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Software Linux

Linux 2.4.22 Stable Kernel Released 342

Posted by simoniker from the latest-and-greatest dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Marcelo Tosatti has officially released another stable 2.4 Linux kernel. 2.4.22 was released early this morning and includes a lengthy list of fixes. It follows the last stable kernel in this tree, 2.4.21, by a little over two months."
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Linux 2.4.22 Stable Kernel Released More

Linux 2.4.22 Stable Kernel Released

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  • ready to go.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:45PM (#6786208)
    *downloads and sends check to SCO*
    • Yeah, the number are meaningless. We're working on a plan to renumber the entire kernel back to 1.X.Y since SCO said that the problems showed up after 2.2 . Stay tuned! And don't forget to check your paypal accounts for your compensation for coordinating the SCO attack. Many thanks to all!

  • 2.4 VS 2.6 Performance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hornsby ( 63501 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:46PM (#6786215) Homepage
    I'm curious if anybody has experienced dramatic performance increases running X when switching from 2.4 to the 2.6 testing branch of the kernel.

    • Re:2.4 VS 2.6 Performance (Score:5, Informative)

      by daserver ( 524964 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:53PM (#6786283) Homepage
      I've been running the 2.6 test for a while and the latest O1int patches from con have really made this a pleasure for desktop users. 2.6-test3-mm2 had massive skips when playing xmms and untaring, like 2.4 also has on my machine. But 2.6-test4-mm1 completely fixed this. I have not had a skip yet. Please not that this is from normal usage.
    • I have a friend who's mouse ended up moving across the screen almost 10 times faster than usual with 2.6-test2.

      We joked about the 1000% increase in performance.
    • I switched from linux-2.4.20-gentoo1 to linux-2.6.0-test3-mm3 and X seems much more responsive.. no more jumpy mouse cursors, and I no longer have a problem with memory leaks.

      Switching to ALSA from OSS is cool, I suppose.. though I don't notice any benefits from it yet, and I'm waiting to see what the sysfs is all about.

      Anyway, things are working better than they did before. I would recommend upgrading to 2.6 as soon as its released.
      • I'm running the current 2.4.x release that Gentoo has and I tried with the preemptive kernel options, but it only seemed to break a lot of modules. Even deleting the modules folder and rebuilding caused many of the modules to fail on startup saying that it could not find the preempt function (something like that)make clean / make mrproper didn't help either so I'll wait to 2.6 is gold before messing with it again.
        • I'm running the current 2.4.x release that Gentoo has and I tried with the preemptive kernel options, but it only seemed to break a lot of modules. Even deleting the modules folder and rebuilding caused many of the modules to fail on startup saying that it could not find the preempt function (something like that)make clean / make mrproper didn't help either so I'll wait to 2.6 is gold before messing with it again.

          You must not be building or installing correctly. Perhaps the ebuild scripts are broken, or

    • Re:2.4 VS 2.6 Performance (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 955301 ( 209856 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:59PM (#6786355) Journal
      Absolutely! I'm not sure how to qualify it other than to say that X comes up more aggressively, it's more responsive to user input, and I haven't had any nasty spills with test3 so far.

      It's probably not the smartest thing I've done running on a test kernel for my work notebook, but the added functionality including support for all of the hardware on a Sager 4760 (save the build in vid camera) makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

      It's just a shame that the Cisco VPN client isn't out for 2.6 (that I'm aware of - please correct me if I'm wrong). Otherwise I would be all set.

    • I use:

      emilio@ellugar:~$ uname -a
      Linux ellugar 2.6.0-test3 #9 Wed Aug 20 15:21:40 CEST 2003 i686 GNU/Linux

      I can say 2.6 feels better (mainly from better disk I/O scheduling), but the process scheduler starves sometimes.

      Anyway, worth trying it, I think it's almost ready.
    • Honestly, I saw no improvement after a stock Slackware 9 install and 2.6.0-test4-bk2. I would have kept using 2.6, but when I recompiled again to tweak options, I had module problems (there appears to be a bug involving serial devices being compiled as modules), so I switched back to Slackware's stock kernel. But I wasn't doing anything intensive for comparison, though.
    • Definitely better with the pre-emptive option. X is *much* more responsive with a kernel build going on. This is with 2.6.0-test4.
    • Check out this [kerneltrap.org] great writeup by Con Kolivas on the subject. We've got a lot of really great minds looking to improve interactivity in the kernel. Great stuff, and no doubt more to come.

  • So Many Kernels (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spencerian ( 465343 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:47PM (#6786231) Homepage Journal
    ...and no popcorn...!

    WTF is it with this machine I bought that doesn't give me my popcorn when I give it kernels?!

    Ah, forget it. I'll go back to closing and opening Windows and see if it's more likely I'll get some fresh air in the house.

  • torrents available (Score:5, Informative)

    by gordlea ( 258731 ) <jgordonlea@noSpAm.gmail.com> on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:52PM (#6786270)
    For those of you who use bittorrent, try:

    linux-2.4.22.tar.bz2 [garanterad.com]
    patch-2.4.22.bz2 [garanterad.com]

  • Most important fix. (Score:5, Funny)

    by bfl ( 619363 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:54PM (#6786293)
    Kai Makisara:
    o Change Kai Makisara's email address
    I was wondering when someone would get around to this.

  • Are we ever going to get hibernate? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:54PM (#6786295)
    Summary of changes from v2.4.22-rc2 to v2.4.22-rc3

    @lt;len.brown:intel.com>:
    o ACPI update
    o ACPI build fix
    o linux-acpi-2.4.22.patch

    • That's what keeps linux off my laptop fulltime. I simply got tired of monkeying with patches and scripts in order to get all my hardware working the way its supposed to. When ACPI become pretty much defacto a few years ago I was pretty worried because the entire world was going ACPI and linux didn't even have anything going yet. Flash forward to now and this widely used feature is overall still MIA for linux. Basically its totally hit or miss if your machine will work with ACPI and that's a huge problem.

      Th

      • Re:Are we ever going to get hibernate? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by zenyu ( 248067 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @05:44PM (#6788745)
        The problem from what I understand is there are so many iterations of it that the devs simply can't get the kernel to work with all of them. I can't fault them for that, but ACPI is as common as TCPIP now and this is one area where Linux has fallen way behind the curve. Having only some hardware work and only certain functions available just isn't good enough.

        As somebody who wrote an early user space cpu frequency scaling deamon, I think it's not just all the broken ACPI tables but also the fact that the intel engineers change the interface at ever minor iteration. Even with all the changes they still have very strange convetions such as numbering CPU's starting at 1. If you just want to last longer on batteries you can use the cpufreq deamon, it's a strange beast in 2.4, but makes some sense in 2.6 with the /sys filesystem interface. There is an effort to backport the /sys interface if like me your laptop doesn't like 2.6. When ACPI doesn't work there are also CPU only modules that don't rely on ACPI. The only hitch is that your laptop may not be enabled if no one has posted to the list that it works for them, cuz different motherboards require different voltages and may need longer times between frequency changes than the CPU does (memory bus lines, support chips, and power supply all effect these params.) This is one of the things ACPI is supposed to tell you but most BIOSes are very broken, which is why ACPI doesn't always work when it should.

        Once it's working though your Linux laptop can be both more responsive and last longer on batteries than Windows. Windows is very conservative in interpreting ACPI tables and also doesn't have a very flexible set of frequency scaling algorithms.

    • Re:Are we ever going to get hibernate? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @03:03PM (#6786974)
      Summary of changes from v2.4.22-rc2 to v2.4.22-rc3

      @lt;len.brown:intel.com>:
      o ACPI update
      o ACPI build fix
      o linux-acpi-2.4.22.patch
      What, you can't tell from these extremely descriptive release notes?


      Unfortunately, for most of the world, releasing a new kernel doesn't mean much until a distro releases it in a release. Why? Well, there is no way to tell what the hell is in a new kernel. OK, you could search the LKML, or wait for someone else to do some legwork and post the results of it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - whoever releases the kernel should take a few minutes and do a quick writeup of what is new in the kernel. Not "fixed bug in foo.c" but something a bit more descriptive. Is it so hard? I am not being an ingrate, but I don't get why the maintainers don't do this. Yeah, you could go with the "they're engineers, not doc people!" but who better to describe what is fixed than the people who fixed it? Are you telling me that these people are incapable of describing in a sentence or two what their fix does?


      No big deal I guess, and I am sure I'll get modded down for not drooling over a new kernel. But I'll bet 90% of the people who rave about it don't know what they are compiling.

      • Unfortunately, for most of the world, releasing a new kernel doesn't mean much until a distro releases it in a release.

        Sure it does. You take your old config do a 'make oldconfig' and it'll prompt you for the new features. Then you just compile and install as usual. It's easy.

  • New Kernel doesn't matter here. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deathcow ( 455995 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:55PM (#6786310)

    Mod me off-topic if you wish, I for one welcome our new off-topic overlords.

    We don't need a new kernel for now. The existing kernel has been highly stable in the types of jobs we throw at it. But that's not why it doesn't matter. Our director has finally handed down the "No more Linux installs" message. Here is the message:

    As some of you may know. SCO has a lawsuit filed against IBM for breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, etc. The bottom line of this disagreement is that SCO is accusing IBM of including some of SCO's trade secrets (proprietary code) in its Linux kernel and that this source code has also been included in the Linux kernel available off the Internet.

    To top all of this off, the US Copyright Office awarded SCO a copyright to System IV Unix last month. SCO, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, acquired the patents, copyrights, etc to System IV Unix that was originally developed by Bell Labs in 1969. About this same time, SCO created a new division whose only purpose in life was to license Linux and Unix to end users.

    Because of all of this confusion, I have asked our legal eagles to give me an opinion as to whether or not our recent installation of Linux systems in the (our department name) places (our company name) in any sort of jeopardy. Frankly, I think that SCO is simply struggling for survival as it is in severe financial trouble. I also think that any rights SCO may have think it had at one time has been abrogated since SCO was (until last month) freely distributing Linux on its web site under the GNU General Public License.

    But until I receive an opinion from Legal, we will not deploy any more Linux systems.

    p.s. We are a 1200 employee telecommunications company, ISP, cable TV, long distance telephone, etc.

    • I wish we could charge the legal expenses for evaluating these types of things to SCO... their FUD costs us real money, especially when they're shown to be totally baseless.

      Too bad that once that's proven, there won't be an SCO to recover damages from. Oh well...

      MadCow.
      • No, but if the Justice Department gets off its ass and does its job properly, Darl McBribe and Chris Sontag will still be alive and kicking after SCO vanishes in a cloud of cmoke, and can therefore be sent to prison for fraud and racketeering.

        All the companies who have lost money from their FUD may not get their money back, but at least we'll all have the satisfaction of knowing Darl and Chris are getting some from Bubba.
    • p.s. We are a 1200 employee telecommunications company, ISP, cable TV, long distance telephone, etc.

      IOW, you're the devil incarnate.
      (joking, joking...)

      (sort of)

    • Re:New Kernel doesn't matter here. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:32PM (#6786613) Homepage
      so you are one of the small fish.

      I'm with a 2.2 million employee Telecommunications/ CABLE TV etc.. company and we are accelerating the deployment and installation of linux in the enterprise.

      the last 2 weeks have put the Top of the company in a position that they no longer can trust microsoft systems for the backbone of the company. Linux is being given the green light all over the place.

      SCO's lawsuit has zero effect on companies that have sharp upper management and employees. in fact the District vice president of sales mentioned to us in a meeting that the SCO lawsuit is to be considered a joke and ignored in our deployment research and plans.

      Sorry that your company is ran by people that do not get a complete picture before making business decisions, and best of luck to you.
      • 2.2 million employees?! Are you sure you mean company and not Country?
      • I'm with a 2.2 million employee Telecommunications/ CABLE TV etc.. company and we are accelerating the deployment and installation of linux in the enterprise.

        I'm with you! We have about 20,000 employees worldwide and, not only are we inexorably moving towards Linux on all of our workstations (as CAD/CAE software is ported), but when Micosoft came around with threats and demands that we upgrade the entire company to Windows XP because they were no longer going to license NT to us, we told 'em to pack san

    • ftp.sco.com [sco.com] has linux-2.4.13-21S.src.rpm from their OpenLinux distribution. It's free, and still available as of this morning (after the DoS ended...) Depending on your taste in distributions, you'll probably have to repackage it to use with whatever applications you need, and I don't know if there are any critical fixes after that. Sure, it's not as much fun as running 2.6.wildly.unstable, but it'll let you run a reasonably modern production environment.
    • Interesting that I ran across this thread immediately after reading this article [cnn.com] about idiot bosses at CNN. Their conclusion? Leave.
  • I run Debian, what practical difference will this make if I install it? I use the system for office type tasks.
    Thanks
    • It won't. Really, if a kernel works for you, and you have no interest in upgrading it if a new release only contains bugfixes, don't. It would be different if there were serious security issues, but it's just a bugfixing-release (with speedtouch usb and crypto support added). Repeat after me: 'My Life Will Go On With An Older Kernel', there ya go...

  • Slowed to a Crawl (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, it's happened again. kernel.org just slowed to a crawl.

    Remember to use those mirrors [kernel.org], folks!

  • Sco License - Does it cover crashes? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ospirata ( 565063 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:01PM (#6786369)
    I wonder if I can tell SCO off because of the kernel panic I am getting with this new release. Btw, I own a SCO License

  • Small upgrade fee (Score:5, Funny)

    by DarlFromSCO ( 701080 ) <darlfromsco@maj[ ]s.net ['oro' in gap]> on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:01PM (#6786370) Homepage
    Hay, don't forget to pay us the small upgrade license fee.

  • For that desktop box, try the 2.6.0 kernels... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sonicattack ( 554038 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:01PM (#6786375) Homepage
    I've been running the -mm series of the 2.6.0-testX kernel since they started coming out, and I'd recommend anyone not running a critical system (where stability is of high importance) to try them out. Some of the main improvements easily noticeable are in the scheduling / Disk I/O areas, which makes interactive (desktop) usage much smoother. For instance, problems I've had with the 2.4 series where a system under high disk usage made the desktop jerky, and sometimes slowed down to a crawl, I have yet to see with these new kernels.

    Sure, I've stumbled upon an occasional bug in the process, and once after upgrading found the kernel unbootable, but with help from the kernel newsgroups, a quick fix could always be found. Besides that, I've found these kernels to be as stable as the 2.4-series..

    And, don't forget, the more people running the soon-to-be-stable kernel, reporting bugs as they are found, the ... sooner it'll be stable! :)
    • which makes interactive (desktop) usage much smoother
      Dude, are you using a Cavemanalon-negative-100 processor? I have a very humble system (450 Mhz K6, 256mb ram, 2.4 kernel), and I just don't see how it could get any more "smooth".

    • Re:For that desktop box, try the 2.6.0 kernels... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nvrrobx ( 71970 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @03:16PM (#6787108) Homepage
      I have to agree with you fully on this one.

      I'm running 2.6.0-test3-mm on my dual PIII 600 box. It's not a fast machine, but with 2.6.0 it feels downright snappy. (The machine is a Dell Precision 210M Workstation - 384 megs of PC100 RAM, a 5400 RPM hard drive, GeForce4 Ti 4200 card)

      The system as a whole feels a lot faster than it did with 2.4.x.. Of course, I have no real perf numbers to throw at you, but I'm really impressed with 2.6. VMware and WineX has some issues with 2.6 (CD-ROM access doesn't like to work correctly)

      Also, the new kernel build process is much more streamlined, and building a kernel doesn't seem to take as long. The output is even prettier. :)
    • I've thought about upgrading since I normally like to run the latest stuff (plus I'm hoping 2.6 will fix the broken SBP2 driver).

      However, trying to get all my settings into this new kernel was not so easy (it was quite painful upgrading to 2.4 also). I'm running on a big laptop so I have a lot of special case hardware that had to be tweeked. Now, I've been a Linux user since the kernel was at 0.97 or so and I remember thinking how complicated all those kernel options were. Jump forward to today and damn

  • Crypto API (Score:5, Interesting)

    by njchick ( 611256 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:02PM (#6786380) Journal
    For the first time we have cryptographic API in a stable released version of the Linux kernel. Until recently, cryptographic software could not be exported from the U.S. without a special permission. It took some time to explain to the government that the "bad guys" already have access to strong encryption. We have succeeded. Cryptographers, rejoice!

  • Cmedia Bug Fix (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:11PM (#6786469)
    Anyone know if the new kernel has been fixed for the C-Media 9738 AC97 Codec? Last time I checked Alan Cox "patched" this in 2.4.21 and my integrated sound didn't work. I know this has gotta be a pretty big problem.. my board was pretty popular (K7S6A)...

    • Re:Cmedia Bug Fix (Score:4, Informative)

      by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @03:50PM (#6787529)
      Changelog is your friend.
      Summary of changes from v2.4.22-pre5 to v2.4.22-pre6

      snip
      o fix a race in the plugin api for ac97
      o example ac97 plugin codec
      Then, a bit earlier (lower down in the Changelog) and also from Alan:
      o update AC97 codec core
      o switch cards to new ac97_audio
      o switch i810 to generalised digital out, new ac97
      o ac97 updates
      o update trident, fix printks, new ac97
      o Update via audio - fix problems esd, mpg321
      o update to new ac97_codec
      o update ac97 codec headers

  • Guide to installing a new linux kernel (Score:4, Informative)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:14PM (#6786483)
    This short guide [pc9.org] walks you through the steps used to compile and install a new 2.4 kernel.

  • Current bandwidth utilization 114.70 Mbit/s (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    *YAWN* come on /.
  • Okay, we've got a new kernel. That's cool. I've built kernels before in the past...in the past.

    Now with RH9, every time I try to make a custom kernal it pooches the system mightily. I'll lose video, or I won't get power, or it'll give LOTS of errors when starting up because I didn't have a Makefile just like Redhat's magic one.

    So how would a person compile 2.4.22 and still have the same support as whatever RH9 based build they're currently running?

    • Re:For those of us unenlightened (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrWhizBang ( 5333 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:41PM (#6786696) Homepage Journal
      Building a Custom Kernel [redhat.com].

      enjoy!

      i tried several times to compile a kernel on redhat until i realized that they have changed things a bit, and you need to follow their docs.

    • Re:For those of us unenlightened (Score:4, Informative)

      by digitalhermit ( 113459 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:44PM (#6786724) Homepage
      Since RedHat adds a bunch of patches you'll need to start with the Linus source that the RedHat kernel is based upon, then add the patches from that kernel to bring it up to the new.

      It's not exactly easy.

      There will be hundreds of files that change from the stock kernel to the RedHat kernel. Then there are the hundreds more that change from the stock release to the next stock release.

      Your best option is to use a kernel from the RedHat beta releases then recompile it for the current. These will *usually* work, but there are no guarantees. It's pretty simple to rebuild a kernel RPM:

      rpmbuild --rebuild --target=athlon kernel-2.4.22-20.9.src.rpm

  • 2.6.0-test4 out too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by evilned ( 146392 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:25PM (#6786570) Homepage
    Just saw that 2.6.0-test4 is out. Been using test-3 with a patch akmp patch for the APIC on the nforce2, and have loved the results. X is more responsive, sound is much less likely to skip when the disk is in use. Havent found out if they included that patch in test-4, so if anyone knows, please reply.

  • Why why why? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is this some evil plot by SCO? Why have we slashdotted kernel.org?? OH THE HUMANITY!!

  • other fixes (Score:4, Funny)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:52PM (#6786836) Homepage

    Linux kernel. 2.4.22 was released early this morning and includes a lengthy list of fixes.

    all of which came from SCO's massive Pool of Intellectual Property.

  • How not to write a changelog entry (Score:3, Insightful)

    by achurch ( 201270 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @12:13AM (#6791397) Homepage

    Do you suppose they did anything with the AIC7xxx driver?

    o Aic7XXX and Aic79XX drivers
    o Aic79XX and Aic7xxx Drivers
    o Aic7XXX and Aic79XX Drivers
    o Aic7XXX and Aic79xx Drivers
    [...]
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic79xx Driver Update
    o Aic79xx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx and Aic79xx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx and Aic79xx driver Update
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic79xx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx and Aic79xx Driver Update
    o Aic7xxx Driver Update
    o Aic79xx Driver Update

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