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Linux Software

Info About Kernel 2.3 39

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Peter Hernberg writes "Linuxtoday has a interesting little tidbit from Linus about 2.3. " Talks about the last fixes in the 2.2.8 patch as well as what is happening first in the 2.3.0 series. And just a note to help curb future flamage directed towards me and my mediocre website from appearing on the kernel mailing lists: 2.3.x is the devel series kernels. Don't touch them unless you are a kernel developer, a mental patient (or both)
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Info About Kernel 2.3 More

Info About Kernel 2.3

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  • The appearance of 2.3.0 "merely" means that the Linux kernel development process continues. That's great. It's also good to see the fork happen much sooner than the 2.1.0 fork did.

    Beyond that, the fuss and flames must be because of new Linux users. Otherwise, they'd already know the scoop about 2.odd.n kernels, and this silly discussion wouldn't be occurring.

    To get real:

    Is there a preliminary menu of features for 2.3? I've heard of LVM and ext3, to name two. There have been some rumblings of extending SMP to higher numbers of CPUs. Someone needs to say "GGI" and start another flame war...

    I rather hope that 2.4 doesn't take as long as 2.2 did. Not out of any sense of hurry, but because the long gestation of 2.2 tended to put feature creep pressure on the 2.0 series.

  • The problem with Devel Kernels (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 13, 1999 @04:27AM (#1894487)
    Is that if you get a cycle as long as the last one was, you're practically FORCED to run one if you need features you can't find in the current stable ones. The 2.1.xx series gave me MUCH faster (Like, 3 times faster) disk access and better SMP performance too. If they worked (And they ususally did) they worked 100% -- nice and stable and much much faster. If they were broken, they would generally not boot at all and I'd just go back to the last one I was using.

    Hopefully they'll narrow the feature set between stable kernel releases so we can get a stable kernel with features we need on a timely basis.

  • Testers are welcome! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 13, 1999 @05:00AM (#1894488)
    >>Don't touch them unless you are a kernel developer, a mental patient (or both)
    This is of course crap. Everybody willing to test
    development kernels is of course welcome to do so,
    and a wide test by the user base is a very important element of the linux development process! If people don't test early the releases will be buggy, so to get good releases there need to be hordes of alpha/beta testers.

    As the old GNU saying is "the contribution of users to GNU is testing". This applies 100% to Linux kernel development too.

    Of course it is not recommended to run development kernels on production machines, but e.g. on your workstation it can be done without many problems. Even development kernels are usually more stable than most Microsoft releases @) If something doesn't work just fix it, of if you can't, report it with a detailed bug report (of course it is usually a good idea to check the l-k archives first if the bug has been already reported - that is often the case with "obvious" compile time problems)

    If some misguided people on l-k say otherwise, just ignore them. Or did you see any prominent kernel developer in this silly thread?

    -Andi Kleen
  • Linus said a while back, probably on linux-kernel, that he wants 2.3.x to be much shorter than 2.1.
  • I generally agree, but it should be pointed out that the unstable branch is just that, and it may make demons fly out of your nose, drink all your beer, sleep with your grandmother or perhaps even cause filesystem corruption. So make sure you have backups.

    And yes, Alex B. is a f*ckwit, I thought everyone had him killfiled already. Mind you, Al Viro seemed to make a few not-very-friendly comments, too.
  • After Q3Test _hardlocked_ my SMP machine twice (with an ne2000 no less) I was getting a bit concerned as well. This bugfix is very encouraging :)
  • That's the only difference between 2.2.8 and 2.3.0. The 2.3.1prex patches contain further changes.
  • Posted by kenmcneil:

    Mmm... I'm hoping we can get 2.4 (Or 3.0???) out before Win2000 (Wouldn't that be a scoop!)

    What would be the point of that? Does anyone really measure the quality and utility of their OS by the version number or how fresh the bytes are? It is better to have a stable kernel like Linux or a flashy new kernel somewhat stable kernel like NT.

  • No kidding, the lamers came out of the walls...It does seem that there are a large number of whiners
    and that they're all AC's! He's running a site to report news for nerds, not news for nong's.

    That said, it would be better in most cases if the posting waited for a release comment. The earlier
    example only said that X.X was out, which wasn't much to discuss...thus the space was filled up with
    people whinging that it's not news and bemoaning the frequency of kernel Updates.

    On the other hand when there's a release message people actually get to talk about the substance
    of the change...although it does mean the news is not quite as fresh.

    Difficult one...Don't sweat it CT, everyone is responsible for the stories they choose to read :)
  • Uhhh, yeah, that's what Linus says in the page that's linked to...

  • Something about Linus... (Score:3)

    by Jerky McNaughty ( 1391 ) on Thursday May 13, 1999 @04:14AM (#1894498)
    I remember reading a quote where Linus _liked_ that people still run old kernels. He liked the fact that people didn't just _have_ to upgrade their kernels. Often, an older kernel suited someone just fine and they saw no reason to upgrade.

    I think that's a pretty big complement to a programmer. That's basically like saying that what you had two years ago is good enough for me, what you have now must be fantastic!

    Of course, all of that being said, you don't _have_ to have a reason to upgrade. You can do it just because you want to. That's reason enough.
  • Mmm... I'm hoping we can get 2.4 (Or 3.0???) out before Win2000 (Wouldn't that be a scoop!)

    Anyway, I'm running kernels from 2.0.25 up to 2.3.0 at the moment and I know it's sad but I'm loath to upgrade a box for the sake of it and I've had no problems at all in the 860 days uptime

    Yes, I'm wondering if I can crack the ULONG max jiffy wrap TWICE!... You gotta laugh!
  • I've worked out a simple set of rules-of-thumb, which I try to pay attention to, well, whenever I have the disks handy.

    If there are NO patches OR warnings on /. for a given kernel inside of one week of release, it is probably a stable kernel, with no catastrophic bugs.

    If the last patch > 100K, even when bzipped, there are enough changes to make unexpected side-effects, or even simple typos, likely.

    If the last two patches are If these suggest that a development kernel is going to be stable, I'll probably upgrade to it. I like playing with the new features. Mind you, if these suggest the kernel is liable to destroy the compputer, raid the fridge and pull funny faces at my boss, I'd probably upgrade anyway.

  • Do not be ashamed as an old kernel is quite in style these days. I have been experimenting with some of these older, smaller gems. They were the ones that ran on less hardware and still do it well. Since I have a few 386's, some with 4MB laying around, may I share the following:

    Superant - sells cheapo CDs catering to small computers [superant.com]
    Xdenu Versions [tcm.hut.fi]
    Linux On A Floppy [ecks.org]
    Etherboot home page [slug.org.au]

    My favorite:
    toms router boot home page [toms.net]
  • ....it begins to have fully working features such as full USB support, for example.

    And even then I'll deliberately keep back a few revisions - which will allow me to see if there are any serious gotchas in any particular release (like filesystem corruption).

    And even then, I'll be running it in a nice separate partition, and keep my main partition with a 2.2.xx kernel!
  • Running the risk of sounding like some big corporation that slashdot knows and loves, I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that it's the hardware's fault.

    The problem is that the market is flooded with all sorts of NE2000 clones at two for a penny, each of them having its own perculiarities and shipped with its own windows driver.

    My honest advice would be to stay away from this minefield. Anecdotal evidence (of which there is far too much on /.) suggests that some NE2K clones make a dangerous playground - transfer rates would vary from 20 to 400kb/s, depending on which machine I was talking to. Another NE2000 clone, costing less than a tenner, would produce all sorts of wierd timeout errors and would not talk to anything, computer included. The former was (I think) due to the onboard ethernet electronics - windows produces the same results - and the latter was a pile of poo anyway.

    My advice: Buy a different ethernet card and avoid no-name NE2000 clones like the plague. At risk of starting an ethernet flame war^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion thread I'd recommend any 3com card and the Kingston KNE100TX (based on the dec Tulip 21x4x) - they've both been more than satisfactory (980kb/s average for a 300MB file yestarday), and I'm sure there are many other cards out there well up to the job.

    Too bad I haven't yet worked out how to construct a TCP/IP loopback with two cards in one box :-(

  • 2.0.38 is due out around the end of the year, actually.
  • oh... oh yeah... those people
    ;-)

    i used to be like that, i guess, for
    a little while, until i broke my system
    and had to, like, reformat...

    heh... that sux...
  • Wow. You aparently read a different post than the one I typed. Let me try again...

    I'm not telling anyone to NOT upgrade their kernel. I'm just question what the value of upgrading for the sake of upgrading is. If your machine is crashing, by all means, update the kernel. If you enjoy upgrading kernels or like learning about the code or whatever, upgrade the kernel.

    All I was saying is there's a lot of people upgrading just to upgrade, just to have the latest version. They're machines dont crash, they dont read the changelogs, yet they MUST have the latest kernel... Why?

    -Rich
  • I never said avoid bugfixes and updates. Clearly if your machine is being attacked or is in danger of being attacked upgrade your machine. All I'm saying is there's people out there who upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. That, I dont get.

    -Rich
  • Edit your Makefile and make it any version you
    want... :-)

    -Rich
  • I dont see why people should be so thrilled about a new kernel unless it actually does something for them. I used to download the kernel every new patch for 0.99 and 1.0, but those were the days when each patch really addressed something important. If it aint broke, dont fix it, for the most part it aint broke, so I aint fixing it :-)

    I cant even remember the last time one of my machines crashed due to a kernel bug '95 maybe. Possibly '94.

    -Rich
  • I especaily like this, Rob put that comment in there because last time he posted about 2.3 he got flamed by quite a few people who think that dev kernals shouldn't be on /. that too many newbies who don't know what's up will trash their systems with a dev kernal. So he does the logical thing and tells people not to use the dev kernal in his post, and still he gets flamed for it. I just find this amusing.
    -Ted
  • Will Alan Cox still maintain the 2.0 kernel series? Seems like developing 2.3 while maintaining 2.0 and 2.2 would be a lot of work kernel?

    Does anyone still maintain/use the old 1.2 kernel?


  • Then don't read it. Obviously.
  • I used to wait until I needed a feature of a new kernel to install it. I soon found that getting new libs, utilities, and learning other things that had changed can sometimes be done better incrementally. I find it easier to stay current, even if I don't *need* to be current.
  • I cant even remember the last time one of my machines crashed due to a kernel bug '95 maybe. Possibly '94.

    Mine has a couple times in the last few months. I always assumed it was one of vmware's [vmware.com] modules since I was actively using that each time. I stopped using vmware and the crashes stopped. But Linus says:

    The one major fix in 2.2.8 is the SMP fix for disable_irq(), courtesy of Andrea Arcangeli (I disagreed in details and did it differently in the end, but all the heavy lifting was done by Andrea). This is the thing that caused silenth deaths for some people with certain network adapters (3c509 and 8390-based cards in particular: the latter covers ne2000 clones which are fairly common).

    Yep, describes my hardware and what happened exactly. I hope this means I can start using vmware again without fear...


  • the final 2.0.37 prepatch is almost done; When that's out, that'll be it for the 2.0 series. 1.2 et al is no longer being 'officially' maintained, but feel free to roll your own :)

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