Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Bug Upgrades Linux

Linux 3.0 Release Delayed 187

JustinRLynn writes "A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds indicates that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will have to wait due to the discovery of a 'subtle pathname lookup bug.' Linus indicates, 'We have a patch, we understand the problem, and it looks ObviouslyCorrect(tm), but I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux 3.0 Release Delayed

Comments Filter:
  • Chicken? (Score:2, Funny)

    by oldhack ( 1037484 )
    Release it now, you fool!
    • Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)

      by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:18PM (#36807428) Homepage Journal

      Project Manager: Did it build?
      Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
      Project Manager: Ship it!

      • Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)

        by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:32PM (#36807494)
        Your project managers make you get a completely clean build before you ship? How do you guys stay on schedule?
        • Re:Chicken? (Score:5, Funny)

          by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @12:19AM (#36807828) Homepage Journal

          Your project managers make you get a completely clean build before you ship? How do you guys stay on schedule?

          Simple enough, Firefox style: Any time you get a semi-clean build, you tag it. When you release, you simply bump the version number of the last tagged build. So what if you don't get half the features - it's a new version, as witnessed by the version number!

          • by topham ( 32406 )

            And with the new policy they increment the major version number every time they hit 'Build'.

        • I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.

          More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.

          • Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)

            by Canberra Bob ( 763479 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @03:11AM (#36808640) Journal

            I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.

            More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.

            That would explain why GNU/Hurd is such an excellent OS

            • RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.

              • by horza ( 87255 )

                RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.

                How are those mutually exclusive? And if somebody that writes a good chunk of emacs and gcc isn't a geek I'm not quite sure what your definition is. Ungrateful git.

                Phillip.

              • by Kjella ( 173770 )

                You don't come across a broken printer driver and say "Hey, I want to fix this. Where's the source code for it?" without being something of a geek. He wrote a Lisp interpreter, if that's not geeky then I don't know what is. I don't know how much of the GNU project he wrote himself, but I doubt he said "Everyone else you write the code, I'll lead." to get it started. And a life dedicated to software and source code, that sure sounds like a fanatic geek to me. Of course he's no Linus kind of geek, but then ag

      • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

        Project Manager: Did it build?
        Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
        Project Manager: Ship it!

        There doesn't seem to be a mod for '+1 sad but true'.

      • A number of months back I was trolled and trolled moderated at the very concept that anyone other than developers are typically responsible for late releases and buggy products. I fully expect a large number of people here literally had no clue your post was anything but serious - except for the fact it has been moderated funny.

        Sad.

  • by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:20PM (#36807434) Homepage

    I say push it live, let those damn n00bs grow some chest hair by referencing all their files by inode id.

  • by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:27PM (#36807478)

    LET'S SHIP IT!!!

  • No problem. (Score:5, Funny)

    by loxosceles ( 580563 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:42PM (#36807542)

    No problem. I'll just run GNU Hurd.

  • by DWMorse ( 1816016 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:55PM (#36807622) Homepage
    The shareholders will demand an answer for th ... wait.
  • by cervesaebraciator ( 2352888 ) on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:56PM (#36807632)
    Waiting for someone to take this as Linus Torvalds' recommendation of Google+...
    • Okay, that's the last time I will reply to anyone semi-famous in G+ where they are sure to have about 100 replies thereafter! Especially since G+ decides it wants to subscribe my email to the thread and email me each reply! Seriously, what the fuck is with that??!!
  • uname -ar > Linux trampel 3.0.0-rc7 ... but how is this possible? for i'm just a normal geek..?
  • Google Plus (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wizarth ( 785742 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @12:04AM (#36807676) Homepage

    I think the more important news here is - Linus uses Google+ for announcements now?

    Facebook really is in trouble now.

    • ... all moving to G+ and posting there instead will be the death of Facebook, but not a moment before
      • ... all moving to G+ and posting there instead will be the death of Facebook, but not a moment before

        I actually wouldn't mind if Facebook would survive as a place for Hollywood celebrities and such forth.
        All the people I don't want to have around not joining G+ would turn it into G++

    • It may as well go sit and cry in the dark corner with Myspace

    • Google should really start advertising G+ as "Facebook, but with people you actually care about".

    • Re:Google Plus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zebedeu ( 739988 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @07:14AM (#36809538)

      Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

      It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.

      • And like ftp replacing his need for hard drives, G+ replaces his needs for Twitter. People will twitter for him.

      • Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

        It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.

        What happened to mailing lists?

      • That was my impression as well. Facebook is actually ironically more private for me. The real Google+ competitor isn't Facebook, it's twitter.

        I noticed within a couple days that the posts on Google+ weren't similar to my Facebook news feed, they were identical to my Twitter feed.

        Google+ blows the doors off of Twitter and it accomplishes the same thing. It is built around the "Follow" philosophy instead of the "Friend" philosophy.

        As a consequence I don't think people will feel safe and private on Google

      • G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

        But if you are a true follower of Linus, you might really, really care that He, Linus, accepts you as a "friend".

    • It seems like everyone I know on Google+ are young tech people.... whom know someone that works at Google. No celebrities, no popular non-techs, etc... Just tech folks.

      And from that and the chatter of the invites and how the services are being used, it appears to me (unless Google puts + into general release ASAP) that Google+ is becoming an enhanced version of Slashdot.

      CmdrTaco, you've been warned...

  • Fair Enough (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jampola ( 1994582 )
    Reasons like " I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it" would never fly in a commercial environment. This is why I love Linux and pretty much anything open source. I know it's cliche but whaddyagunnado?
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I don't know what commercial environment you've been in, but in the places I've worked, release becomes hell because you have your bug list and someone (read a commitee) has gone through and labeled the "show stoppers" which are bugs deemed important enough to be fixed before the software can be released, and because of politics in the commitee, all but the most trivial become show stoppers. Upon fixing the last show stopper, the software then needs to go through regression at a minimum, and usually a comp

      • Re:Fair Enough (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ATMAvatar ( 648864 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @01:15AM (#36808120) Journal
        That depends on the balance of power in the organization. If sales/marketing have the bigger share of the power, QA is downsized or eliminated and the only "show stoppers" are unchecked feature boxes.
      • On some organizations all that process happen after some manager already sent the software to packaging, so you'll have an update before even the release.

        Of course, on other organizations both precedures run in parallel with some requisite changes. Those are the fun ones to work in.

  • Anyone want to post some links/info on what the bug actually was?

  • by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @12:46AM (#36808006)

    Sadly, I don't understand the explanation or what the patch changes.

    https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103

    • by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <flyingguy@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @02:00AM (#36808312)

      Ok, from my reading of the patch which could be WAY the fuck wrong BTW, I think it is a race condition between the unlinking of a file and returning the inode to the pool AND the CP command ( copy a file ) traversing the inode list. In other words the CP command was trying to stat a file that was partially unlinked do to the update of the node list still being in progress.

      If you still don't understand that don't feel bad, I had to read and re-read the note like 10 times before I probably got this explanation wrong.

      • by rdebath ( 884132 )

        And I think you're wrong, there's no "rm" involved.

        The removal is that the file details are being cleared from the memory cache and the cp is only looking in the cache for something it knew was there but hasn't locked yet. Because it wasn't locked another thread though it was a good candidate to be removed from the cache. The cp then assumed it was gone because something physically deleted it.

  • Don't rush. Get those nasty bugs squished. :)

  • by FrootLoops ( 1817694 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @01:04AM (#36808066)

    https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103 [lkml.org]

    [Posted by Theovon earlier, but I prefer a clickable link.]

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      The solution to this is really Obviously Correct; I don't know why they didn't post the bug in the summary:

      That -ENOENT in walk_component: isn't it assuming we found a negative
      dentry, before reaching the read_seqcount_retry which complete_walk
      (or nameidata_drop_rcu_last before 3.0) would use to confirm a successful
      lookup? And can't memory pressure prune a dentry, coming to dentry_kill
      which __d_drops to unhash before dentry_iput resets d_inode to NULL, but
      the dentry_rcuwalk_barrier between those is ineffective if the other end
      ignores the seqcount?

  • I bet this mysterious bug is actually caused by a build script trying to pry source code from the bottomless pit of horror that is Git. One could qualify that as an "incredibly subtle pathname lookup bug"...

    For everything besides committing, Git is horrible. This thing is actually making SourceSafe looks trusty and convenient.

    Now that the world is running on Linux (except for MySpace and GoDaddy) it is a crime to impede its evolution by using such a painful system. Down with Git, and long live Anything Else

    • That's IT! You are off Linus's Christmas list for sure buddy!

    • by macshit ( 157376 )

      It can take time for some people to get used to git ("wait the commands aren't exactly the same as CVS!? noooooooooo...").

      But once it clicks, you'll never want to go back.

      There's a good reason git is by far the most popular "new generation" source-control system (and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"). It's simply more powerful, more facile, more nimble than the competition.

    • by Serious Callers Only ( 1022605 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @03:37AM (#36808762)

      For everything besides committing, Git is horrible

      It would be nice to know what you had a problem with. People here could perhaps enlighten you as to why things aren't working out for you, or you could enlighten them as to why git is inferior. It has its flaws (chiefly obscure error messages), but I've found it a better fit than cvs and svn.

  • ... to wait until then! XD

  • ...A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds...

    When the fuck did this happen!?

  • You linked the wrong text. The link is to the google+ entry, and that is the text that should be highlighted.

    I bet your website requires javascript too.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting. -- T.H. White

Working...