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Arrgh. Always preview. Here we go again:

The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.

(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)

Arrgh. Always preview. Here we go again:

The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.

(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)

The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.

(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)

The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.

(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)

The LWN Distibution list has a "CD-Based" section. I suggest starting with one of those, configuring it to use swap on a file in /tmp on /dev/hd??, and go from there.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

thiz iz already the 4th account i am roasting karma under.

Please follow the first aol.com link!

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

But bring your own lube!

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here.

Let's all work together to improve free software.

This is not strictly speaking a W2K function. The real kicker here for Linux folks is that the easiest way to do hibernation in the modern world is to use ACPI, which Linux doesn't do very well. (See this week's LWN for a timely discussion.

APM BIOSes can also do this, but they aren't as standard: Often the implementation details are specific to the hardware. For instance, Phoenix BIOSes (at least as of two years ago, I haven't messed with this stuff much since then) tend to want to put the STD (suspend-to-disk) data in a special file in a Windows partition, while some others (Dell for sure, since I used to work this stuff for them) save this info in a special STD partition (type 84, IIRC) which is a more generic solution, but requires more knowledge when setting up the box. (When was the last time you thought you might need an STD partition when building your box? BTW, they should be at a minimum, PhysicalMemorySize + 1 MB for state info, video register settings, etc.)

I wonder if it will be able to compile the kernel?

And, if so, I wonder if it will have a kernel debugger.

According to the article, it is not a problem with the motherboard at all. The problem is "the operating system is creating coherency problems within the system by creating cacheable translation to AGP GART-mapped physical memory." That means it's a problem with the OS, not with the motherboard or processor.

In truth, we should probably say it is a combination of a problem with the OS and a problem with the processor. After all, Intel processors don't have the same problem, simply because they work differently. So while it may not technically be the CPU's fault, the CPU does play a part.

Hi, my name is Carey Bunks, and I have written two OS books: Grokking the Gimp and The Lasso: A Rational Guide to Trick Roping.

Here are my two cents on writing books, and on the theory that community participation benefits a book in the same way it benefits code (correcting errors, keeping it up to date, etc). I suspect that this theory is wrong except for some special cases (for example, dictionaries). However, I can warmly recommend the idea of making a book open.

I claim that writing a good book is very different than writing good code. Generally, good code should be well organized, carefully designed, with its components being as modular and as independent as possible. If successful, the result should be an application that evolves more gracefully, and is more easily updated and maintained by multiple developers.

A good book should be well organized, however, does not, indeed must not be modular. Why? Because a human mind does not understand nor process the words in a book the way a computer does a program. Humans like good organization. However, the brain also needs association of ideas and redundancy. We humans like to see the connections between things, and we need to be constantly reminded.

So, although a table of contents may be very organized, a good book contains chapters that are hardly modular. Good chapters should be rich with references to other parts of the book, showing how the ideas presented in different parts work together. Furthermore, chapters will often contain redundant recaps of other chapters, again showing how the pieces fit together. When there is enough of this type of self-referencing, it creates a synergy that helps readers better understand and better appreciate the material.

My conclusion is that a book is more like a cathedral than a bazaar. It requires a master architect who conceives the original design, and then literally weaves the many threads together into a single whole. The very nature of the work resists participation or subsequent updating by third parties. Thus, trying to update chapters is likely to make a book incoherent as the relevancy of references and the synergy of ideas start to break down.

Second, my theory on writing a good book is coherent with the above discussion. I believe that the most important process in writing a good book is re-reading and re-writing. It's kind of like refactoring of code, except instead of making the resulting book more modular, it makes it more connected. As the book starts to take form (near the end of the first draft), it is important to intensely review what has been written. This will give rise to all sorts of small scale revisions -- spelling, grammar, and sentence construction corrections. However, it also allows the author to revisit the overall connectedness of the work. Does the story hold together? Is it coherent? Does it provide insight into the underlying concepts presented by the book? This is the most valuable part of the revision process.

Finally, let's face the facts. The way the publishing industry works, it is very difficult to make any money writing. There are some counter-examples to this, however, the overwhelming majority of books make less than $10k for their authors. Compared to the 6 to 9 months of full-time work needed to produce a quality book, you are better off not trying to write for a living. Thus, it is unlikely that deciding to make a book open will ruin its economic potential. However, in some cases, I think that making a book OS can help improve its market share (see my thoughts on this in this interview on LWN). On the other hand, creating a book is a very rewarding personal experience, and can definitely improve ones professional profile.

Linux is heading even further away from the compiled-in drivers and to a more modular kernel. According to LWN [lwn.net], Alan Cox said that Linux 2.6 will not have compiled-in drivers. "Compiled-in" drivers will just be modules that are written to the "initramfs", a sort of software boot disk compiled into the kernel.


From: Alan Cox
To: babydr@baby-dragons.com (Mr. James W. Laferriere)
Subject: Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 18:08:32 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox), esr@thyrsus.com, cate@debian.org (Giacomo Catenazzi),
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org (Linux Kernel List)
> Hello All , And what mechanism is going to be used for an -all-
> compiled in kernel ? Everyone and there brother is so enamoured
> of Modules . Not everyone uses nor will use modules .

For 2.5 if things go to plan there will be no such thing as a "compiled in"
driver. They simply are not needed with initramfs holding what were once the
"compiled in" modules.

According to LWN, Alan Cox said that Linux 2.6 will not have compiled-in modules.


From: Alan Cox
To: babydr@baby-dragons.com (Mr. James W. Laferriere)
Subject: Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 18:08:32 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox), esr@thyrsus.com,
cate@debian.org (Giacomo Catenazzi),
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org (Linux Kernel List)

> Hello All , And what mechanism is going to be used for an -all-
> compiled in kernel ? Everyone and there brother is so enamoured
> of Modules . Not everyone uses nor will use modules .

For 2.5 if things go to plan there will be no such thing as a "compiled in"
driver. They simply are not needed with initramfs holding what were once the
"compiled in" modules.

Alan

No, that's wrong. Red Hat, for instance, which is generally designed to be an industrial-strength server distribution, applies something like 200 patches to Linus's kernel. Red Hat knows that its customers expect a solid, stable server operating system, so they will do what it takes to build one. Mandrake, on the other hand, knows that its customers are mostly desktop users, so it has other priorities (providing games, etc.) than testing and patching the kernel.

According to this document, ext3 supports three different journalling modes, including one where all data is written to the journal, rather than just the metadata.

A am clueless why moderators keep spending points in this. but the facts:
-She (a "cow is a she?") posted as Anonymos Coward. So it was no karma whore. However it would have been better to mirror it and post a link.
-kernelTrap is /.'ed now(badly!)
-Why waste moderation points points on this? Moderate the trolls down. Moderate gems up, leave the rest, don't push an agenda.
-Read the article first before moderation,(if the moderator did this you would have found out is was /.'ed.)

Some interviews i filtered: (if i say post links i should support this)

1999 linux weekly
1999 from c't (german)
june 2000, linux journal
Nov 2000 linux.ei
and a /.
aug 99 /.

Heh, if you want to get spoilers (before monday ;), I personally always read Linux Weekly News every thursday. Especially the kernel pages.
Also the Kerneltrap has sometimes news on latest kernel developments (like recent O(1)+preempt patch..).

Speaking of that, they should have full interview with Alan Cox tomorrow..

Joe Barr did a similar article for 2001. Here's how he did:

1. Linux Kernel 2.4 will be released, and will trounce Windows in the benchmarks
Half right. 2.4.0 was released, performance was good, but not as good as it could have been. It's gotten better since. Nobody that I know of has done comprehensive benchmarking. I'll give this one a half point.

2. MS Findings of Law overturned, Findings of Fact stand. Ordered back to lower court. DOJ loses zeal for case
Almost perfect. The Conclusions of Law stood, but the Final Judgement was overturned. Everything else was on the nose. I'll give this one a full point.

3. Consolidation and attrition of Linux companies. Fewer distributions. RedHat & VA merge. SuSE & Atipa merge.
Didn't happen. There were some mergers, but no big ones. There was much attrition, but primarily on the fringes of the Linux world, the rest of the computer industry was much harder hit attrition-wise. There are more distributions than ever. There are no superdistributions, in fact, I'd say more people realize today that RedHat != Linux than a year ago. No points.

4. KDE and GNOME continue as separate projects.
Easy point.

5. Linus stops heavy kernel hacking, focuses on community leadership.
You've got to be joking. No points.

6. One of the big five computer retailers offers a Linux boot (or dual boot) for a retail desktop machine.
Nope, didn't happen.

7. Widespread government desktop adoption of Linux
Nope, didn't happen. More servers tho.

8. Bruce Perens shakes up HP.
If it happened, it was completely behind the scenes. From out here, it looks like Compaq's pleading to be eaten had much more effect on HP's management than Bruce did. He has had some effect, and he's still there, so there's always next year. No point.

9. Linux stocks will thrive.
Ha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Seriously, they didn't do badly compared to the rest of the tech stocks, but I would hardly call it "thriving". No point.

10. Another great year for Linux
Easy point.

So, last year, he got three and a half out of ten. One was a complete giveaway (#10), and most people would say #4 was a giveaway too. Not the most impressive set of predictions.

The LWN coverage is here. The ruling contains the interesting phrase " the Court finds that there is only assent on the part of the consumer, if at all, when the consumer loads the Adobe program" (my stress).

TWW

There was a kernel summit about 2.5. I've also heard that they are working on lower latency (either through preemption or breaking up long no-preempt regions) and integrating ALSA.

Where do important changes get tested? One would think that, now that we finally have a development kernel again, non-trivial changes would show up there before being merged into the stable 2.4 series. Thus, there was some surprise when support for "hyperthreading" on PentiumIV processors went into 2.4.17-pre5. That support still does not exist in 2.5, and has thus not seen the wider testing that it could experience there.

The reasoning behind putting this change into 2.4, as explained by Alan Cox, is interesting. The claim that normal users will not be affected by the change is standard. But Alan also points out that, due to the ongoing block I/O work, the 2.5 series "isn't usable for that kind of thing in the near future." So, if a feature like hyperthreading is to be tried out, it must be added to the stable kernel series.

Where do important changes get tested? One would think that, now that we finally have a development kernel again, non-trivial changes would show up there before being merged into the stable 2.4 series. Thus, there was some surprise when support for "hyperthreading" on PentiumIV processors went into 2.4.17-pre5. That support still does not exist in 2.5, and has thus not seen the wider testing that it could experience there.

The reasoning behind putting this change into 2.4, as explained by Alan Cox, is interesting. The claim that normal users will not be affected by the change is standard. But Alan also points out that, due to the ongoing block I/O work, the 2.5 series "isn't usable for that kind of thing in the near future." So, if a feature like hyperthreading is to be tried out, it must be added to the stable kernel series.

I hate to reply to my own post, but this is NOT flamebait! I was attempting to point out that patents are a key underpinning of the economic system that makes a technological world possible.

I realize that many here at /. love to hate patents without having thought of this vital aspect of the problem, but in the context of the article posted, that's pretty dang relevant!

For more info on how big companies can abuse patents, and how they keep them from steam-rolling the little guys, see my letter to the editor in LWN a while back: http://lwn.net/2000/0420/backpage.phtml#backpage

has nat ever actually released anything? still waiting for gnu rope...

Oh well, I cannot reach the site at the moment, but at least you can find an announcement for the latest release from LWN.

Raw access to block devices (DB work)

SCTP (nice network tricks)

Block layer redesign (scsi, ide, etc)

High performance file systems (xfs, jfs, etc)

Re-worked network driver API

Hot-Plug Devices (pci/pcmcia)

Kernel build system

Intergration of some NSA secure linux idea's (mandatory ACL's, etc)

Async-IO addons (non posix conforment)

ACPI / Power management (needed for hot plug?)
And a lot of other topics. 'Specialy make sure to check out the video's. They provide some nice insights into the wo the file systems (xfs, etc), raw access to block devices (oracle was hot on this i think),rld of kernel hero's ;-)

check out this link to the lwn article for more details, descriptions and links.

Actually, Andrew Morton reckons ext3 is actually quicker than ext2 in spite of the journalling. Go figure. :)

--

Here is a summary of the report that talks about Sun's poor response time to security issues.

> By analogy, this isn't a call for
> people for give up freedom of speech;
> only that they stop yelling fire in
> a crowded movie house.

Another wonderful analogy!

Security professionals have been yelling "fire" in crowded movie houses for years. Most of the actual patrons fail to pay any attention, despite the fact that the seats are made of explosively flammable materials, the management allows patrons to smoke cigarettes in the theatre, and occasionally the movie is interrupted by ushers dousing patrons with fire hoses if they are noticeably ablaze. Patrons who do catch fire are not offered a refund, nor a credit for those parts of the movie that they miss, nor even so much as an apology.

--- Zygo Blaxell (zblaxell, feedme.hungrycats.org)

A sign of true geekness would be a linux distro on a credit card sized CD permanently stored in the wallet. Perhaps Slackzip would fit?

Securityfocus did this sort of study.

I can't find the whole thing, but there's
a summary at linux weekly news, and googling for "days recess security focus microsoft linux" or similar might help (days of recess is a measure of response time).

Sumner

XFS comes with SGI's kernel debugger. Linus doesn't want a kernel debugger in the official tree, as he says here.

Especially since 0.01.x still has one. :-)

An LWN link for this issue does exist already, so people in the future can find the column which we are talking about.

(Yes, I spend an hour a day reading the kernel mailing list.)

I'm too lazy to read LKML, but I am interested in the happenings of the Linux kernel development. I highly recommend Linux Weekly News' kernel news (updated every Thursday) and Kernel Traffic , an in depth summary of the week's LKML happenings (usually updated every Sunday or Monday).

Although advanced journaling filesystems only journal metadata, some journaling filesystems journal everything: when a disk write happens, the entire write is written to the journal file, then it's written to the real file, then it's deleted from the journal file.

When Ext3 was first created, it COULD NOT journal metadata -- the only option was full file journaling, which was incredibly slow. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I read the original release notes which said that metadata journaling was not available yet. I believe that Ext3 can now do metadata-only journaling -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but it's a fairly recent development, within the past year or so.

This mail message from about a year ago says that metadata support was "in an early state" at the time. I don't know if it's been perfected since then or not. But the e-mail proves that at one time, Ext3 could NOT do metadata-only journaling, which flat-out disproves your post that all journaling filesystems only journal metadata.

And RAID quite frankly has nothing to do with it; I can't even imagine why you brought it up because it's absolutely irrelevant.

Third section up from the bottom is what they plan on doing for power management.

Intel's ACPI implementation is out there now, and is being used by FreeBSD. They are currently waiting for the 2.5 fork to submit it for Linux. As a measure of the complexity of ACPI, consider that this implementation has "5-7 person years" of development work in it already, and does not yet have support for putting systems to sleep.

So ACPI is important, despite its bulk. 2.4 already has the ACPI interpreter in it, but 2.5 will be where we see a truly working implementation of this standard.

On November 17th, a draft version of a review of Carnivore, the FBI tool for monitoring Internet traffic, was made available to the public. This review was performed by members of the ITT Research Institute in Lanham, Maryland and is 127 pages long. In the Executive Summary, the review makes several recommendations for ways in which Carnivore must be improved, in order to protect individual privacy and assuage concerns about the potential for unauthorized use.....
....

.....
In other words, they found a flawed product, which can currently be easily manipulated to gather information beyond that authorized in a court order. They believe the flaws are fixable and have made recommendations as to what needs to be done, including eventually releasing the source, but not until some glaring security problems have been fixed first.............
Read on here:
http://www.lwn.net/2000/1207/security.php3