Linux 2.6.27 Out 452
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Change naming scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Download and build your own kernel..
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, before we can say "maintaining quality" we need to let the kernel live in the real world for a little bit. Let's make sure motherboards aren't catching fire and disks aren't walking before we get too carried away.
Re:'pure' flash devices (Score:5, Insightful)
So what kind of flash hardware is this for? Embedded devices, apparently. But maybe as flash storage becomes more common, more devices will support raw access?
Olympus' xD card format essentially specifies a direct connection between the NAND flash chips and its external interface.
It's weird and proprietary, yes. However, it's already being done, and there are arguments to be had for minimizing the amount of circuitry on the memory card itself. Interacting directly with Flash isn't as uncommon as you might think it, and can be of huge benefits for portable/embedded devices that require low power consumption.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Insightful)
Now every release is stable, and bugs are truly anomalies.
Or so the theory goes. Some of the early 2.6 releases were a bit dubious and I had my doubts when they announced there'd no longer be a development kernel but it seems to have settled in nicely now, don't know if it's developers making better code before including it in the kernel, Linus being stricter, closer cooperation wtih distros or more testing feedback but all the later ones have been quite good from what I understand. At any rate, the kernel isn't the most exciting part for me as it seems to have all the parts to run a nice desktop already - it's userspace drivers, X+extensions, Compiz and Gnome/KDE that make up most of my improvement wishlist...
ACPI (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
As an arrogant asshole, you need to know you are one of the core reasons why Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance by the masses because you're too good to stoop to a "newbie's" level.
That being said...nah, you're still an arrogant asshole.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:4, Insightful)
You should probably learn the difference between a root kit and a virus before you post to Slashdot in the future.
A fair number of people here actually have a clue, and thus do know the difference.
Might I recommend digg [digg.com] so that - in context - you sound like you have a clue?
Oh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF are you smoking? I've been running Debian on the desktop for years before Ubuntu ever existed.
So did I, as in I used to. Just because you're able to install the packages, doesn't make it any less true. I waited for a long time for basic niceties like a GUI installer, a nice splash screen when I didn't feel like reading the boot log and a million other smaller and bigger things that never came. And less than 18+ months release cycles, as testing could and did sometimes break, while stable was stuck in the stone age. I'm sorry but I have replaced Debian with something better, and I think you would see it too if you knew what you were missing.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, why not? It's not like slashdot could get any less useful on April Fools anyway, where other sites run one story slashdot is all wacky all day long.
Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a relaxing week-end with your wife and children.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry but I have replaced Debian with something better, and I think you would see it too if you knew what you were missing.
s/better/more appropriate
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to work quite well, and now you no longer have to meddle with dark arts and unsupported known-broken dev kernels to get recent hardware working. Win win all around IMO.
No more backporting/sideporting/up/down/leftporting to get current hardware code into current kernels, just all the dev community working on one codebase. Makes progress a lot more straightforward and apparently better/cleaner/less buggy.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because it's impossible to do on Windows and Mac. You need to wait until the next version of the entire operating system comes out, and then pay for that.
So yes, please switch so you don't even have the option of doing what a Linux user mentions casually in conversation. Less is better, right?
(WTF?)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Download and build your own kernel..
Or get Windows or Mac and never have to hear that.
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
I bet he bought his TV and refrigerator preassembled too.
(don't flame me bro, I also use Linux all the time, but you asked for it ;-))
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I looked about 9 months ago there were well over 3000 build options for the 2.6 kernel. Thats probably gone up a lot. I used to build my own kernels , anything up to 2.4 was do-able. But 2.6 is so complex with so many options which frankly mean nothing to me , that you would end up with a right dogs dinner thats far worse than anything the distributions could produce and you'll probably find you missed out some important functionality and/or dependency for something to work correctly and have to start again.
Re:Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Insightful)
Rejecting patches is a lot of work, especially given how many he has to reject.
Unless you're fine with people lobbing whatever they want into your kernel? :)
Re:Thats all very well in theory... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's a lot harder to do. Instead of following a spec, you now have to reverse engineer Windows and replicate its exact functionality, bug for bug.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah its incredibly difficult.
falcon ~ # emerge linux-uvc -pv
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild N ] media-video/linux-uvc-0.1.0_pre250 39 kB
Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 39 kB
Hang on a sec.....
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:1, Insightful)
Or get Windows or Mac and never have the ability to do that.
On Linux you don't have to. But you can.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with wanting things to 'work' sometimes. Some people have better things to do in the evening than trying to get working. Especially when they spend their day fixing other people's problems.
Sometimes it's fun to mess about with stuff like that sure, but sometimes you just want to know that your hardware to work with your OS. That's part of the reason that I use OSX at the moment.
Linux is a lot better these days than 5 years ago obviously: wireless support, and now improved webcam support. Those were 2 of my major issues last time I tried to move to Linux as my primary OS. I used Skype for videocalling a lot back then. The whole thing is a virtuous cycle - better default support means more users, means more OSS developers, third party application and driver support, and so on.. I'm looking forward to the day I can use Linux to play the latest games or use the latest devices as soon as they are released, rather than having to wait a couple of years for WINE or driver support to catch up enough.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:2, Insightful)
emerge linux-uvc -pv
Ah, how intuitive. Much easier than putting in the driver CD that comes with the hardware. Of course you fail to mention the finding and downloading the exact right kernel source for your drivers.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:3, Insightful)
Turns out the guy that packaged up X.org forgot to test it on anything other than his Intel GMA based laptop so he never noticed that it didn't work on any other graphics chip set, this apparently "wasn't a problem" though as they had a new version out 2 hours later.
Well after that I went to Debian because if they let bugs like that through who knows what else they'll break (say, my file system...). I have a clue about what I'm doing on my system so I actually find Debian easier to use, it doesn't automatically reconfigure anything, it's configs are all sane and most importantly things are tested.
Re:Re-buying peripherals (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't buy unsupported hardware in the first place?
If I were buying all new hardware, that would be feasible, but how do I know what operating systems I'm going to want to run on a given computer system several years ahead of time? There's a big difference between buying a new computer to run Linux and switching to Linux.
when I'm about to spend money on something new and shiny I usually check that I can actually use it.
I did. I was a full-time Windows user when I first bought that scanner, and the box said "works with Windows" so I bought it. Only later did I decide to switch to Linux.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of builing your own is to get a lean efficient kernel, not one that has everything including the sink bundled in plus hundreds of modules to build after.
You know, I spent most of a decade building "lean efficient kernels" a ruthlessly stripping them down to their minimal components.
Then I started benchmarking the results.
Now I just run with whatever Ubuntu ships with, knowing that it's 99% as "lean and efficient" as my best efforts and I automatically get new versions without screwing around with "make oldconfig".
If you want to build your own kernel for the sake of building your own kernel, great! It's fun and instructional. Just don't delude yourself into thinking it makes a measurable difference outside some very specific cases (like targeting an embedded system).
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
No, but my house and car came pre-assembled. I knew I would get modded to hell because I suggested Windows over Linux in that situation, but I did it anyway because it had to be said. The point I was trying to make is, it is fairly bad to expect somebody to recompile their operating system just to get their webcam working when other operating systems have gotten this right years ago. The OS version of a "swing voter" would have become a new Windows or Mac user as soon as they heard that. If you read my previous comment and think about it, you may realize it's not a slam on Linux. It's a slam on the overly used phrase, "then go build it yourself". As a person who has recompiled the kernel, introduced Linux to her children and friends, and actually installed Firefox on friends' computers, I have learned over time that telling them to recompile software to make it work just doesn't help the situation.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you did it in a bad way. Let's see how to explain this...
Every Linux user was a Linux newbie once. Being new to Linux does not make someone a bad person, nor does being confused by piles of jargon or the 20 different version numbers you have to face to understand the OS.
What you're doing is like going into a preschool and yelling, "Call that writing? You're such a n00b!" and then slapping the kids. It's not pleasant, necessary or acceptable, not even on the internet.
Besides, I'm not even sure the poster was even wrong, he may have just been using a weird terminology (Ubuntu 2.6.27 for the version of Ubuntu to use the 2.6.27 kernel).
In essence, you've not broken taboo, you've just been arrogant and uncivil. I suggest you break both habits forthwith.
re: nothing wrong with wanting it to just work.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's *exactly* my mentality these days, and yet sometimes, I almost feel guilty about it.
Honestly, I've worked in I.T. long enough now that I'm just kind of "burnt out" on what used to be the "thrill" or "challenge" of figuring out how to make an OS perform some function or other it claims to support.
I love Linux for the same "core reason" I loved it when I first started using it. It's great at consistently and reliably performing a task or set of tasks over and over again without failure. The downside is, the "pain" is usually all up-front, in hammering and prying everything into shape so it does what's required.
By contrast, an OS like Windows (or let's be fair here, even OS X Server) promises a lot of functionality that's just "a few mouse clicks away". And often, you can get some fairly complex thing up and running in minutes that way, but the "pain" comes unexpectedly, at random points in time down the road, when things don't *quite* work as expected, or some automatic update changes its behavior unexpectedly, or ??
But if I could have a "perfect world" of operating systems, I'd want one that has the "just click a few options to configure" ease, with the Linux-type reliability. I don't think we've ever really gotten there on the server side of things. On the workstation side, I think OS X is closer than anything else I've used - but again, it may never get 100% there with as many random possibilities a workstation user comes up with throughout their use of a "desktop" PC.
Re:Kernel changes I wanted in as of v1.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want a stable kernel module ABI, use an enterprise distro. They go to great lengths to preserve 3rd-party module binary compatibility, because their customers pay them to do this. The upstream kernel is not about to freeze innovation for your convenience.
Re:flaimebait? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
There is a noticeable difference in presenting information in a way that educates and informs the group at large of something that they may or may not realize, and posting the same information with demeaning and inflammatory statements that serve only to convey a false sense of superiority.
This is the latter.
While there might be a nugget of truth buried in there, it's obfuscated by the angry rhetoric.