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."
KVM (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:GPU switching (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
The most exciting thing is (Score:5, Interesting)
that this kernel already got device IDs for next years Intel hardware. This is something completely new, since Intel so far had a much more closed policy and wouldn't have told device IDs prior to the chipset release.
Now there is a really good chance that driver code will make it into the distribution kernels until the new hardware will be released for mass production. So the chances that brand new hardware will work without any flaws in 2011 are higher than ever before.
Thanks to Intel for this change in their policy. This was a small step for Intel (since everybody "knows" that they will release new chips every year) but a giant leap for providing Linux hardware compatibility right "out-of-the-box".
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:2, Interesting)
Because as a Linux user I have become quite accustomed to things "just working".
Unfortunately, wireless destroys that notion, causing irritation (though my thinkpad T500 shows me how it is when the stuff does work, and it's great).
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to compile kernels, but stopped. There is no way that I, as a single administrator, can perform all the necessary testing to assure that there aren't any kernel problems. So now I don't, but now I get 100% uptime instead. I prefer the uptime to the performance.
Re:KVM (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Redhat's dropping of Xen for KVM is as much politics as anything else. In the eyes of business, Xen = Citrix, and if going for Xen, why not go for Citrix?
Personally, I'm very pleased with Xen except for the qemu IO performance. Setting the host's block device schedulers to noop (for linux guests) or deadline (for Windows guests) helps, but high host IO load still makes it very hard to do advertised features like instant failover using an NFS-hosted container.
Details details (Score:3, Interesting)
You may ask "why should SSH connections be restored?" and I'll reply: why should my apps and connections go down in the first place just because X goes down?
Heck even in windows when I kill "explorer.exe" my apps still keep running. I know it's not the same thing, but who cares when all the fanatics keep saying Linux is so stable, but when X goes down, I lose stuff.
In my experience a cli-based Linux system may be more stable than windows XP, but X can be less stable than Windows XP SP2/SP3. I've got X to lock up or abend a fair number of times, and have had to restart X, this causes me to lose unsaved work. For a Desktop User, it matters little if the rest of the O/S is still running merrily when X goes down and takes the GUI apps along with it.
Yes I could use stuff like "screen" instead and treat X as a glorified interface to multiple screen sessions, but that's pathetic.
Re:All Very Nice But... (Score:3, Interesting)
>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).
ATI/AMD abandoned those cards not only because they where old, but also specifically because the OSS drivers for them were complete, if not that fast. They wouldn't have dropped them otherwise.