Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released 273
An anonymous reader writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel: 'It's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time).' The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaces the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new Firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source-level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree."
What is this? (Score:5, Funny)
I've read & reread the linked articles, and not a single mention of the iPhone - and it's been over 48 hours since an iPhone story. Seriously - it's like slashdot's turned into a linux site, instead of an iPhone site.
Let's not forget our roots folks - just because linux is the big hype story today.
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you, but I do feel that there's a little too much redundancy in my nick. I mean, if I was called "mac fanboy", you'd assume whiney.
For that matter, if I was just called 'mac', everyone would read the implied 'whiney fanboy'
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Re:What is this? (Score:4, Informative)
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Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
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Whitney mac fanboy? Is that someone called whitney who's a mac fanboy? Or a fanboy of whitney macs? Either way, I'm going to assume you watched the bodyguard waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to many times
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Re:What is this? (Score:5, Funny)
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You must be new here, then
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SLUB much better than slab (Score:5, Funny)
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Savvy Llamas Understand Better.
Should Linus Use Buckshot?
Anybody (Score:3, Interesting)
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If anyone could shine a little light on this, I'd be quite pleased.
Re:Anybody (Score:4, Informative)
Second now there are less threads in the firewire subsystem, which is indeed good because kernel threads are really really a very stupid idea.
Last but not the least i have used TI firewire chipset with Basler IEE1394 cameras under Linux and trust me they knock teeth out of Windows Firewire stack.It was good and performed good even with two cameras working in real time image inspections.
I suspect the current stack is going to work atleast similar if not better, though i ll bet on it being better.This is a good sign also, as there is no point in patching things but point is in writing the whole messy thing again.And here we are.... hey wait TTY layer ...any takers? please :-)
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But is disk IO fixed on amd64? (Score:2, Informative)
I thought I was going crazy, being on 2.6.18 and discovering that any disk activity slows down the whole system, let alone accesses to any other disk.
Then I found a 19-page thread on the gentoo forums that says I'm not alone and it's not unique to a particular chipset:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 450.html [gentoo.org]
(with evidence that the deadline scheduler may alleviate _some_ of the problem but not the root cause)
And
Headline does not match the story (Score:3, Insightful)
Specific complaints should be stated as such instead of rubbish about it all being broken. The Gentoo thread quoted above is about people discovering that writing to optical drives is horribly slow and puts a lot of load on the CPU in comparison to dealing with hard disks - looking up ATAPI may have been a good move at that point inste
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http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 450.html [gentoo.org]
"... And of course all along I've been experiencing the slowdowns with the SATA (now back to IDE) disk access mentioned at the beginning of this thread."
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372 [kernel.org]
"... The only thing related to libata I can think of is NCQ interacting badly with io scheduler..."
"...Yes, and this means that the problem is getting worse with TCQ/NCQ enabled, but
it is not the root cause."
Thi
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I'd suggest http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372#c1 08 [kernel.org] and http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372#c1 12 [kernel.org] as the best summary of the kind of problem people are running into. There are no optical devices involved.
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So, why the trolling at the end of an otherwise good post? I'll quote Wikipedia for the people who have been living under a rock since 2.4:
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Re:But is disk IO fixed on amd64? (Score:4, Informative)
"Because Linus said so" is in fact not a particularly valid answer. Yes, Linus has the right to choose the development structure the kernel is now using, but that doesn't mean it is the best way to do it for everybody. dropping the distinction between "stable" and "development" versions was a sloppy, lazy move that simply pushed the responsibility for maintaining stable released off onto the distributors. That has essentially duplicated the work a hundred-fold, because each distribution must do the work themselves. We're told that this is a "better" arrangement, but it is clearly only better for Linus and the kernel developers, because they get to do less work and be lazy when it comes to making changes: "Want to rip out the allocator and replace it with a largely untested one? Sure, why not! Making sure everything works is the distributors problem, not ours!"
Except that the old system didn't work at all. There were just too many changes to stabilize in any reasonable amount of time and while the debugging was happening the 2.4.x kernel was becoming so badly out of date that people (and distros) tried to back port changes from the 2.5.x tree.
The result was TWO unstable kernel trees and the vendor trees had a tendency to be even worse. The old system would have left those people using SATA in a worse situation then they are in now. Keep in mind that SATA came out after 2.6.x so the drivers would right now be somewhere in the 2.7.x series kernel still waiting to be debugged and the stable maintainers would be forced to try and backport the SATA drivers once again resulting in two unstable kernels
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IMO there is nothing wrong with backporting new drivers (which should only affect people who use the hardware for which the new drivers are designed, not any other users of the kernel) into a stable kernel tree.
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IMO there is nothing wrong with backporting new drivers (which should only affect people who use the hardware for which the new drivers are designed, not any other users of the kernel) into a stable kernel tree.
Except that in this thread people have been blaming the SATA problems on the new development method but in this case there would have been no difference.
The downside to backporting was that the differences between 2.4.x and 2.5.x were so large that the driver interfaces had a tendency to be com
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It sounds to me like you don't remember the 2.4 kernel. D
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Slashdotted, use the cache: (Score:2, Informative)
Linux 3.0.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the hardware around. What features should Linux 3.0.0 have?
Re:Linux 3.0.0 (Score:5, Funny)
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Given the hardware around. What features should Linux 3.0.0 have?
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Thats next to impossible for a modern fairly efficient operating system. Why? Because kernels which run on handhelds , supercomputers and mainframes have different constraints in terms of memory, power management and similar technical terminological stuff :).
> * Transparent clustering. Run this process somewhere else with as much or as little user control is a required
Oh boy!!! this is how SMP kernels wor
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> * Built in support for virtual machines. Something like java in the kernel
This is what VMI (Virtual machine Interface) does right now in the kernel along with the KVM(kernel virtual machine) and please do not compare and OS with Java stuff. Java do not deserve to be compared to a highly performing kernel.
I don't think that's what he was talking about. KVM is used for hardware virtualization, not byte-code execution like the Java VM. That said, I don't understand what having the JVM built into the kernel would accomplish, besides giving slightly improving startup of Java apps and generally forcing the Kernel to consume more memory. It would also give rise to all the known problems of running multiple Java apps within the same VM instance, which is why the standard JVM doesn't do this already. I also don
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> * Transparent clustering. Run this process somewhere else with as much or as little user control is a required
Oh boy!!! this is how SMP kernels work when you run them on a multiprocessor systems.
But not when you have multiple discrete single CPU systems. Or multiple discrete multiprocessor systems.
...
Imagine all your machines automatically acted as a single box when they were connected to the LAN. Or other low latency interconnect like Infiniband.
I think the closest thing is Mosix:
http://www.mosix.org/txt_about.html [mosix.org]
Then you're on to the network queueing systems like NQS, PBS, Torque, Sun Grid Engine, Condor
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Though they gradually sneak into Linux anyway. So no big deal.
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It's going to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic.
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Linux 3.x wouldn't have to be compatible with Linux 2.x (that's the criterium for upping the major version number in the Linux kernel). So, we could have all sorts of exotic incompatible stuff :)
I personally would love to see Posix as a compatibility layer in a much reworked OS with a object-relational filesystem done right. But that won't be done in the next decade or so, so I won't hold my breath ;)
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Right now, ReiserFS is unsupported by many distributions because it's legacy "maintenance only" code. JFS is also not supported by many distributions (e.g. Kubuntu), I don't know why. And XFS is problematic [wikipedia.org]. I resorted to using ext3, which is just horrible from a performance point of view.
What I really wish is that we could have ZFS or Reiser4. However, those are unlikely for obvious reasons.
What... (Score:3, Interesting)
And you can shrink and grow them. And it has nice backup and fsck utilities... Oh, and it supports extended attributes and ACLs and all that good stuff. And it's faster than XFS.
So use it!
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Although it would be good if an application could be sandboxed simply by having a whitelist/blacklist of directory paths that it could access.
Crashing soon a kernel near you... (Score:5, Funny)
I notice the patches being tested include Reiser 4...suddenly the above warning appears a bit more sinister.
TCP Illinois congestion control. (Score:2)
Illinois Congestion control is helpful with network games as that tends to spike my connection.
Obligatory comment (Score:2, Funny)
eeeh, strike that.
Torrent File (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:What's SLUB? (Score:5, Informative)
There for you, help yourself.
BTW in short plain english, it adds some voodoo stuff to struct page, removes a lot of metadata cruft from the slab allocator, adds lesser and simple locking after removing most of locks which are not required because of the changes in the cache layer.
So if you are running your kernel on a huge farm of processors of the order of thousand(s), you ll find a remarkable memory saving, which is a big overhead in slab allocation.
HTH
Re:What's SLUB? (Score:5, Funny)
I believe that brings the amount of the Linux kernel containing Voodoo to 13%.
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Yeah, here's the breakdown of the 2.6.22-generic (Linus' kernel) source from krnl-magick-analyzer:
/usr/src/linux-2.6.22
$ krnl-magick-analyzer --percentages --nice-format
Linux Kernel Magick Analyzer v0.01 -- Monday, July 9, 2007 8:30 AM DST
Linux Kernel Version: 2.6.22
Path:
High Magick 10%
Santeria (w/o chicken sacrifices) 5%
Santeria (w/chicken sacrifices) 5%
Witchcraft 8%
Hoodoo 7%
Voodoo (Voudon) 13%
Daemonology 20%
Other 22%
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# cat
1: 10 5:5 8 7 13 20 0x00000022
--
GNU: A recursive acronym "GNU's Newbie Unix"
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Re:GPL v3 (Score:5, Funny)
- You can't use a CPU of the same manufacturer that has previously executed GPLv3 code in the same room as a computer running a Microsoft operating system. If you have exhausted all the alternatives and you still need to run your GPLv3-infected hardware in the same room, you can negate this by drawing a chalk circle around the machines running the MS software and sprinkling a ground-up printed copy of the GPLv3 over and around them. This is all standard as per Section 5.
- In the case the Richard Stallman's or any of his buddies' computer blows up (for any reason - read the license for full details), he's allowed to walk into your house and take your computer right off your desk and keep it, even if it has never run GPLv3 code!
- If left unattended, disks containing copies of the GPLv3 can become corrupted and mutate into GPVv3 (General Public Virus version 3), which will assimilate all carbon and silicon-based matter with in a 3 mile radius into a demonic, electronic, GPLv3 spreading zombie ox (or it might be a buffalo - that part is unclear).
This is why we should all boycott GPLv3. It is just too evil and virusy.
Wow; Informative? (Score:3, Insightful)
YOU are the troll (Score:2, Informative)
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Not sure why that is modded Insightful and just above that is another user asking which usb device would be best to buy for a linux box, but that is modded "off-topic." I remember when slashdot was about news for geeks and sharing information about geeky things for linux/bsd/etc.. Now it seems like its just about modding up snarky comments and crap articles about
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(turns out it is only 2.6.17)
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Do you know and understand all of the technology in your car? your cell phone?
Re:question on the wireless (Score:4, Informative)
I would recommend using one of the PCMCIA cards instead. Find one that uses the Anthros chipset. I picked up a D-LINK one that was recognised by Dapper Drake. I didn't need to install NDIS Wrapper of Network Manager. I don't remember the model number of the card, but setting it up was as easy as setting it up in Windows except I didn't need to use the setup CD that came with it. Dapper recognised it as an Unknown Wireless. Properties showed it has an Anthros chipset made by D-Link. From there I gave it a static IP on my LAN and plugged in the WEP key after picking my SSID from a list. I added some DNS listings and put in the gateway address of my router and I was online. There have been some difficulty with configuring many of the USB cards. Check the forums and purchase carefully.
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The purchasing part is hard to do when the same model comes with a different chipset each day, depending on constellations and sunspot activity.
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Either take your laptop in and test drive them (explain it to the salesman, especially if they are on comission.. A fit is a sale.), find a good restocking policy, or spemd little. My D-Link card that worked came from Goodwill. It pays to look.
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Re:Upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably true. I'm running Dapper because I have a life. I spend little time as a noob putzing with it. I'm more of an end user. I settled on Dapper because it is the LTS version so I wouldn't have to be on the 6 month upgrade cycle.
Anyway, in a couple years, I'll upgrade. In the meantime I'll enjoy the sunshine and warm weather, camping, etc. When rainy weather sets in and I have time to blow my install and learn how to recover it, I
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I'd be careful about anything with a Broadcom chip. There is a Broadcom driver for Linux, but it doesn't always work. The alternative is ndiswrapper which can somehow make a Windows driver work under Linux. My experience was that setting up ndiswrapper was not much fun. Not knocking ndiswrapper -- I'm utterly astounded that it works at all
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To beginning and average programmers, 'do not use goto' is the best advice to avoid problems.
But kernel hackers are hardly beginning or average programmers. They know very well when they can use goto without proble
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Yeah, too much of it results in spaghetti code.
But used well, it can compensate for the lack of some things in C. For example, exiting nested loops. In Perl you can say "last NAME", where NAME is the name you gave to the loop, and exit from the outer loop directly.
In C, if you avoid goto what results is a check in every loop to determine whether the inner loop decided that we've got to bail out. This is much uglier than just using goto in the first place, and more
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In a nutshell, yes. But there is an important exception - goto's are ok when you jump down in the code (similar to a break in the loop), usually to a piece that frees allocated storage and exits function. In the code you cite, dput_and_out commits information and exits the function. In a way it is kinda a replacement for try {} catch {}, but with multiple try {} clauses.
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State machines have more or less entirely unstructured control to start with. The goto is a natural expression of this. You can avoid the dreaded "goto" in this situation by using a switch statement in a loop, with the cases representing each state. However, this is slower than the goto, and really no easier to read
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http://www.linux.com/feature/115767 [linux.com]
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Or, just use whatever your favorite distribution publishes for you.
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Re:New wireless stack? Firewire stack? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And what's with the need to jump version numbers at the drop of a hat?
And why the need to tell someone else how to name their product, when you don't contribute to it at all?
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Not in the foreseeable future--Linus has decided not to do this. I would have thought you'd heard about this because the decision was made a long time ago and nobody's ever hinted that anyone's mind has changed.
Your question doesn't make sense. 2.6.x is not a "stable branch". You're using old terminology. Linus has decided that 2.6.x is the new development platfo
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Unless I missed something, everything they added is an optional replacement to what was already there. Don't use the new stuff if you don't want it.
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I, for one, haven't used a distro kernel (discounting LiveCDs) for 4+ years now. I love the discussion on Slashdot whenever a new kernel is released.