Linux Kernel 2.6.35 Released 159
eldavojohn writes "Linus has announced the release of 2.6.35 for people to download and test after he found not a lot of changes between this week and last. The big features to look out for include: 'Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables' as well as various performance and graphics improvements. Linus also praised the community saying that 'regression changes only' after rc1 improved this time around and gave numbers to back it up saying 'in the 2.6.34 release, there were 3800 commits after -rc1, but in the current 35 release cycle we had less than 2000.' Good to see the process is becoming more refined and controlled after the first release candidate — hopefully there's no impending burnout."
Re:The year of... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well its definitely the year of linux so far down in the guts of your cellphone that you don't know its there..
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand why, but there are a ton of people out there that think OSS is OSS. You wonder why corporations are weary of OSS it's because of this.
I would wonder if they were, but they're clearly not. Corporations love Linux. It's less expensive and commodity. It frees them from expensive proprietary hardware vendors (Sun Sparc, HP Itanium, etc.) and lets them find the right x86/x86-64 servers for them. They can use free versions (e.g., CentOS) in some environments and paid enterprise versions (e.g., RHEL) in others. Most of the big enterprise packages (Oracle, DB/2, Websphere, JBoss, SAP, etc.) are available in Linux. The enterprise data center is a war between Linux and Windows (with the mainframe, AS/400, and other monotowers, though they are rarely growing).
The "SCO scare" is a thing of the past. I can tell you from personal experience after many years in the infrastructure world that the license headaches with Linux distros are nothing compared to the eternal headaches that I've had with companies like Veritas/Symantec, Oracle, etc.
Most of the decision-makers, technical architects, etc. in corporations do not operate at the "why ZFS is better" level. Does $LINUX_DISTRO support RAID, SAN multipath, and other common enterprise storage needs? Great. That's all we need. Frankly, while ZFS is great, it's not enough of a game changer to make someone buy Solaris over Linux.
Big Features? (Score:2, Insightful)
The big features to look out for include: "Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables"
I'm sure most or all of these mean nothing to 99%+ of Linux users. This isn't a big feature release; it's a small incremental improvement release.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:3, Insightful)
For a kiosk turnkey product, an extensible OS that can work for the server or desktop is probably not that useful. You're never going to want to run commodity software on it, you're never going to want to extend it, and you're never going to want to make use of the flexibility it has.
Rather, you'd be much more interested in a real-time OS that is compact (so that most of the memory can be used for double-buffering the video and buffering the network traffic and disk activity) and supports only the absolute key features you must have. In the end, it is cheaper to develop a few minor features for an OS kernel than to test a horribly large number of pathways, and for something like TiVo, users aren't going to care about the 99.999% of the time it works great, they're going to remember and whine about the 0.0001% it doesn't.
(I like Linux, I consider it to be one of the best OS' yet developed, and it would be great for a platform that was going to combine the elements of a cable box with a video recorder with a web browser, especially if it was then going to act as a central server for on-demand TV to the rest of the house. It could handle something like that with one bitmask tied behind its back. For something much more basic like decode-store-and-play, FreeRTOS is probably sufficient and the simpler code would make verification much easier.)
The man took a two week vacation twelve years ago. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we still have to talk about "burnout" every time we mention kernel maintenance?
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
You should only compare to what is already existing and mainstream, rather than what the theoretically best option is.
If its reliable in general use, and better than existing alternatives, its a winner in my books.
Re:Welcome... to the REAL world (NEO) (Score:5, Insightful)
Were I in their shoes, I would realise that commercial software comes with no more of a warranty than open source. Despite all the money they extract from you, commercial vendors provide you no warranty whatsoever and you have to agree to these terms before they will let you use the software.
You can also buy commercially supported versions of open source, there are a huge number of such products available now.
If you want a system so critical that it flies a plane then you typically write it in house (there aren't that many places that actually build planes). you test it extremely thoroughly (far more so than any commercial vendor does), and then you have multiple redundant backup systems too.
The reality is that many decision makers in business and government simply don't understand very much when it comes to technology, they buy into propaganda that open source is bad but will happily buy things like cisco asa firewalls without realising they run linux.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:0, Insightful)
I had two choices, I could keep my mouth shut and take the contract or I could speak the truth and blow my chances. I spoke up.
Sure, you could have used the money, but being able to brag about your sense of morality later on Slashdot makes up for it. A little sad in the long run though.
Re:once burned, twice shy (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
Unlike Microsoft or some other big softare company/project, Linux really has one controlling hand. If Linus goes kaput tomorrow, face in his wheaties, it would take a non-trivial period of time to get someone up to speed and filling his shoes.
Sure, there are other "non-current" linux developers/maintainers, and there are many others who have been doing the job in the past. But that's an entirely different development model than the 2.6 tree has been, and there's nobody who "fills in" for Torvalds when he wants to take a break. The man is 40; he's going to have to slow down sooner than later. He's certainly not keeping up his percentage of code commits, nevermind the level of code (though the quality, quite possibly). He's got 3 daughters and a wife; the man has to sleep at SOME point.
That said, I'm really pleased to see the decrease in regressions. I was starting to think that it was all open source OSes that were going down the shitter of late, but I am pleased Linux is still improving (though I do still consider the removal of the anticipatory scheduler a regression).
It just makes me uneasy that anything as big as Linux has such a small point of failure. It's possible I'm overlooking the importance of the distro kernel teams and other people who contribute, or overlooking something else, but as it stands now, his continued pivotal position makes me uneasy.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
Re:once burned, twice shy (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
There are at least a couple of good developers who could easily take over starting with the maintainer of the linux-next tree and if there were a huge disagreement then I'm sure the Linux foundation can step in if need be.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
You would only say that if you haven't been using Linux long enough to remember when it was exactly the way you wish for. Back in the 2.4.x / 2.5.x days, people got so tired of features taking so long to be ready they started backporting the changes from 2.5.x to 2.4.x essentially making both branches unstable. For all of the whining kernel releases are a lot less buggy with fewer distro deviations from mainline. And as a bonus features actually get better testing now because fewer changes need to be tested at a time.
After having lived through that transition I never want to go back.
Re:Big Features? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, in the same sense that "improved the reliability of the rear differential" means nothing to 99%+ of automobile owners.
Because we all have front wheel drive cars?
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:3, Insightful)
Its true though, we're a full-on microsoft shop and even though we use some poor products that are shown to be failing us, when I migrated some things to OSS (Visual source safe to Subversion comes immediately to mind), my bosses all insisted we evaluate all the commercial offerings first. They equate 'free' to 'crap'.
As it is, even though we migrated successfully and used it for nearly 2 years, they still went and bought the worst (IMHO) SCM I've ever had the misfortune to use (Serena Dimensions). It cost us well over £100k and we're considering moving back to SVN as soon as we can.
The problem is one of attitude and 'marketing'. Even though they were slapped in the face, then built themselves a wall and quickly walked right into it, they *still* think 'free' equals 'crap'. I don't think this is too unusual amongst the majority of business managers either.
We know better, these poor dears don't.
Re:my wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)
There are tons of places on the internet for that. Try monster.com. "Wanted: Linux kernel hacker."