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call me an old-timer, but I remember a time when the linux kernel attempted to support java - http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v1.3/100/fs/binfmt_java.c

Download sizes;
Version 1.0 * Current: 1.0.9, 16-Apr-1994 * Size: 1.3 KB(bz2)
Version 2.6 * Current: 2.6.23, 09-Oct-2007 * Size: 5.8 MB(bz2)
http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/

In use;
Linux kernel 2.6.23, 1.8M on disk and 2.3M in RAM.

I don't have a copy of the 1.0 kernel to compare with, sorry.

It looks like power-up in standby support was finally added to libata:
http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.6/22/drivers/ata/ libata-core.c

Finally I'll be able to use staggered spinup for SATA drives on machines that don't support it in hardware. Plus, hdparm -s should no longer be quite as dangerous.

The code is pretty well commented, and it's usually worth having a good look at the sections you're interested in. It's well organised and clean [in the interesting parts]. It has to be, it's modified by a lot of people. Seriously, you won't be sorry. Above this, Google is your best friend. IBM's developer works has good holistic info, and Linux HQ has lots of links to great information. Kernel hacking on your own time is pretty easy, I don't think it needs to be taught. If you want to work on THE Linux kernel, the official archives and documentation are a must.

Actually, I'm even a little sympathetic to Microsoft over Java. Not over the proprietary extensions, but over the fact that Windows doesn't support Java out of the box. After the lawsuit over the language extensions was settled, Sun basically told Microsoft "You must ship our Sun-branded Java runtime with Windows, or nothing". Microsoft quite reasonably chose the latter option. Sun then tried to sue Microsoft to force them to ship Java, but that lawsuit went nowhere as far as I know, and quite right too.

It would be a better world if Microsoft and Sun had been able to come to an agreement, like Apple apparently did with Sun. It would also have been nice if Sun could have worked with the Linux community better; then we could have had Java applications deployable pretty much anywhere.

Sadly, Sun used to be pretty much uninterested in supporting any platform except Solaris. I think Sun got caught up in their own hype, and thought every OS platform would have to do the work and ship Java just to be competitive.

But I'm hopeful that the Linux situation will improve once the full JRE is released under the GPL. The tools already exist to let you run .jar binaries just like any other binary, they just need to be integrated properly into the various distributions. I'd love to see Kubuntu ship with Java integrated and working.

From http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/
Version 2.6 * Current: 2.6.18, 20-Sep-2006
Version 2.4 * Current: 2.4.33, 11-Aug-2006
Version 2.2 * Current: 2.2.26, 25-Feb-2004
Version 2.0 * Current: 2.0.40, 08-Feb-2004

So, 2.6 and 2.4 are actively maintained, with 2.2 released in '99 with updates to '04, and 2.0 being updated for over 8 years, since 1996. And I'll wager that there's been no more updates since then for those two kernels simply because it *is* good enough.

Linux Kernel 2.2 was released in '99, updated until '04, and got its last patch in January 2005. The kernel may be "good enough" feature-wise, but do you really think it's secure enough to not require any security patches since the beginning of 2005? Since 2.2 is not getting security patches anymore, is it still "good enough" (secure enough) to use?

In comparison, Windows 2000 was released in '00, updated until '05, and will continue to get security patches until 2010. Also until 2010, customers can continue to get paid support directly from Microsoft.

I'm not arguing that Windows is more secure than Linux (or even a better option), but they sure give customers a heck of along product lifecycle. Even if they can't convice customers to upgrade, they continue to supply patches for much longer than a Linux kernel gets patches. They also continue to provide paid support for their "no longer good enough" OS.

Microsoft: "One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that old versions of software are good enough"

Behold, the difference between open and closed source software.

From http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/
Version 2.6 * Current: 2.6.18, 20-Sep-2006
Version 2.4 * Current: 2.4.33, 11-Aug-2006
Version 2.2 * Current: 2.2.26, 25-Feb-2004
Version 2.0 * Current: 2.0.40, 08-Feb-2004

So, 2.6 and 2.4 are actively maintained, with 2.2 released in '99 with updates to '04, and 2.0 being updated for over 8 years, since 1996. And I'll wager that there's been no more updates since then for those two kernels simply because it *is* good enough.

Need I also mention the little bit of text that is present in almost *any* F/OSS software update that pretty much says "Hey, if you're current version's working fine for you, that's great. Don't think we're forcing this on you."

"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
-- Linus Torvalds. http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v1.3/53/Documentatio n/CodingStyleem

SHA-2 in 256 and 512 bit flavors isn't the only alternative folks. Among other nifty hashes, there's whirlpool: Linux 2.6 kernel crypto API entry for whirlpool and a page with whirlpool details.

I was thinking that I had read that the uncertainty around the lawsuit was why Alan Cox was using Linux instead of BSD, but I did a Google search and it turns out that Alan Cox choose Linux over BSD was because it would run on his FPU-less PC.
http://www.linuxhq.com/lnxlists/linux-kernel/lk_99 05_01/msg00578.html

[If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, check out the now very dated Linux Installation and Getting Started]

It blinks out the problem in morse code using the num/caps/scroll lock lights on your keyboard. Here is the code that does it

Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor

Christoph Hellwig has been, according to this web page, "in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree". The page also mentions another fascinating piece of news, that he worked for Caldera for at least part of the time he was making those kernel contributions:

"After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution."

In 2002, he offered a paper on "Linux-ABI: Support for Non-native Applications" which is described like this:

"The Linux-ABI project is a modification to the Linux 2.4 kernel that allows Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

Back in 2002, he was described, in connection with his appearance at the Ottawa 2002 Linux Symposium, like this:

"Christoph Hellwig
"Reverse engineering an advanced filesystem
"Christoph Hellwig is employed by Caldera, working on the Linux-ABI binary emulation modules. In his spare time he cares for other parts of the kernel, often involving filesystem-related activities."

So, in short, he was contributing to the kernel and working for Caldera on Linux/UNIX integration at the same time. His work for Caldera was on the Linux kernel ("he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution"), and he also did work on his own on the kernel. Did Caldera know about his freelance contributions, in addition to knowing about his work for them? What do you think? He used his hch at caldera.de email address when doing it. All contributions to the kernel are publicly available anyway. They certainly could have known. As for his job, his signature on his emails back in 2001 was:

"Christoph Hellwig
Kernel Engineer Unix/Linux Integration
Caldera Deutschland GmbH".

He used the email address hch at bsdonline.org sometimes too, and here you can see some of his Linux-abi contributions. Here are some of his contributions to JFS, Journaled File System. Yes, that JFS. Here he is credited as sysvfs maintainer, and he confirms it in this email, writing, "I've run native sysvfs tools under linux, but as now that I'm Linux sysvfs maintainer I'm looking into implementing free versions of it."

Here is a list of the operating systems that use or can handle the file system sysvfs:

"sysvfs: UNIX System V; SCO, Xenix, Coherent e21
"operating systems that can handle sysvfs: FreeBSD (rw), LINUX (R), SCO (NRWF)"

Here's a page listing by author (alphabetically by first name), with his emails to linux-kernel in June 2003, so he is still contributing.

Here he is listed on the Change log for patch v2.4.17. Here he tells Andrew Morton in 2002 that he will

Correct me if I am wrong, but... Why wouldn't this work with the standard kernel drivers? Vojtech Pavlik and Andree Borrmann have already written drivers for this, and it works with DB-9 or a DB-25. It works with NES controllers, PSX pads, SNES, and more. It works great. I have it working with my PSX pads at home. It even works with my homebrew arcade stick. Diagrams and Info are available here. This is a kernel module that comes with Linux by default.

Good, but crude instructions about using a gamepad in Linux can be found here.

It is important that you load a few seperate modules.

parport
gamepad
joyconsole

I think that there is another one. If anyone has any questions, just ask, and I will post what I have in my rc.modules file when I get home and have access to my machine.

Turbo to this day has an installer that can compete only with slackware and debian, if you noticed neither of those installers are actually what anyone would call "user friendly". But they weren't designed to be user friendly they were designed to install their distribution. Turbo's marketshare is in Asia and Southern America. Europe and the US see RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian and think that the other distros of the past are dead.

Has anyone here every looked at the list of linux distributions out there today? It's not like there is a perfect distro for everyone. I wouldn't say Turbo was dead, just like I wouldn't say that and OSS project is dead. A dead OSS project is unknown because someone has forgotten about it. If there is at least one person who knows and uses a distro/software then it's not dead.

On a wee bit of a side note, if you want to count how success and whether or not something is alive by monetary values. How much money can one really expect to make on something that is free? I'm not trying to start a Open Source flamefest, but just identifying the original intent of Open Source, freedom. Can you put a price on freedom? I can't.

• General Info
• The Linux Kernel API
• /proc in general
• just for network tuning

• General Info
• The Linux Kernel API
• /proc in general
• just for network tuning

The alt sysreq function might work when X dies and locks the keyboard. I always forget which key does what so haven't been able to test it yet, Luckily X doesn't crash for me anyway (using 4.2.0).

info about alt-sysreq here.

Even before we handle the CJK/Unicode human interface and application integration problems, Linux (don't know about the rest) should have proper support for Unicode in the kernel, especially the filesystem's filenames. What's the point of writing a Chinese document when you can only save it as 'abcde.doc'?

Granted, you could just mount /home as a UTF8 friendly VFAT/umsdos (see here for details, grep for "Unicode"), but that's a huge kludge.

And after that, we have a whole load of typical unix software AND file formats that handles files suchs as tar to fix to make them Unicode/UTF8 friendly while making sure that they are backwards-compatible.

One minor thing software developers (that's YOU) can do is to make sure that all your new software you create is UTF8 friendly. That way you'd save yourself lots of redesign problems later. It used to be 640Kbytes, then Y2K. It's Unicode now.

Back on topic, don't underestimate the influence of .tw. They've manage to dominate the popular desktop motherboards and misc. electronics market. Given the right conditions and some time, they can hugely influence the software market as well. This is the best chance for the world to break free of a certain US company's monopoly on software. After all, would you ten years ago believe that most desktop motherboards today are made in Taiwan?

I've no idea myself, but I found this on linuxhq.

From the brief glance, it seems like there are a number of rewrites of the experimental hacks in 2.4 ("Bluetooth no longer experimental", framebuffer rewrite, Video 4 Linux redesign, Generic ACPI, etc).

Mostly stuff I wouldn't use in a hurry. After all, I use Linux for stability over Windows, and really cutting-edge stuff is secondary to rock-solidiness.

Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can check those, and it only confuses the programmer. No wonder MicroSoft makes buggy programs.

Comments are good, but there is also a danger of over-commenting. NEVER try to explain HOW your code works in a comment: it's much better to write the code so that the _working_ is obvious, and it's a waste of time to explain badly written code.

For the love of Dijkstra please don't use Hungarian style. There's a lovely common style in linux/Documentation/CodingStyle Which references (and bashes) the GNU Coding Standards. Either one of those could be a good starting point, once you resolve the fights you'll get into over style.

http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/patch/patch-2.4 .6-ac1/linux.ac_drivers_ide_hptraid.h.html

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

• MWave info at Linux HeadQuarters
  
  
• MWave Project for Linux
  

I'm also not quite sure what the original poster wants, but when a box in a cabinet gets so unhappy that it's not controllable via the network, I use APC's MasterSwitch, which is basically and eight-plug power strip with an ethernet jack and the ability to turn the outlets on and off individually.

I have also heard interesting things about the watchdog cards that have Linux drivers in the kernel, although I've never used them myself.

Both these solutions strike me as ugly, but I guess it beats driving to a colloc in the middle of the night.

Try linuxhq.com.

Depending on your architecture's cache design, this isn't always true. Virtual caches that include PIDs in cache tags obviously don't have to be flushed; all that's needed is a change to the cache's PID register. The same applies to TLBs. The Linux Cache Flush Architecture.

Additionally, unless you put in enough memory, you're going to have to swap to disk throughout the rotation.

This is why web servers have lots of memory. But, that aside, in Linux text pages are shared; you don't have 700 copies of your program's code in memory. Clearly stacks and data pages aren't sharable, but your MT system also needs separate memory for each thread's stack and thread-local data. If I had large amounts of data that was usefully shared by my threads, I would shmem that same data in a process-based system.

But the most telling observation is how similar processes are to threads from the Linux kernel's perspective (which you could use to dog on Linux's threading support, but I wouldn't). Both are created by the kernel's clone call, which takes flags that indicate which process stuff (FDs, data, etc.) should be duplicated and which should be shared by the cloned process/thread. If you ever wondered why threads have their own PIDs in Linux...

Threads aren't god's gift to programmers. But they're still nice :)

Where can I find a list of changes in 2.4 vs 2.2

This page should get you started on the significant differences...

Linux is very User-friendly, VERY!; its just very particular about its choice of friends :P

Linux kernel 2.0.32 came out around November 1997, so that comment is almost 2 years old. Things seemed to have stabilized a lot by 2.0.33 which came out in December.

Check out Linux Kernel 2.0 patches page at LinuxHQ for more details.

As I recall, the 1.2 networking was OK. Anyone remember that far back? I know I ran 1.2.8 for quite a while, and didn't have any kernel-related problems.

For those of you to new to development kernel tracking, this is a JOKE, it's sarcasm. I have no doubt that Linus would like a freeze, and it COULD happen, but this is not written in stone.

I refer you to Kernel 2.1.69 notes where Linus said:

Anyway, I personally don't see anything major pending. There are still various fixes that have yet to be integrated (some of the smbfs work by Bill etc), but on the whole I'd call this feature-freeze time. Have fun--Linus

As it happens, the development kernel kept going from 2.1.69 in 1-Dec-97 on to Linux 2.2.0-pre9 in 20-Jan-99, that's over a year.

Linus has a sence of humor, don't think every word out of his mouth is written in stone, this isn't Moses comeing down from the mountian with the ten commandments... . It's just a comment, and one said with tounge in cheek.

It could be "the freeze," but don't hold your breath.

Check out the Lance Armstrong Foundation

Hehehe. Try Linux HQ, use the Distributions link, and let your jaw drop down to the ground. There are *many* distributions, ranging from tiny one-floppy versions to packed, multiple-CD distros.

Differences? Many. Too many to post here. Do the research. ;-)

As for RH -> SuSE, I doubt they're upgradeable between each other, because of different file placement and such. 'sides, SuSE probably has better things to do than constantly track RH's standards...

I just checked on LinuxHQ and there is a reference at the bottom of the page to a COPYING file. It states that, unless otherwise noted (and I didn't see any other notices), the material is covered by GNU GPL. There is even a copy of the GPL on the copying page. Did I miss something?

Read the copying terms. They state that the site content is copyright ECS Group and impose various limitations on what can be done with that content.

Now, look at the Changes files for the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. Both of those are obviously derived from their counterparts which are distributed with the kernel, and even say as much. Unfortunately for ECS, those Changes files in the kernel are under the GPL.

Hmm.

Read the copying terms. They state that the site content is copyright ECS Group and impose various limitations on what can be done with that content.

Now, look at the Changes files for the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. Both of those are obviously derived from their counterparts which are distributed with the kernel, and even say as much. Unfortunately for ECS, those Changes files in the kernel are under the GPL.

Hmm.

Read the copying terms. They state that the site content is copyright ECS Group and impose various limitations on what can be done with that content.

Now, look at the Changes files for the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. Both of those are obviously derived from their counterparts which are distributed with the kernel, and even say as much. Unfortunately for ECS, those Changes files in the kernel are under the GPL.

Hmm.

LinuxHQ.com back online! (and it's not this site)

The original creator of LinuxHQ has brought his original site back up (with a little bit of an explanation). I wish him luck!. :-)

From now on, this site will be called kernelnotes.org, and I will continue on with my plans for it. The content on this site will always be free, so I have no problems with anybody borrowing it, or enhancing it. I believe the two different sites can develop complementary (not competing) content for the Linux community.

I am glad that this little episode appears to be over. Please give me a few weeks to remove all the references to LinuxHQ in this site.

Now, I personally feel that the linuxhq.com thing was a fiasco, but I admire the diplomacy on the part of kernelnotes. An explanation from the linuxhq guy (Mark Evans) is here. He says he wants it to be better maintained, but I always thought it was well maintained. Well, whatever.

/me changes bookmarks to kernelnotes.org. :-)

Simple as that. Don't go to the web site and it won't stay up long. The author says he's looking for support on the LinuxHQ is Back Online page, so if nobody helps, the site cannot continue.

I have a motherboard with the ALi Aladdin V chipset that includes the M1543 IDE controller, which has always worked fine for me (I was running 2.1.something when I bought it). So what does this mean? Is there functionality that I wasn't getting out of my M1543 before that I will now if I upgrade to 2.3.1? Anyone know?

• Minor update to Quake IP masquerader.

I have no clue abt coding, but would the recent release of the quake3 test have anything to do with this? yummy...

-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...

On the Cutting Edge Linux page, it says to disable bdflush when installing the new kernel. Could someone explain exactly what this does, and why I have to disable it now?

Maybe someone else with more information can comment, but I believe the problem with WinModems is not so much in writing the drivers, but in the licensing costs of the V.90 protocol.

Go see this page for a little more information.

Or, if you want to see why most of the real linux kernel guys hate Winmodems, follow this thread.

Alan Cox estimated 200k+ lines of code, running in kernel space.

So, forget about the specs. Even if you had them, they would be either too expensive to use or not worth the impact to the kernel to implement. Better off spending the few extra bucks, and taking a load off your CPU.

Its good that you're asking, but you're asking the wrong question.

The question should've been "Where can I find what?" not "What is what" In this case, try here. That overwrought saying "give a man a fish and he eats vs. teach a man how to fish and he eats for a lifetime" applies here in spades.

Read docs and man-pages, do a "grep -i snmp /usr/doc/HOWTO/*", FAQ's are your friends.

On another note, the RedHat-2.2.5 kernel is not a vanilla linux-2.2.5 in the first place. Raid and a few other patches have been applied. To get the complete list of changes, run, mount the source-cd, and run something like this:
"rpm -qpl /mnt/cdrom/SRPMS/kernel-2.2.5-16.src.rpm"

its not up yet but I guess it will be here when it gets posted

from

cutting edge change listing


Simple USB driver added: You can't enable this option from the configuration yet. Maybe in 2.2.8.



but there is no changelog up yet for 2.2.8?

Pop over to www.linuxhq.com. If they don't have a change summary up yet, there should be a link to the cutting edge linux site that usually has them.

Well, this url will work fine once it is updated, and it will show the updates in 2.2.7
http://edge.linuxhq.com/changelis t.cgi?show=2.2.6

From the linux-kernel list:
Mindcraft also used the v0.92 MegaRAID driver. An SMP race condition was fixed in v0.93 which was almost certainly available from the AMI web site long before the Mar 10-13 test. So SMP NT "beat" a non-SMP Linux on a quad-Xeon server. Big hairy deal.
Original poster is "Doc" Savage. Original post 14 Apr 99.