Linux 2.6.34 Released 268
diegocg writes "Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version adds two new filesystem, the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware balloon driver, the 'kprobes jump' optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the 'perf lock' tool, cross-platform analysis support), several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (RFC 5082) and private VLAN proxy arp (RFC 3069) support, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements. See the full changelog here."
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
Erm, quite a lot? Intel use it as one of their distinguishing factors between upper and lower tier chips (albeit one that they put in data sheets but don't make overly obvious).
Re:GPU switching (Score:4, Informative)
How do you restart X without affecting all your GUI apps? If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.
If you are using something like Gnome or KDE, it can probably save your GUI session. Individual applications will have to deal with their contents, but many of them already do that. At least Firefox and Openoffice can restore their sessions after being terminated.
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the RT2500 chipset is proprietary, closed-source that's "maintained" by a Taiwanese manufacturer who doesn't care about his users at all and only wants to sell cheap hardware and as much of it as possible.
Why would you get quality, polished drivers that are updated to support newer paradigms in newer kernels if the manufacturer isn't cooperating?
I think it's magic that these drivers work at all.
Next time, buy better kit with a reputable mfr that cares about linux support.
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance
KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
Xen doesn't get all the hype. From what I've seen everyone is ditching xen and redhat is leading the way. Not that I mean to imply that xen deserves to get ditched, it's great too.
Re:GPU switching (Score:2, Informative)
If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.
For some people, "only having to restart X" will only save a bit of time over rebooting the whole laptop, reconfiguring bios etc.
Not all laptops have a BIOS configuration that allows you to choose the GPU (ASUS UL series for instance). On mine, I had to change the SATA operation mode to have the second GPU work, but this in turn meant a severe performance degradation on my SSD. Without that (deficient) improvisation, I would not have been able to use the second GPU at all!
Besides, logging out of your desktop and then logging in again is surely better than what you suggest?
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure you are disappointed that your 200Mhz Pentium Pro doesn't support vt-x, but the rest of the world owns (or will soon purchase) processors that do. To see what I mean, just go to newegg.com. 63 out of the 76 (83%) desktop-class [newegg.com] processors they sell have virtualization technology built in. 78 out of the 80 (98%) of the server-class [newegg.com] (ones that really matter) processors they sell support it.
And, if you still don't believe me, check out this page [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia for a list of the Intel processors that support VT-X. Among the crapload of processors listed, you'll notice that 100% of their newest, i3, i5 and i7 processors have virtualization support.
Re:I'm not impressed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:KVM (Score:3, Informative)
If you want an inexpensive chip, you should carefully check Intel's support for virtualization - by example, some of the E7400 and E7500 had it, some didn't. Same for E5400 and E5300 (some have it, some don't).
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:3, Informative)
Generally Linux works very well.
For me the two biggest problems seems to be wifi & graphics cards.
ATI decided my r300-based card was legacy and discontinued it via the closed-sources drivers. I'm screwed(thankfully the open source drivers are ok but nowhere near as fast).
RT2500 - I could download the source of the serialmonkey drivers and compile them. Great it works fine and did that with every distro upgrade.
Then these drivers were abandoned and all focus is now on the in-kernel version and stability has suffered ever since.
I would have thought the maintainers could have adapted the legacy driver to work with the new kernel - even as a temporary solution.
Then again Linux is a "server" OS and seen that way from the kernel maintainers.
Re:GPU switching (Score:1, Informative)
Well, AFAIK, until veeery recently (Still beta I think) you basically have to do the same on windows. Close all apps and restart the desktop.
Don't know about other configs, but on laptop with ATI graphics and Windows 7 the switch between discrete and integrated graphics is seamless. No need to close anything down or restart anything, open windows stay open. It can also be set on auto, controlled by battery level. And it has been working like this at least since Windows 7 launched last October.
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but then you have dick moves like my CPU supporting VT (AMD Neo) but being disabled by the Bios with no option to enable it. Thanks HP!
Re:Excellent (Score:2, Informative)
Huh? You are running unreleased kernels, you _admit_ that you have "data corruptions issues" and you claim "rock stable"?
What idiot runs beta kernels on production servers? I'm glad you aren't working for me, because I'd fire your ass for doing this.
Production servers are NOT the place to run beta kernels.
And you are complaining because your company is going with Windows "because of a few outages"? How do you know that it wasn't a kernel bug triggered by that hardware configuration? Your laptop has different hardware than your servers, you simply cannot assume that since it runs fine on your laptop that it will also be fine on the server.
People like you annoy me. "Most performance" does NOT equal good business. The most important thing to a business is total reliability. Play with the new stuff on a test system, not on a production system
Re:KVM (Score:1, Informative)
*sigh* To everyone complaining about the shitty processors they got stuck with, I just want to say that for the past three (at least) years, I've been especially careful to make sure that the ones I bought had VT support. If you didn't do the same then maybe you didn't really need it that much to begin with.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
Because I've heard the exact same thing from people who actually believe it and have done it at their job. It is a comment made by a young, inexperienced person (I can't call them an administrator) who doesn't have the experience to understand the problems with doing this.
Re:GPU switching (Score:2, Informative)
In KDE, System Settings -> Advanced -> Session Manager -> On Login, Restore Manually Saved Session. After that, you can save your session state from the logout menu or, alternatively, using a shellscript that loops every 30s or so and does
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
Because (a) it is Monday morning, and (b) Sturgeon's law applies to /. posters too.
And, unfortunately, (c) there are idiots like that out there. But they generally don't change their posting prefs to AC when bragging about their latest folly...
Whooosh (Score:1, Informative)
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, actually, Ralink has for a long time been providing documentation to open source developers writing drivers for their devices, without requiring an NDA.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to trot out Ubuntu as an example, but why do you think they have Long Term Support releases? High availability production servers are not expected to run Ubuntu Server 9.10; It has a lot of patches which may break features which worked in previous versions (just look at the list of dependencies removed when you upgrade). I would expect a significant number of those servers to be running 8.04 LTS, and to potentially upgrade to 10.04.1 when it becomes available (the LTS version of LL still being relatively new and untested).
There's a hot GPU offloading support as well (Score:3, Informative)
There's experimental support for 'hotswitching' called 'PRIME' (for obvious reasons :) ).
See here: http://airlied.livejournal.com/71734.html [livejournal.com]
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:2, Informative)
"..mock you back into the Stone.."
Yeah, much like your attitude and you live-up to the narky-sterotypical "open source" kid who put people (and businesses) off Linux altogether.
I would love to fix the source myself but two things hold me back:
(1) I just do not know enough about wifi & various chipsets to do something about it
(2) Unfortunately, I do not have an infinite amount of time to dedicate to the rt2500 problems (I have other obligations in "meat" space - e.g. partner, kids and full-time job)
Unfortunately I have wasted precious moments replying to you post instead.
FWIW: I am extremely grateful to people who develop the Linux kernel, use an open source license and the enormous amount of open-source software (e.g. Linus, Richard Stallman, the "faceless" people that spend their time writing software).
Because of them I am free from my dependency on Windows and actually have a realistic choice.
So basically rogerborg, F*** Off.
Re:a filesystem for flash devices (Score:2, Informative)
I'm more concerned that this is a slashvertisment for Linux. Slashdot used to be about news for nerds, stuff that mattered! How far it has fallen.
Um. Slashdot has been reporting new updates to the Linux kernel since almost day one.
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:5, Informative)
Except they did work, and worked better, in the last version. The kernel maintainers swapped out the working version for a flakey version, and now have made enough changes that the working version won't work even if you compile it in manually.
Did it occur to you to actually read the post you were replying to? This was in all there, not behind a link or anything.
Re:KVM (Score:2, Informative)
Where do you get the idea that Debian doesn't support Xen? I use it in Debian on a daily basis.
From my desktop running Squeeze:
I get the same return when running the same command on my laptop which runs Sid, and a couple of servers running Lenny. If Debian's abandoned Xen, then someone should tell the Debian devs about it, as they are still supporting it and seemingly have no thought of dropping for at least a couple of years seeing how Xen is in both Squeeze and Sid.
If I had not made the search look specifically for packages that include xen- it would have showed the kernels that support dom0 and many other packages related Xen, but then the list would have been too long for posting here.
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
Whereas Xen is nominally controlled by Citrix.
Either way, both are GPL and both are compatible with libvirt so it seems a moot point. Use whatever your distro comes with.
What I really want is OpenVZ in the Kernel. Sometimes, I just want a lightweight VM...
Re:Excellent (Score:1, Informative)
Original AC here ;) Well, what do you expect of someone who names himself linuxgurugamer? Linux users are such cute gullible creatures. Anyway, I got my free lunch. Made a bet with a co-worker that I could successfully troll the newest article on Slashdot; the fact that it was about a kernel release just made it so much easier.
Re:The most exciting thing is (Score:1, Informative)
Intel has been active with the linux kernel for a number of years and done this sort of thing for a long time. Where have you been?
Re:KVM (Score:3, Informative)
The E6500, for instance, supposedly a solid business-class laptop, was announced August 12, 2008. As of January 25, 2010, it had enjoyed its twentieth BIOS update.
Re:KVM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are inferior to Linux servers in any way. (Well, "any" way is an overstatement, but any practical way.)
You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are as good as Linux servers in every practical way. Linux has advantages beyond cost. For some large organizations, like Google, being able to tinker with the software is essential. For other organizations, some particular feature of Linux might be essential: like DRDB, or support for some application, or good software RAID (much better than Windows from what I've heard), or (soon) btrfs, or performance on their particular workload.
If Windows Server were really as good as Linux in every "practical" way, only the cash-strapped would use Linux. That's simply not the case. The only top websites that use Windows, for example, are owned by Microsoft. On the other side of things, most shared hosts support only Linux, although typical web apps are completely portable. Why is this? Some of these are big companies; they would pay if Windows were better. But Linux does have advantages over Windows. Usually different advantages to different people, but they're there.
I'm not dissing Windows Server. I'm sure it's a lot less hassle to work with unless you're a Linux guru, and it surely has some other great features that Linux doesn't. But Linux has real advantages too. If you deny that, I have no idea how you can explain its success.