Linux 3.2 Has Been Released 271
diegocg writes "Linux 3.2 has been released. New features include support for Ext4 block size bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB, btrfs has added faster scrubbing, automatic backup of critical metadata and tools for manual inspection; the process scheduler has added support to set upper limits of CPU time; the desktop responsiveness in presence of heavy writes has been improved, TCP has been updated to include an algorithm which speeds up the recovery of connection after lost packets; the profiling tool 'perf top' has added support for live inspection of tasks and libraries. The Device Mapper has added support for 'thin provisioning' of storage, and a support for a new architecture has been added: Hexagon DSP processor from Qualcomm. New drivers and small improvements and fixes are also available in this release. Here's the full list of changes."
Popcorn loaded, commence fanatical BS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Waiting to see the usual fanatical wars over filesystems... people calling for the death of the EXT3/4 system.
Personally the whole fanatical thing seems a bit silly - who'd have ever thought that people would lynch each other over having different options for different purposes/tasks, the very core of the whole idea of what we do and strive for. I'm fine with ext4, thanks :)
Re:Popcorn loaded, commence fanatical BS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then what you should do is change you shell so rm is a functIon that moves stuff to the "trash" rather than compromise the on disk format of the file system so an operation "unlink" which is supposed to be destructive can be undone. Solve the problem in the correct place.
Re:Btrfs (Score:1, Insightful)
There's no fsck [kernel.org].. So unless you're 100% sure your Linux machine never crashes and your power supply is never interrupted - don't.
If this is the case, whats the fucking point really? BTRFS was heralded are the replacement for ZFS, but you are seriously telling me that after all this time, you can still lose a large amount of data and end up with a corrupt filesystem after such a trivial thing as a powerloss? Really? It seems like I am still stuck with FreeBSD and Solaris11/OpenIndiana if I want to use a decent filesystem, because even Windows hasn't had such issues in over a goddamn decade.
Re:Btrfs (Score:3, Insightful)
even Windows hasn't had such issues in over a goddamn decade.
Windows is not a filesystem. And that's only relevant if NTFS has the same features as ZFS: Ext doesn't have the same issues either.
Re:Btrfs (Score:5, Insightful)
The fucking point is to encourage beta-testers. Bleeding-edge users who know what they are doing and don't care about data loss are being offered the chance to test a new and interesting filesystem and (ab)use it in ways that upstream developers had not thought of, hopefully uncovering major bugs before the thing will get marked as feature-complete and enabled by default for new installs by major distros.
Re:Btrfs (Score:1, Insightful)
Windows may not be a filesystem, but it only ships with one sane choice of general-purpose filesystem, and that choice is NTFS.
In your opinion it's a sane FS.
... does not represent my opinion on anything. It simply is.. ..how things are.
Wait, what?
NTFS and windows are a pain in _my_ ass. That's an opinion.
Re:Btrfs (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen.
fsck's only job is to make that junk that was a filesystem look something like a filesystem again. Nothing in there about making it look like the particular filesystem you used to have. fsck is not backups. fsck will not (necessarily) get your data back. fsck may eat kittens on a bad day. What fsck does hand back to you should not be trusted and should certainly be verified.
If you think that pulling most of what was /home, /var, /srv or /opt out of lost+found is fun, just remember that corrupted directory and filenames get named after their inodes. Nothing like trying to figure out of 1234567 or 1234568 was the start of the quarterly financials report.
If you are relying upon a fsck to get your data back after a power outage, you have more faith in your filesystem than you should. It's a nice validation tool, with the caveat that a False Negative means you go back to using a damaged filesystem for more fun later, rather than now.
BUT if you have backups, please do test. Having talked to the BTRFS team directly at LINUXCON, Mr. Chacon and folks are pretty cool about getting feedback. And you can do nifty things like snapshots for backups on RAID10 or thin disks on virtual machines which don't inflate during formatting.
For many filesystems, failing a fcsk means reaching for the format tools and the last (verified) backup. You are backing up everything, right?
rm -i (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to alias "rm" as "rm -i".
Then, one day, I was using someone else's computer. I used "rm" with the expectation that it would prompt me, but this person never bothered to set it up that way, and I had the fearful experience of worrying whether it was deleting too much. I hadn't been too careless that time, but it got me thinking. It's dangerous to use "rm" when I really mean "rm -i"; habits are strong things.
So I made a change that I still use. I now alias "r" as "rm -i". "r" by itself does not have default behavior on most computers. Now if I absent-mindedly type "r *.txt" on someone else's computer, I get "r: command not found" and I edit the command to say "rm -i".
I suppose I should have used "rmi" or something like that, just in case I am a guest somewhere that "r" was aliased to something crazy. In practice, it hasn't been a problem. I use more aliases than most people seem to; they seem to be content with the defaults. I seem to be the only one I know who likes one-letter aliases.
Hmm, I guess I might accidentally run the R statistics package someday?
steveha