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Bluetooth socket exploit
LSM exploit
uselib() exploit
stack growth exploit

I'm pretty sure that was in response to this recent LKML posting by Linus...

:)

The register article is a bit alarmist, at least compared to the response Linus gives in this thread : http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0311 .0/0621.html

While the parent posted a good link to the thread, it may have been more appropriate to post a link to the start of the thread rather than the near end.

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
retval = -EINVAL;

In other words, you become root if you call sys_wait4()with the __WCLONE|__WALL) flags

Story here and here

Go learn the difference between blocks and sectors before you comment.

No, I'm well aware of the difference. I was having one of my temporary memory lapses and couldn't remember the term block. Since I was in a hurry, I used the word "Sector" and hoped no one would notice. Ah well. :-)

Blocks default to 4096 bytes, because this is convenient for the page cache;

That's what I said.

nothing stops you using a different size.

Bzzt. You need to use multiples of 512, otherwise the blocks and sectors won't line up properly.

For example, I have ext3 filesystems at work using 512 byte blocks (so the allocation unit is 512 bytes) on a system with 4096 byte pages.

And? I did say that 4K was normally used because it lines up nicely with the page sizes. If you use a different size for blocks, it will still run through the paging system, regardless.

ReiserFS tail-packing uses left-over space in blocks, and space that cannot be used as blocks.

What is "space that cannot be used as blocks"? Blocks are managed by the Linux Kernel. You can't muck with the block size you chose. (Though there has been some mutterings about making the last few blocks of an odd sized device accessable in Linux as a partial block.)

4K blocks is less efficient, but still works fine (which would not be true if the OS paged the memory to disk for writes, since the block would be accompanied by 12K of garbage.

You forget about read-ahead caching. For sequential I/O, the reading is run through the paging system to make read ahead more efficient. So the OS is *designed* to read (and potentially write depending on your kernel version) more than it needs. So it fills pages as necessary. Pages used for disk I/O are not the same pages used for Swap I/O, as that would create something of a mess.

Since the page is filled with the complete data from that portion of the disk drive, it can page out the correct data to disk. i.e. No 12K of garbage as you propose.

I *don't* know if the page sizes used between the file and swap systems are required to match up.

[info]
[more info]
[more, but older, info]

Reads and writes at the OS level can still be done on a single-sector basis; it's just inefficient, as each sector ends up filling a page in the cache, either with the other 7 sectors needed to make up one page, or with dummy data.

I'm not aware of any APIs that allow you to address a block device in a unit smaller than a block, but it's always possible that such an API has been added to recent kernels. I sincerely doubt you'd want to use direct sector addressing, though, since it would probably screw up the OS's attempts at block level locking.

I have also used Mathematica to produce "music", or at least interesting noise. I tried to incorporate some music theory into my algorithm, which is much more complicated than Wolfram's seems to be, and is able to produce sounds with a certain shape, although I would hesitate to call it musical structure.

Examples of results of gotten are included at http://music.download.com/andrewdabrowski and I have a hybrid piece, part Mathematica generated, part human composed, at http://mypage.iu.edu/~dabrowsa/junk.html.

I should say that my Mathematica program produces raw midi files of voices, without any instrumentation. That is added by "hand" afterwards.

Top 5 reasons not to buy one:

1. It's much cooler and geekier to make your own like my buddy did.
2. If you make your own you won't have that white label reading 'Das Keyboard' ruining your otherwise all black beauty.
3. These are not at all new. They've been around for a long time, so the trendy factor has already worn off.
4. Real geeks have all black keyboards because the white characters have all worn off from excesive use.
5. I don't even have a keyboard you insensitive clod.

So the first point here is that regardless of you call your Linux distribution "Linux Something" or something totally different, you'll want to protect that name if you are serious about making a big commercial distribution. -- Linus Torvalds

I haven't forgotten history, you just don't pay attention to the present. Check here to see some of the things you might have missed while living in mommy's basement.

The only reason there's any support for licensing the trademark at all is Linus has a good track record, but he might not always control the trademark. Then what happens? This is a real issue, and being concerned about it doesn't make me a troll.

Some of reactions to the article are scary: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0508 .3/1699.html

Trolls who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Note this is from 2000, and it was Slashdotted

If you don't like the trademark thing (which grew out of misue of the Linux name), fork.

Looks like not everybody is happy with this article. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0508 .3/1508.html

The Linux kernel does not explicitly allow binary modules. This is a commonly repeated myth. Please see Linus's posting on LKML for the truth behind this.

On January 18th 2000, Torvalds, in an e-mail to the Linux kernel developers list, explained the need to protect the Linux trademark.

At the time, Torvalds noted: "Trademark law requires that the trademark owner police the use of the trademark."

Sure you can, what would you call a laser beam? Hello, photons... Anyway, QC has to date relied upon quite large molecular assemblies being banged at with NMR or similar (usually some form of heavy metal-like atoms in a carbon framework designed to allow tunable spin coupling interactions between the "data storage centers" embodied by the relatively complex orbital characteristics of the heavy atoms [s and p only scale to so many qubits using spins and the like, the larger qubit assemblies out there are starting to reach into the d and f block elements just to get enough manipulable orbital complexity]). Also... QC is not really a generably applicable method from what I've read on it so far. Sure, it allows some algorithms to run Way Fast (tm) [e.g. Schor's RSA breaker, currently at about the level of factoring "15" into "5" and "3", the smallest possible prime factorization which required a 7 qb computer; last I looked (this spring) people were publishing synthesis papers in the various chemical journals (nature, agewantde chemie, JACS, JInorg, JOrg, etc.) of up to 20-40 qb computing assemblies...], but it's not like dioctocyclo-cuprous-wtf-inol in your million dollar NMR machine or whatever is going to be efficient at inherently Von Neumann-esque things like running your bash shell. ;) In other words, much like a highly tuned vector machine (Cray, etc.), it'll be really insanely great at some tasks and sloooow at others, so it'll probably end up as a component in a larger computing assembly rather than a standalone. Of course, all this tech is at least 20 years out from market availablity (at least!), so who knows what will happen.

(I am a chemist, though my day job is web applictions dev. *shrug*)

IU has offered linux since 1996 via FTP or by asking for a CD from http://www.ussg.iu.edu/

Ironically, I was talking about iuware and Windows, not Linux, especially not free (as in beer) distros.

All your other comments in this thread seem to indicate you....

a) don't want to spend 5 bucks for a legal copy of windows, but you would drive 30 minutes to "use" a copy.

No. I don't want to spend 5 *more* bucks to pay for a CD for a legal copy of Windows I already own. IU paid millions of dollars to MS so that its students and staff could have legal copies of Windows. That came out of the money I paid to go to IU. The comment about using a copy was to point out how much of a hoop one had to go through to avoid paying even more money.

b) don't want to recognize that there are free alternatives to buying a 5 buck winders cd

Actually, I listed the free alternative to buying a Windows CD. It was to borrow a Windows CD. If you meant Linux, I'd have to point out that that's not a version of Windows.

c) do want to copy the licensed legal copies and give them away to others

Give them away or sell to them copies of a CD to IU students who already own a license to Windows. If it costs me either 30 minutes to 1 hour of time or $5 to get a copy of something I already own, I might as well have the right to try to recoup the cost, especially if it means selling to people at $1 who would otherwise have to spend time or $5 to get a copy themselves.

d) think you have the right to do whatever you wish just because you "were" a student at IU once upon a time.

No. I think that at the time, I was a student at IU and had the right to do what a site-license deal would imply. That is, if the school wasn't handing out free CDs to students, then there's no reason I shouldn't be allowed to hand out free CDs to students or even charge for a copy, just like the school was.

Get real dude, 5 bucks isn't squat for a legal copy.

And if it was only really $5, I wouldn't have made a single comment.

BTW the reason you cant D/L windows from IUWARE is because the license agreement states each purchaser must physically sign for the CD and provide a valid student or employee ID.

That might be the case. I wouldn't know. Why not? Because when I asked, I was given some BS excuse about some technicality prevented burn a bootable Windows 2000 CD (this was BS, btw, because while this might have been true, all Windows OSs were taken down; nothing about Windows 2000 not being bootable would somehow revoke the ability to distribute OSs already downloadable); oh, and I was also given the excuse that people would end up d/ling and installing Windows 2000 as an "upgrade" to Windows 98, which would be too much of a drain on support costs (I consider this an excuse because clearly they weren't stopping people from going down to buy a copy; besides, it's pointless to pay for software you don't want anyone to use). At the time, the agreement that was up for reading didn't make any mention of any requirement to physically sign for a CD. Perhaps that situation has changed.

And that license agreement says you can't redistribute the CD or make copies if it.

I assume by you, you mean the students and staff. But perhaps you mean the university as well, and MS was selling the CDs to IU. Like I said, no contract I read said anything of the kind.

If you don't like it bitch at Microsoft and stop ragging on IU like some whiney arsed farmboy from Martintucky ;)

As I was a student at IU, whom I was paying to indirectly do my bidding, to claim I shouldn't "rag" on IU for agreeing to policy that seems irrational is to ignore exactly what IU's role was in this affair. Does this mean I think Microsoft is somehow not culpable? Of course not. But the subject at hand was IU's part in their licensing of MS Windows OSs and their disper

IU has offered linux since 1996 via FTP or by asking for a CD from http://www.ussg.iu.edu./

All your other comments in this thread seem to indicate you....

a) don't want to spend 5 bucks for a legal copy of windows, but you would drive 30 minutes to "use" a copy.
b) don't want to recognize that there are free alternatives to buying a 5 buck winders cd
c) do want to copy the licensed legal copies and give them away to others
d) think you have the right to do whatever you wish just because you "were" a student at IU once upon a time.

Get real dude, 5 bucks isnt squat for a legal copy.

BTW the reason you cant D/L windows from IUWARE is because the license agreement states each purchaser must physically sign for the CD and provide a valid student or employee ID.

And that license agreement says you can't redistribute the CD or make copies if it.

If you don't like it bitch at Microsoft and stop ragging on IU like some whiney arsed farmboy from Martintucky ;)

Up until 2000 or so one could d/l just about any software that was available under this license agreement off of an IU website by providing your username/password. But then they decided to change the rules and make it so you had to pay $5/copy if you wanted an OS.

This is inaccurate. IU and IUPUI staff and students may login to http://iuware.iu.edu/ and download FOR FREE Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and a bunch of other software titles for linux, osx, and winders platforms. Last I knew Red Hat AS4, WS4, and Desktop4 are OS's!

One may also "checkout" installation CD's from UITS with a valid student or employee ID card. So saying one "has" to pay $5 for an OS is Bullschit.

... in windows that is true, threads are better period. That is NOT because of process vs threads its bceause of how windows handles process and threads. threads are efficent and multiple processes aren't.

as said by someone who knows more then i do:
"There are no threads in Linux.
All tasks are processes.
Processes can share any or none of a vast set of resources.

When processes share a certain set of resources, they have the same
characteristics as threads under other OSes (except the huge performance
improvements, Linux processes are already as fast as threads on other OSes). "
read
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0103 .0/0935.html

the one that is faster and better for a task depends on: programmer skill, style and design. Do you want shared memory, harder debugging, for a bit of a speed increase, or a clean modular design, simple processes working togeather. smaller project sizes, at possibly a bit of speed cost. Its all about trade offs and in linux you can pick either so its all comes down to the programmer usualy, in windows threads are the only way to go,

Now to you last paragraph, windows is was NOT designed to be SMP, and if it was it sucked ass at it. linux has had SMP support for a long long time. And the fact windows is 4CPUs at most, and linux is running on 64+ CPU machines all the time, and on huge clusters of 1000s of boxes shows me that linux was designed pretty well.

And as always linux is ahead of the curve overall then windows (in the kernal) at all times. and runs on more system.

and the other reply so far is from a total idiot.

According to "Effective C++" - Meyers, if you need to know the type of a class, you designed your classes wrong.

Also consider the size of their contributions to those projects and how important stuff like OpenOffice.org is. Then you have Sun's history of supporting open standards and publishing a lot of their research like their Sparc cpu which allowed others to build sparc cpu's and systems (while IBM was trying to close off their pc architecture with things like MBus to prevent OEMs), their work with xml including sponsoring the working group that created it, publishing reasearch like on The Slab Allocator which was used in Linux, even OpenSolaris has been helpful to Linux Kernel developers, and there's more I don't have the time or energy to search for.

I'm obviously not the only copyright holder of Linux, and I did so on purpose for several reasons. One reason is just because I hate the paperwork and other cr*p that goes along with copyright assignments.

Another is that I don't much like copyright assignments at all: the author is the author, and he may be bound by my requirement for GPL, but that doesn't mean that he should give his copyright to me.

A third reason, and the most relevant reason here, is that I want people to _know_ that I cannot control the sources. I can write you a note to say that "for use XXX, I do not consider module YYY to be a derived work of my kernel", but that would not really matter that much. Any other Linux copyright holder might still sue you.

Sure they are. Just don't use Boehm style GC which usually requires a "stop the world" to perform GC. See my project atomic-ptr-plus for various forms of SMP/CMT friendly GC. I'm currently sporadically working on a RCU-SMR hybrid that obsoletes everything there. It would be less sporadic but I don't have as good funding as Sun, Intel, IBM et all have.

Methinks the poster refers to this, wherein some as yet uinidentifed party inserted a line into the kernel sources on the CVS repository.

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))

A torrent is available here and a HTTP download here.

Please join the torrent if you can!

Greetings Slashdot. I am the symphony os project manager. Our site is obviously slashdotted at this time but the mirrordot mirror is available at
http://mirrordot.org/stories/325a42c04c64f80d25bdc 8518114af11/index.html
and the Symphony OS Alpha 3 ISO is available at
http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/symphonyos/

If anyone has any specific questions they can post on our forum tomorow when the site is restored or they can email me at ryan at isptec.net

Thanks
Ryan Quinn
Symphony OS Project

This writes to the disks write cache but I don't believe it actually issues the sync command to the drive.

Yeah - that's the point of this thing - what's supposed to happen with fsync? From memory, sometimes it will guarentee it's all the way to the platters, sometimes it will not, depending on what storage system you're using, and how easy such a guarentee is to make.

Linus in 2001 discussing this issue - it's not new. That whole thread was about comparing SCSI against IDE drives, and it seemed that the IDE drives were either breaking the laws of physics, or lying, but the SCSI drives were being honest.

From hazy memory, one problem is that without tagged-command-queing or native-command-queuing, one process issuing a sync will cause the hard drive and related software to wait until it has fully synched for all i/o "in flight"; holding up any other i/o tasks for other processes!

That's why fsync often lies; because it's not pratical for people that fsync all the time to flush buffers to screw around with the whole i/o subsystem, and apparently some programs were overzealous with calling fsync when they shouldn't.

However, with TCQ, commands that are synched overlap with other commands, so it's not that big a deal (other i/o tasks are not impacted any more than they would by other, unsynchronised, i/o). (Thus, with TCQ, fsync might go all the way to the platters, but without it it might just go to the IDE bus.) SCSI has had TCQ from day one, which is why a SCSI system is more likely to sync all the way than IDE.

If I'm wrong, somebody correct me please.

Brad's program certainly points out an issue - it should be possible for a database engine to write to disk and guarentee that it gets written; perhaps fsync() isn't good enough - be this fault in the drives, the IDE spec, IDE drivers or the OS.

However, in this post from hpa, it looks like the tools are not ready.

I think RTFM is a term that should be abolished. It's used too often by overconfident and undereducated people. They rarely know much about that they're posting about, yet they talk like they're the BE ALL END ALL of the subject.
Let's RTFM here. The Redhat article admits that there is fragmentation on EXT2 and admits that no well established utility exists for fixing this besides recreating the partition. Is that really a solution? Does it really "Just Work?" Further articles on this matter exist:
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php?p=241
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203 .1/0539.html

...and the kernel has continued to bloat since then.

Are we going too fast?

Part of the reason for that is that any teenager can complain and make half-baked "suggestions", even if they barely have any idea of what they're talking about (written by Yours Truly over 4 years ago).

I think if the "write it yourself" attitude completely disappeared, there would be no large open-source projects, because all the developers would burn out due to frustration. :-)

Was going to provide? If bitmover had seen interoperability as a goal from the beginning (the very least I will accept out of proprietary software that is part of a core business process) then it would have been provided already, Tridge would never have had reason to write tools that interfaced to BitKeeper via its internal protocols (Assuming that is what is happening, which all of this strongly implies - I don't know just what was written obviously) and this whole thing never would have happened.

If you are trying to copy BK, give it up. We'll simply follow in the footsteps of every other company faced with this sort of thing and change the protocol every 6 months. Since you would be chasing us you can never catch up. If you managed to stay close then we'd put digital signatures into the protocol to prevent your clone from interoperating with BK.

In this post I provide evidence that Arch offers reasonable performance on large trees. Here is a post from the lkml thread that demonstrates Monotone's performance problems.

Do you have a link where has Arch been proven prohibitively inefficient? (Any benchmark older than mid-2004 is obsolete.)

Also, bazaar is not a performance-focused fork, although it does have a caching system that is not yet in mainline Arch. Its primary goal is to put a better UI on top of Arch. bazaar-ng is a completely separate project that shares no code with Arch, but is inspired by some pieces of Arch design.

You are incorrect w.r.t. Linus quote, that's what Chris Wedgwood said. Linus is still considering Monotone, believing that the speed issues can be fixed.

Judging from the level of enthusiasm, the second top contender is probably Bazaar-NG, if it really delivers in time. SVN and derivatives aren't really so popular amongst kernel developers, for various reasons, so I wouldn't say it is that much likely that they/we will use that.

Note that we are now working on Git (you might like my branch now, which provides some humanly usable user interface ;-) ), Linus' interim storage system suitable for tracking of trees history. It is not a full-blown versioning control system, but it is lightning fast and probably can do enough stuff to be usable for the development at least until some full-blown VCS matures.

You are incorrect w.r.t. Linus quote, that's what Chris Wedgwood said. Linus is still considering Monotone, believing that the speed issues can be fixed.

Judging from the level of enthusiasm, the second top contender is probably Bazaar-NG, if it really delivers in time. SVN and derivatives aren't really so popular amongst kernel developers, for various reasons, so I wouldn't say it is that much likely that they/we will use that.

Note that we are now working on Git (you might like my branch now, which provides some humanly usable user interface ;-) ), Linus' interim storage system suitable for tracking of trees history. It is not a full-blown versioning control system, but it is lightning fast and probably can do enough stuff to be usable for the development at least until some full-blown VCS matures.

Linus is looking into Monotone as you can see here.

Might want to start figuring out how to migrate to that, instead of pestering him about subversion.

PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems ;)

Actually, I think he did.

Here's what Linus had to say about it today.

Found these links when I was doing a websearch on monotone and other CMS systems.

Problems with BK's license

A critique of the license.

And a nastygram of BK to the subversion group.

here

Interesting, I did a comparison. Now, I happen to own a Via Rhine based NIC so I did a vague search on the string "Linux via-rhine" (without the quotes) on Google, Teoma and Vivisimo. The string doesn't imply anything except that I want my results to show something about Linux related to via-rhine (or vice versa).

In the Teoma Results the first hit of 51,600 was a forum post where someone asked "Trying to install LMD 10 using a Via motherboard with onboard Rhine NIC configuration asks for additional parameters - anyone know these please?" It was about someone having problems with an onboard Rhine chip on Mandrake, very short, not much detail and not particularly interesting (nor would it have been helpful even if I was having problems with it).

In the Vivisimo Results the first hit of 51,600 was to a mailing-list post where the topic was "VIA Rhine problem in 2.4". Someone was having an obscure problem with a D-Link dfe-530tx, probably not what I'm looking for. Ironically there was a link in that post to what turned out to be the first hit on Google, and the mailing list post was actually an answer from a company employee at Scyld Software, which brings us to Google..

In the Google Results the first hit of 99,400 was to "Linux Drivers for PCI Ethernet Chips". The link was to a page at Scyld Software, a Linux company. It had information about several Linux kernel drivers (including Via Rhine/II) along with usage instructions, module settings, support options and diagnostic programs - not to mention a direct link to the driver source code. What I could learn from this hit was a lot, including the fact that I can use the via-rhine driver to both Rhine as well as Rhine II chips.

What I found most interesting about all this was not the results (they speak for them self) but rather the number of hits. Theoma and Vivisimo had the exact same number of hits which leads me to believe that they share the same indexes but filter the results differently (Indeed, the second hit on Vivisimo was the same as the first one on Teoma). I admit, Vivisimo has a really cool interface, especially the "Clustered Results"-thing, but the quality on the hits arent nearly as good as those of Google so none of them are Google replacements, yet. Well, that's my conclusion based on this shallow test anyway.

Oh, and thanks for the links btw - they're going into my collection.

All distributions adopt new characteristic *BOIINNGGG!* bootup sound.

Speaking of which. On Wednesday, we were at LinuxFest in Indy and one of the freebies that the university was giving out where these little penguin squishy things. Two girls who looked like they just came off of the latest reality TV show came up to our booth and asked in a very gingery voice "Like, can we have one of these penguins?". I doubt they knew anything about Linux. After they left I then turned to Marina and said, you know there needs to be a new distribution of Linux called Pink Linux or something "like" that. It could have a pink gtk theme with cornflower blue icons.

As far as I know it doesn't...

Here is some more info about paging and swapping under unix

AFAIK a page is an group of memory addresses that are being changed/addressed at the same time.

But I could be mistaken

The links I used:
http://osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
http://gary.burd.info/2003/07/time-shifting-fm-rad io.html

I'll post my script in a reply to this posting.

Stay below 92.5MHz on your FM dial and you're usually a lot better off.

You'll often find NPR stations and college radio, often almost completely void of annoying DJs and commercial interruptions.

In the triangle we've got:

88.1 -- WKNC @ NC State Listen in high-quality .mp3 or .ogg (station formats and history) I have really grown to like "After Hours" between 20:00 and 23:00Eastern on weekdays. Saturday evening is pretty decent hip hop mix. You're in for a surprise if you try Friday evenings or Sunday mornings :) Some PSA's.

88.9 -- WSHA @ Shaw University Listen in .wma or Real. Mostly Jazz. SUPPORT

89.3 -- WXYC @ Duke Listen in .mp3, .ogg, or Real to one of the first radio station in the world to rebroadcast over the net. Eclectic and chill.

89.7 -- TheClassicalStation, WCPE Listen in .mp3, .ogg, .wma, Quicktime, or Real. (please send them a few bucks if you stream their music!) All classical all the time. (Just disconnect if you're not listening!) SUPPORT

91.5 -- WUNC in Chapel Hill Listen in .mp3, .wma, or Real (from iBiblio) to a well funded public radio station. You get Terry Gross, BBC and Day to Day. "Back Porch Music" on weekend evenings (great bluegrass). Program Schedule SUPPORT

I know everybody doen't have such a wonderful selection at the bottom of the dial as the Triangle, but check it out locally - you may discover something... (tune manually rather than with "seek" or "scan" as these will often miss low powered - sometimes high quality - listening opportunities). If you don't have a FM tuner onboard your music player, you can either pipe in audio from a regular radio to your soundcard for automatic recordings and conversion to your favorite format or use the FM tuner that's built in to many TV capture cards and do the same.

http://gary.burd.info/2003/07/time-shifting-fm-rad io.html
http://osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
http://jaeger.blogmatrix.com/radio/
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/05/15 40231&tid=141&tid=185&tid=95&tid=4

There doesn't appear to be a full changelog yet, but I have been following the release candidates, and it appears that Parallel ATA (AKA "Ultra ATA") Hard disk support is still not in the kernel.

This is frustrating. I had purchased an Ultra ATA Hard disk drive (which came bundled with a Serial/Parallel ATA controller), and I had it working fine under SUSE Linux 9.0. What I didn't realize at the time was, Promise made proprietary drivers for SuSE Linux, and no other distro.

I have wanted to switch over to Fedora Linux for some time now, but although it is able to detect my SATA card and load drivers for it just fine, It does not recognise the PATA connector, and does not locate my hard drive, as a result.

There does appear to be a patch available for this, but it is still officially "in development", and I am concerned that it will not make it into the mainstream kernel in time now for Fedora Core 4 to be able to recognize my hard drive, and install to it.

This is so frustrating. What is the holdup? PATA support appears to have been discussed for almost a year now and it is still not in the kernel. There appear to be a lot of Ultra ATA hard disks on the market; I can't be the only one encountering the frustration of not being able to install a modern version of Linux due to lack of driver support.

From Lisp primer:

= (= x y) is true if and only x and y are numerically equal.

equal As a rule of thumb, (equal x y) is true if their printed representations are the same (i.e. if they look the same when printed). Strictly, x and y are equal if and only if they are structurally isomorphic, but for present purposes, the rule of thumb is sufficient.

eq (eq x y) is true if and only if they are the same object (in most cases, this means the same object in memory).

eql (eql x y) is true if and only if they are either eq or they are numbers of the same type and value.

So what Microsoft is trying to patent is known in LISP as (not (eq a b)) for a long time already :(

mentioned LKML thread (and it was 2.6.5)

It can be bypassed rather easily on the thinkpads

see - http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0406 .1/1048.html

This is nothing new. Linux-lovin' IBM is known to do this as well,