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"But F18 was a disaster from the first second I began with it, when I discovered they would not allow F16 to upgrade when they've always supported two versions back"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading :

"This is the recommended method to upgrade your Fedora system to Fedora 18 and newer. Note that FedUp is only available in Fedora 17 and later. Thus users who are currently running Fedora 16 or earlier, will first need to upgrade to Fedora 17 using another method before being able to use FedUp to upgrade to Fedora 18 or later."

"and then I discovered it wouldn't boot from the DVD and I had to leave my computer downloading a million RPM files overnight when I had burned a DVD image"

Yes, of course, Fedora 18 doesn't boot from a DVD. That's why there were all those outraged news articles about it and the pitchfork-toting mobs in the street.

Wait, no, F18 boots fine from a DVD. We tested it. No news articles. No mobs. I can believe there might be some weird bug which prevents it working properly on some specific hardware, but generally, the F18 DVD boots just fine. I tested it myself.

"Until a few minutes ago, when I had a kernel panic and a reboot after updating 900 packages this morning. I thought I'd waited long enough for a buggy kernel to be replaced with a good one."

Fedora, being a cutting-edge distro, rebases the kernel on currently stable releases to the latest stable upstream kernel each time a new upstream release happens. Yes, this can occasionally cause problems, and sorry it did so for you. But it fits in with the nature of what Fedora is for, it does not cause problems for most users (in fact on balance it usually fixes more problems than it causes), and the kernel team does work hard to fix any bugs that are reported at the time of the rebase. See e.g. http://codemonkey.org.uk/2013/05/21/a-day-in-the-life/ "Looked at bugzilla backlog. Swore a lot. 3.9.x rebase bugs started to trickle in" and http://codemonkey.org.uk/2013/05/24/daily-log-may-24th-2013/ "Looked at a bunch of “can’t boot” bugs that came in since F18 got rebased to 3.9. Found a thread upstream that seems to be discussing the same bug."

If you want a long-term stable distribution for production use in critical cases, Fedora is probably not the distribution for you. But no, it is not "a perverse, sadistic force of pure evil". I don't wake up in the morning and go 'aha, who can we piss off today'. We are trying to drive forward the development of F/OSS, constantly, and that requires a level of churn and major change.

"But F18 was a disaster from the first second I began with it, when I discovered they would not allow F16 to upgrade when they've always supported two versions back"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading :

"This is the recommended method to upgrade your Fedora system to Fedora 18 and newer. Note that FedUp is only available in Fedora 17 and later. Thus users who are currently running Fedora 16 or earlier, will first need to upgrade to Fedora 17 using another method before being able to use FedUp to upgrade to Fedora 18 or later."

"and then I discovered it wouldn't boot from the DVD and I had to leave my computer downloading a million RPM files overnight when I had burned a DVD image"

Yes, of course, Fedora 18 doesn't boot from a DVD. That's why there were all those outraged news articles about it and the pitchfork-toting mobs in the street.

Wait, no, F18 boots fine from a DVD. We tested it. No news articles. No mobs. I can believe there might be some weird bug which prevents it working properly on some specific hardware, but generally, the F18 DVD boots just fine. I tested it myself.

"Until a few minutes ago, when I had a kernel panic and a reboot after updating 900 packages this morning. I thought I'd waited long enough for a buggy kernel to be replaced with a good one."

Fedora, being a cutting-edge distro, rebases the kernel on currently stable releases to the latest stable upstream kernel each time a new upstream release happens. Yes, this can occasionally cause problems, and sorry it did so for you. But it fits in with the nature of what Fedora is for, it does not cause problems for most users (in fact on balance it usually fixes more problems than it causes), and the kernel team does work hard to fix any bugs that are reported at the time of the rebase. See e.g. http://codemonkey.org.uk/2013/05/21/a-day-in-the-life/ "Looked at bugzilla backlog. Swore a lot. 3.9.x rebase bugs started to trickle in" and http://codemonkey.org.uk/2013/05/24/daily-log-may-24th-2013/ "Looked at a bunch of “can’t boot” bugs that came in since F18 got rebased to 3.9. Found a thread upstream that seems to be discussing the same bug."

If you want a long-term stable distribution for production use in critical cases, Fedora is probably not the distribution for you. But no, it is not "a perverse, sadistic force of pure evil". I don't wake up in the morning and go 'aha, who can we piss off today'. We are trying to drive forward the development of F/OSS, constantly, and that requires a level of churn and major change.

Yes it's the cool Amiga stuff Matt Dillon. I still remember getting DICE on two Amiga Shoper coverdisks and the ever useful FMS (thanks Matt!). It's interesting to note that Dave Jones (who later tweaked FMS) is a Red Hat Linux kernel hacker.

A notebook with Fedora 8 (2.6.26.6-49_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8) has survived the New Year leap.

Here's a followup to this Slashdot story:
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/01/01/post-leap-seconds/

I was going to give you a link to where the bug database was but it seems to have turned into a promotional page - Coverity Linux "bug database" page. Normally that link goes to a bugzilla like database showing you a list of bugs, what type of error was found and a highlighted code snippet. All very nifty.

Here's kernel hacker davej talking about coverity bugs. So they do let the kernel folks know about the bugs they have found.

However this hits upon something I don't like about this press release. I wonder whether the headline should be "Tool finds less bugs in Linux than rival OSes when previous bugs found by the tool are fixed in Linux". Assuming fixes for all problems that means only new and changed code gives a chance for these errors to occur (which is a subset of the entire code).

Were all codebases that were compared given coverity bug databases and a chance to fix the reported bugs too and over what time scale? If the Linux kernel code gets 6 monthly reports and say OpenBSD kernel only gets reports one every two years and you test towards the end of those two years is that fair test? What does it say other than our tool finds less bugs in code that is regularly checked by previous versions of our tool? Is that in itself a good justification?

I see you, sir-or-madam, haven't read any of the previous 2.6 stories :3

davej has a nice list of big changes in the 2.6 series that's commonly referred to as the post Halloween document that you may be interested in looking at.

The big change for users is to install module-init-tools, which is packaged in debian. (I don't recall if it's made its way to stable, though.) In any case, have a read through that document.

You can use it with gentoo right now(tm).
However I get the feeling that the new scheduler still needs some finetuning for desktop apps.
It seems to be great already for servers.
But glxgears dropped by almost 50% for me - and tvtime drops frames all the time.
Surprisingly the kernel is even SLOWER, when I disable powermanagement and framebuffer support.

I also looked forward for the Sis 746 AGP support - but it is still very unstable.
Unfortunatly, Dave Jones, the main agpgart developer does not seem to be too interested in improving the support soon - and I am just beginning to understand how the kernel works internally and am not able to fix things myself right now.

The problem is that there are many subtle things that have changed in USERSPACE in the new kernel. This means that simply updating to the new kernel may break some things. For example, changes include /sys instead of /dev, ALSA, LVM2, and several other changes that improve things, but that can't simply be rolled into an RPM. Distributions will include the new kernel over the next 6 months so users won't have to worry about these changes. For example Fedora Core 2 will have the 2.6 kernel and is coming out soon.

For more information see this. Also as you predicted, there are rpms for redhat here. If you want to upgrade to the new kernel, I would recommend googling for instructions to follow. Many people have writen good howtos.

Eh? What do you mean by "lightening fast?"
Check out The benchmarks.

It still takes nearly 3x as long as SYSENTER on an Athlon. And an Athlon is slow to begin with. An EV6 was down near 80 clock cycles for system calls! That's about 5x less than the P4.

And yes, it supports Centrino.

VM has been modified, mostly with some improved reference counting code (rmap).

The firewall code hasn't been rewritten this time, it's still iptables. Support has been added for using netfilter against a few more things though.

I just realized I'm putting a ton of effort into posting something when I can just link you to the official document: The Post-Halloween Document

This has been posted here before. Check out Dave's post-halloween document.

Here's your list of gotchas. Read it carefully before proceeding.

And drivers and stability are the two most important things dists are interested in. And just like the 2.4.x series it was only after several more iterations after 2.4.0 that both of these things are likely to be achieved for mass consumption. Mandrake might pick it up pretty quickly once 2.6.0 is out proper but I imagine that 2.4 is still going to be the mainstay of dists until they go through their next major iterations.

I personally can't wait to skim the change logs.
I think someone has already done this for you ;-)
Check that link for a complete and detailed list of "things to expect" in the next stable version, already merged in th 2.5 series.

From post-halloween-2.5.txt:

- Older Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support For XFree86 4.0) has been removed. Upgrade to XFree86 4.1.0 or higher.

So, you need to upgrade to Xfree 4.1.0. I even saw Alan Cox mention that he needed Xfree 4.3.0 in some i810 testing.

Check

The best reference I've found is Dave Jones' website..... Linux 2.5 core updates.

Well, some of the nice things are:

o New i/o scheduler, which seems to improve a lot of people's desktop performance;
o Better scheduler performance under loads with lots of processes;
o Rewritten scheduling and threading code, which, coupled with Ulich Drepper's NTPL library, greatly improves threading performance;
o ALSA for sound, and AGP 3 support;
o Faster and cleaner framebuffer support;
o Faster CD recording that doesn't need ide-scsi;
o Upgrades for NFS (v4), NTFS, and HFS+, as well as merges of JFS and XFS;
o System-level in-kernel profiling support;
o CPU Frequence scaling
o IPSec

More information can be found in Dave Jones' list of things to expect in 2.6. Personally, I think it's great to see features that benefit both big and small systems.

Here's a good pointer: Dave's "post-Halloween" doc.

Hey dude,

You might want to take a look at this:

Dave Jones' The post-halloween document. (aka, 2.5 - what to expect)

Cheers
Stor

Detailed status and a general overview of incoming kernel's features.

Here's a nice overview by Guillaume Boissiere:

http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/latest.html

And a document by Dave Jones:

http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.tx t

pci_for_each_dev(pdev_sb) {
if(pci_match_device(amd_sb_tbl, pdev_sb) != NULL)
goto found_sb;
}

while((pdev_sb = pci_find_device(PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, pdev_sb)) != NULL) {
if(pci_match_device(amd_sb_tbl, pdev_sb) != NULL)
goto found_sb;
}

A good place for an overview for 2.4>2.5 is http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.tx t

The module-init-tools link is valid, but you really should read this if you want to try 2.5 and haven't been following the development.

http://diary.codemonkey.org.uk/ (19th May) Anything to do with it?

Hi!

The following links should tell you what you want to know:

Dave's Post-halloween document and The Kernel Status Page

Cheers
Stor

Preempt isn't such a big thing anymore compared to the massive scheduler and i/o scheduler improvements that have gone into 2.5.

Documentation for 2.5 changes is here courtesy Dave Jones.

For more info see http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.tx t

How about checking out Dave Jones' introduction to 2.5? :) It will probably be updated as things move along, most notably is LVM2 already included.