Linux 5.1 Released (lkml.org) 69
diegocg writes: Linux 5.1 released has been released. The main feature in this release is io_uring, a high-performance interface for asynchronous I/O; there are also improvements in fanotify to provide a scalable way of watching changes on large file systems; it also adds a method to allow safe delivery of signals in presence of PID reuse; persistent memory can be used now as hot-plugabble RAM; Zstd compression levels have been made configurable in Btrfs; there is a new cpuidle governor that makes better power management decisions than the menu governor; all 32 bit architectures have added the necessary syscalls to deal with the y2038 problem; and live patching has added support for creating cumulative patches. There are many other features and new drivers in the changelog.
My word (Score:5, Funny)
It is almost as if Linux is a serious operating system
Maybe someone smart will declare the "Year of Linux" or something. I wonder why the trade media has never thought of it.
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Because the "trade media" is high on, and perpetually addicted to, advertising dollars from Microsoft and Intel. Meanwhile, Linux owns the Internet. Amazon, Facebook and Google are just a few examples of companies which would grind to a halt without Linux.
Re:My word (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the Operating System is more then just the Kernel.
I remember back in the day when Novell Netware was the big player on the Enterprise System.
Running off of MS DOS it was able to do a whole lot of stuff that the OS's with the more advanced kernels had a hard time handling.
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Re:My word (Score:4, Funny)
Yes yes it is.
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English is a real clusterfuck of a language, at least concerning spelling and pronunciation. Unlike for example German or Spanish, where in 99% of cases you will know how a word is pronounced by looking at how it is written, in English you have to learn the pronunciation of a ton of words by heart because there are no clear rules.
The Polish car mechanic told me to polish my car to make it shine! Get my point?
Also, you "pronounce" something, but the related word is spelled "pronunciation". What the fuck?
Not
Re:My word (Score:5, Informative)
I remember back in the day when Novell Netware was the big player on the Enterprise System.
Do you?...
Running off of MS DOS it was able to do a whole lot of stuff that the OS's with the more advanced kernels had a hard time handling.
...nope, you sure don't. Netware loaded from DOS, but it was a full-fledged operating system with its own kernel, drivers, etc. Remember booting Linux from DOS using LOADLIN.EXE? Same thing.
Netware 3 had its own FS sized up to 1TB and with files up to 4GB, which at the time was quite good. Up until about Windows 2000, Netware offered better file server performance than did Windows. But well-tuned NFS was always competitive with NCP, even with NFS on TCP and NCP on IPX. Netware was only impressive to people who were only familiar with DOS and Windows 3.1. To people who had Unix experience, Netware's dependence on DOS as a bootloader and the need to load piles of NLMs from floppy during installs or upgrades seemed primitive. Novell figured this out eventually, but they went to Linux too late [wikipedia.org] and lost all momentum.
By that time, Windows had Active Directory so NDS was a hard sell, and on the other hand SMB had become dominant and Samba existed on Linux, meaning that Novell really owned no technologies that anyone cared about. At one time I actually bothered to install nfs, samba, netatalk, and MARS-NWE on a 486 running Linux, which let me share the same printers and files out to DOS, Mac, Unix, and Windows — all with entirely free and Open Source software. How was Novell ever going to compete with that? These days, of course, the DOS clients (what few exist) can speak SMB efficiently, and so can the Unix and Mac clients for most purposes. For those remaining cases, there's NFS. NCP is only a dim memory, and Novell is just a name.
TL;DR: Linux conquers all
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Rewitten in Perl (Score:5, Funny)
after the Rust re-write failed they threw something together in perl in an overnight session. Many of the GNU utils are now just Perl one-liners.
Re:The kernel is great. The userland isn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but I disagreee.
Both systemd and PulseAudio are far better then what is available for Windows.
Gnome 3 sucks, but that is why I run Kde instead.
I don't know anything about NetworkManager. I don't have any issues with wireless networks on my desktop, but it is a simple setup, where I just use wireless to get internet. Is there an issue with complex situations?
Re: The kernel is great. The userland isn't. (Score:1)
Sounds like you were using Slackware. It's not surprising you had to jump through hoops to get it to work. Slackware is all about delivering the 1994 Linux experience, which was unpleasant, no matter what the current year is.
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Agreed. That story is total, utter, laughable bullshit.
I have been using Debian since 0.93R6 and it has consistency gotten better, with fewer boot issues, fewer driver issues, fewer instances where you'd need to do special things to get normal things working.
Not that this means that Lennart's and Kay's crap shouldn't be burned with Holy Fire, because they are structurally unsound, but that does not validate the nonsense written by anon; Debian 2019 is vastly better than Debian 2009.
Re: The kernel is great. The userland isn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
10 or 20 years ago, Debian and GNOME 1.4 or 2 worked perfectly for me... on my single-CPU, single-screen computer that was always connected to the same network.
Nowadays, I expect my multi-core laptop to switch networks automatically when I move from home to work and vice-versa, to have a seamless multi-screen display when I connect it to external monitors, to switch the audio input and output automatically when I plug in my headset with microphone or connect to a monitor with built-in loudspeakers, and to run multiple virtual machines or containers easily.
I still use Debian today (as well as Ubuntu, SuSE and CentOS, as a main OS or in various VMs). I am not so happy with some of the choices made in GNOME 3 and I understand some of the frustration around systemd, but I also admit that many things that were a pain to configure 10 years ago are now working out of the box in most cases.
FWIW, I have been using Linux since 1992 when SLS was distributed on 12 floppy disks and only had a half-working TCP/IP stack. I recycled those floppies in the meantime but I still have my CD-ROM "Ygddrasil Linux/GNU/X Fall 1993". Sometimes I look back at these old systems with a bit of nostalgia, but I also know that I am more productive today with a modern version of Linux.
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Great that systemd solves the problems you need solved. I, on the other hand, prefer a desktop system. Connected via the same ethernet cable for last 9 years. Just like the machine I had before that. With the same monitor with laudspeakers over HDMI connected since the previous monitor died several years ago. At work it's the same, except it is a dual monitor setup. I do like automatic sound redirection when I pull the jack. I do use containers and virtualization - but I do not see ho
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I do use containers and virtualization - but I do not see how is systemd involved there. In fact systemd adds nothing for me but complexity.
One of the argument for switching to daemon supervisors like systemd, is that they are better at handling modern technology like CGROUPS and kernel Namespaces - which are the technologies on which modern LXC, Docker, etc. rely on. systemd-nspawn is even a systemd based container solution.
Inside container, it's even more marked. Systemd is heavily optimized to be able to automatically detect and configure everything needed inside a container (network devices, etc.) in a stateless maner (As little configurati
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Nice!
I used the MCC 3.5" 720kb interim release which had a root disk and a boot disk. Kernel 0.12 or something. But if you want a real challenge, take a really really old distro (eg SLS 1.05), and using only the tools that it comes with and any source code you can get on the web, upgrade it to first 32-bit ELF, with a 1.x then 2.x kernel, then upgrade it to libc6 rather than libc4, then upgrade it to 64
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Yes, and yes.
Crying about GNOME on a Debian-based distro is fantastically whiny, as
Debian: sudo apt-get install kde-standard
Ubuntu: sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop
and a cup of coffee is all it takes. Systemd is still a bit more of a thing, but I've not had issues with it. Any of my booting issues have come from the fucking shitty Nouveau driver always thinking it can handle an Optimus GPU and then throwing a panic when it realizes it doesn't have a framebuffer...
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Any of my booting issues have come from the fucking shitty Nouveau driver always thinking it can handle an Optimus GPU
Blacklist Nouveau, that should have happened automagically when you installed the nvidia binary driver from the repos. Well...it does on Fedora, my experience with Debian-based distros is minimal.
Linux now and then (Score:3)
I'm comparing Linux in 2019 versus Linux in 2005.
Back in 2005, Linux worked perfectly for me. It would consistently boot. Sound would work fine. GNOME 2 was fun and productive to use. Networking worked without any handholding.
In 2005, I could install Debian and with almost no configuration have a perfectly usable server or desktop installation.
And back in 2005 that "minimal" configuration was long scripts written in a shell language (bash) that not only had full blown perl regular expression backed-in, but even had a full fledged network stack. /etc/init.d/ were quite long piece of scripting back in the era (before modern systemd, or before upstart for those distro that expe
Note: I don't have anything agaist bash, I quite like it, but you have to realise that it also is a non-trivial language nowadays. And the typical SysVInit/rc scripts found in
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Linux worked perfectly for me. It would consistently boot. Sound would work fine. Networking worked without any handholding.
Still does.
In 2019, I install Debian and then pray that it actually boots up.
Odds are you tried to do some tweaks that you were used to doing in the old days with the old way od doing things that don't mesh well with modern Linux. In other words, don't mess with the reasonable defaults.
I then get to waste more time stripping out GNOME 3 as much as can be done.
If you have no plans of using Gnome 3, then why install it? KDE/LXDE/XFCE/Cinnamon centric distros/spins/variants are a thing.
If you're new to Linux, and I suspect that you are, you probably don't realize how bad it is today compared to how well Linux used to work.
Modern Linux is far far better than the Linux of the old days. Do you want to go back to having to manually edit your /etc/printcap? When a single application co
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Network manager is an absurd piece of software which various kinds of distributions think you need or your desktop should be uninstalled, despite its primary purported use is to keep track of your network settings and little else.
Its real purpose is to burn cpu-cycles like it's going out of style. If you inspect it closer it burns an insane amount of RAM for what it does, and if your old enough, imagine a Pentium 200 MHz, going full blast 100% all the time just to keep the program idle
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GCC knows the score and is catching up, currently at 9.1 and counting...
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TempleOS is for you.
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I really don't see what the problem is with his statement. You are for free speech, and so is he. He is exercising his right to that speech, and exercising his option of free assembly to not be associated with white nationalist Nazis who have some truly nasty misogynistic, homophobic, or transphobic behavior.
Why shouldn't he be able to say those things in a free society, again?
Oh, because it's the "thought police" when they are aren't stepping in line behind what YOU want people to think.
io_uring looks great (Score:2)
I have high hopes for io_uring! We've already got a PR ready for Ceph and some of the initial benchmarks looking very promising!
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This should really help speed up mitigation of the branch prediction attacks on Intel CPUs too, correct?
It looks like IO can be done without system calls when things are done, which to my understanding was why IO intense tasks suffered the most?
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That's a good guess. It'll help us short term (and definitely long term with crimson), but I imagine the seastar guys will also be very happy to get it into scylladb since they already do such a good job of avoiding syscalls. The other option historically has been spdk. Jens did some benchmarking in January:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-... [kernel.org]
libaio is a deadend imho (thankfully so!) but io_uring looks like it's going to be stiff competition for spdk.
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Will this help userspace FS performance in general?
Last I used an NTFS USB drive in KDE it was acceptable until I tried a second copy (simultaneous), then both pretty much ground to a halt.
Or is that a problem caused by something else? I assume it was copying every file in a single copy one at a time, but two copies caused it to go back and forth leading to issues. It was somewhere around 2 orders of magnitude slower once a second folder was drug over to copy (note, about 5 years ago, so this could be long
John Titor: Endgame (Score:4, Funny)
all 32 bit architectures have added the necessary syscalls to deal with the y2038 problem
No IBM 5100 needed! Unfortunately this timeline now has far bigger problems.
io_urine (Score:2)
Sounds like something that would come from Poettering.
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