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:Still no ZFS. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm increasingly wary of BtrFS, due to claims that there are fundamental design flaws. This does not mean I believe such claims (although I observe LWN's top file-system contributing journalist is quitting her job, her entire career path and her State) but it does mean that I want to see someone do a proper systematic analysis of the methods used and algorithms chosen. I'll probably use it anyway. Radical filesystem architecturing is hard and better options are almost always likely to exist - the question I have is how much impact this actually has on performance and safety of BtrFS. A little? A lot? About average for filesystems?
once burned, twice shy (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the people who fear Linus is going to burn out again spent too many years watching Seinfeld and deeply internalized "no hugging, no learning". Linus != George. OTOH, given his acidic tongue, he's probably not well suited to a career in stand up comedy. Anyone else think that Larry McVoy would make a good Kramer? </rimshot>
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile my TV, webcam and Blu-Ray players all appear to run Linux, as did the media players and cameras I used to work on. There are a ton of embedded Linux systems in all kinds of markets even when a real-time OS might make more sense.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be so sure of that. FUD is alive and well. Last summer I interviewed with a bank about a three month contract to move some data. When I asked them about the requirements for the platform/environment. I was told, flatly, that I could use anything that I wanted, as long as it wasn't open source. Open source means that anyone can see the flaws in the software and exploit them. 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.
LK
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked a defence contract once where the same policy applied. The argument there is they wanted to have somebody to sue when the planes fell out of the sky.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:3, Interesting)
If the OS is truly a commodity then it usually makes sense to go with the one that is the cheapest to acquire and also to maintain over the lifetime of the product. As both BSD and Linux cost the same to acquire the real question becomes:
Is it better to take advantage of the improvements others make to the OS knowing that any improvements you make have to be given up vs. the advantages of being able to keep your improvements secret knowing that your competitors can keep their improvements secret.
There is no right or wrong in business, just a balance-sheet. Different businesses will have different answers. However, philosophically... do you want to share nice or not?!
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
You mention the zfs github and kFreeBSD, but are you aware of Nexenta?
Honestly, I'm not sure why it's not as well acknowledged as kFreeBSD. The myopia involved there seems to be similar to what you make light of with your joke.
In the event that you really haven't heard of it, Nexenta is basically OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.
You get apt. No, it's not debian, but if we're looking at ZFS implementations, it's a far cry better than the alternatives (FreeBSD = buggy crap and you've got to use ports; OpenSolaris = you've got to use Solaris/shoehorn useable modern tools in).
I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
From where I'm sitting - user and admin of Linux for close to a decade, now - there's really not much of an advantage to using (or developing for) Linux over, say, FreeBSD other than the community of developers (including the install base, financial backing, etc.) and what that provides for you. I'm not sure if a BSD compatible license could ever get the financial support (from the likes of RedHat, IBM, Intel, etc.) Linux does because it could be 'turned against them', but for most people (administrators, developers, etc.) there's no inherent reason, one way or the other.
It just comes down to dogma.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
OpenSolaris was a dead platform the day Oracle bought Sun. You would be utterly insane to use it for anything important, today.
Re:Still no ZFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you switched for ZFS without carefully considering whether it would meaningfully help for your particular use cases, you probably spent a lot of money and effort for no gain.
For most people, ZFS is a cpu-sink that offers slightly more convenient volume management, at a high price for hardware overhead and latency.
But you have to use it on solaris, because their UFS infrastructure is so out of date, you can't support a reasonable number of spindles (without investing even MORE money in moving that problem off the box entirely).
It has some neat whizzy bits, but those whizzy bits are not at all free, and things most people seem to not need.
Sun and GPL (Score:2, Interesting)
Eh. Sun intentionally chose the license to be GPL incompatible.
This keeps being said. Do you have a source for this?
Re:once burned, twice shy (Score:1, Interesting)
I disagree. I lived through the stable 2.2, 2.4 kernel releases and I would love to go back to the stable/development branches. The 2.6 kernel has been much too flakey for my taste.
Re:my wishlist (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this what pthreads condition variables are for? Or can you explain what you want in more detail?
The main point is that it is now not easily possible to wait for both a file and a mutex, for example. A workaround could be waiting for a pipe, and writing to the pipe in a separate thread, but of course, this may become hairy.
From a user-space programmer's perspective, it would be nice to have the synchronization objects and file descriptors in the same id-space, but perhaps a simpler solution is possible.
Btw, thanks for the pointer to cgroups. I'm not sure if it entirely matches my needs, but I'll look into it.