the CLI way because it's usually easier to explain... Trying to baby someone through a gui where they might have changed the color scheme or moved things around is very difficult, telling someone "type this" or giving them some text to copy/paste is much easier, assuming they can read.
It's not uncommon to require registry editing to fix windows problems, a task which is more arcane and complicated than anything on linux... The CLI on linux has man pages and help flags for individual commands, and text files you might need to edit usually have helpful comments... What does the registry have? a bunch of arbitrary text strings and undocumented numbers?
Re:It's Christmas! (Score:3, Insightful)
What do I do if my family (i.e. wife) and frieds are all compiling the new kernel already, and the only food in the vicinity is a half-empty pizza box on top of my PC?
Re:Nice start... (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? What more do you need for preemptive multitasking than a timer interrupt ?
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand how it's apparently so fashionable on /. to make disgusting "jokes" about horrific things.
Probably 'cause the best choice in dealing with a horrific situation boils down to humor. The other choices being uselessly wailing, freaking out, or other emotional responses that do nothing to change or improve the situation. Finding the humor, however dark, and getting a chuckle is probably the best defense mechanism we humans have ever developed to stress...