Slashdot Mirror
Linux 2.3.46 Released Unto the World
jschauma writes "I just saw on freshmeat that Linux 2.3.46 is out - thought I'd share the news. Freshmeat also has the changelog online. " One step closer to 2.4.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
devfs is in.
/dev/, 99% of which you don't use (ya sure, I have 20 ide partitions. And 5 sound cards. And 9 SCSI CD-ROM drives...), you mount /dev as devfs, and only see the devices you have. Simplifies life a great deal. More info at the devfs overview. Devfs has existed as a patch for a good time now but Linus had issues with it.
devfs = Device File System. Instead of makedev and having dozens and dozens of device files in
Congratulations to Richard Gooch on his efforts over all this time and his tireless dedication to getting in into the kernel. Hats off to you.
Normally, I agree that announcing the latest development kernel on Slashdot is a little silly - after all, if you're running the devel kernels, you know where to look for them.
However, this kernel release IS newsworthy. Why? Well, take a look at this posting to the linux-kernel mailing list:
[PATCH] devfs v158 available
If you can't be bothered to follow the link, here's the important sentence from that posting: This is the patch that was sent to Linus and included in 2.3.46-pre5. That's right boys and girls, DevFS is now part of the standard Linux kernel. This is wonderful news, and amazingly hasn't yet sparked off any great flamewars on the mailing list (those of you that read the list will know that mentioning DevFS on it has seemed akin to posting about atheism on an evangenical Christian newsgroup). For more information about DevFS, have a look at Richard Gooch's kernal patch page.
I'm still amazed that this has happened.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
That way, if you really care, you can just go into preferences and turn on the box, so you can see the latest, greatest kernel version.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
Have a sense of perspective.
/dev. Kernel developers know that one of the *real* wins with devfs is that we can have more than 256 major devices and 256 minor devices. That will make it *much* easier to provide fine-grained support to SCSI, USB, and similar devices, to implement "volume" managers where you associate each removable media object with a unique "minor device number," etc.
We do. You're the one with things out of balance.
Is this the first day we could acquire W2K? No, it's been released to OEMs for weeks.
Is this the first day we could get a peek at W2K? No, release candidates have been out for many months. I'm tempted to say years.
Does Win2K redefine the fundamental paradigms used by software? Nope, it's a incremental change from NT4, but it doesn't have true innovations like GUIs or a NOS, and it doesn't even have false invocations like doing everything through the fully integrated (but still available as a separate product in stores!) web browser.
On the other hand, the inclusion of devfs *will* go a long way to heading off a critical problem. Users notice that devfs eliminates the need to have thousands of files in
The fact that I can get Win2K "in a box" instead of "OEM'd" today does not really change my life. If I really needed Win2K, I would already have it.
The fact that Linux now includes devfs *does* significantly change my life because some very cool kernel modules and applications are now much easier to write without requiring the end user know how to apply a kernel patch.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken