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Kernel Traffic #64 And The 2.4 Kernel TODO
sohp writes: "Alan Cox's summary writeup of the things remaining before 2.4 highlights Kernel Traffic #64. It's quite a long list -- I'm not holding my breath for 2.4 " Kernel Traffic is a pretty cool overview thing if you can't handle the burden of actually subscribing to the list itself ...
Wrong. Kde2 development is encountering serious obstacles regarding slooow startup of any app. They have a handle on it, but it will take some time to apply the fixes to all the apps and "parts". Other than that, it's in great shape and looks (visually) exciting. I predict that within 6 weeks they will have a beta which includes only the base system and koffice. The rest will follow incrementally through the summer and fall. Gonme will be first. Gnome always releases early and releases buggy. But, I hope they release a new file manager to replace GMC as planned soon. When the hell is gtk going to develop a text widget as a standard part of its lib that has a horizontal scroll bar and allows one to turn line wrap on or off - I hate those ugly return symbols and forced line wrap - yuck! (Qt came out with such a widget as a standard part of Qt 2.1 which sure beats its old widget what didn't allow line wrap at all (without hard line feeds). Debian will always be last. Whatever they release as current will be at least a year behind the times. Hell, I would be using Debian now except "Stable" Debian uses an ancient version of X that doesn't support my video card! I curse them still after preparing some dozen floppies and making the discovery. Mozilla will have an "EXCELLENT" beta for Linux within two months. I think they got the message. The problem will be that official "netscape" branded versions included in most distros will have all the forced AOL crap with no easy way to remove it.
some fool made a comment that linux should sniff for a windoze registry, and use this to set up settings for a linux install. This has some merit I think, but MS should also allow multi boot like lilo. I cracke d up when w1900 went backwards. This intolerance to other os's, including ms's own, ... anticompetitive. With perl and grep, should not be too had, and easy to fix when ms breaks things over.
Every heard of the killall command? :)
Sorry to beg still more details--is this fstab entry necessary or advisable for any 2.3 series kernel? I've been running one 2.3.4something with no such line. ((yikes!)) thx
Til Linus himself adds a journalled fs in, it doesn't help at all. If it didn't make it into the canonical tree, it's a fair assumption that stability and/or security problems are caused by adding it and in any event the combination hasn't received enough testing to trust.
The text widget you ask for is already in the tree. It looks like it will do everything you could possibly want in a text widget. I don't know how speedy it is yet, though.
Injurious?
Al is currently rewriting half of vfs because of the devfs integration, mind you. Which tends to make 2.3.99-pre* badly unstable (as in, 2-3 weeks ago half of the time you couldn't unmount some of the filesystems). This is going to push back 2.4 even more...
OG.
My money is on PHP4, it's currently up to a Release Candidate. The Gimp team is in bug fix mode mostly too.
Anyone know what the story is with Apache?
--
Simon
I said it once, got marked as a troll by some orthodox zealot debianite who didn't understand his own religion, and I'll say it again.
Debian uses words we use every day but with different meanings.
ex...
1) Free: Doesn't violate our Guild Socialism
2) Freedom: Enforcing our Guild Socialism on others
3) Stable: So old that everyones is bored with developing on it, so it doesn't change much
Now I'm not bashing my favorite distrobution. I'm just translating for others to understand. It actualy makes sence that when new major releases come out its time to lock off the old stuff as stable and start working on the new distrobution of new stuff.
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^
Until you realize (too late) that on some unix systems killall will ignore any arguments and kill all processes owned by running user. Don't try this at work as root.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
>And the give me one good reason why someone who buys a zip drive now
>would want the parallel version when he can have the faster, more
>reliable USB version.
How about compatibilty with older hardware?
>a do nothing product? have you looked recently at how many new
>printers, scanners, mice, joysticks, external storage, MP3 players,
>etc etc etc...are all using USB?
>until linux has solid USB support, we're missing out on a lot of cool
>new devices.
Really? I have an external zip drive that plugs into my parallel port. Give *ONE* good reason why someone who has such a drive or any other device should trash it and run out and buy the USB version of it?
actually it does...
you can also try this
ps auxgw |grep netscape | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 kill -9
this little beaut is called netpoop
=)
-Peter
When enough bugs get fixed to consider it usable. :)
There is *nothing* stopping you from using it right now. It's out there in fact. As 2.3.99pre666-1-5-6ac3
If you find a bug, you can even help get it out faster. There isn't really much hype though. USB is a do nothing product right now, and DRM is about the only thing I see useful for myself.
It just takes time to get things bugfree'er.
Give it 3 months I think.
--
CodeRed, the lower user #. No relation to SirCam.
closer to two years between 2.0 and 2.2,
and even then, 2.2 wasn't quite were it should have been until around 2.2.5
Um... try looking up killall. Be careful though... SysV systems like Solaris have killall's that behave quite differently. :P
Actually, it goes a little deeper than that. Linus often decides to change X so that it is better/cleaner/different knowing full well that Y, Z, Q, A, B and a unknown other things will break and need to be fixed.
This is the basic deal with the Linux kernel -- nobody is guaranteeing internal compatibility, especially at the expense of better code. On the other hand, a commercial vendor such as Microsoft would implement an new X, but also at the same time keep the old X working. This is why Windows 98 can do mysterious things like run SCSI drivers from 1986.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
All the 'Kill Netscape' progs on freshmeat.net look at the whole path, so they can grab anything that contains a certain string.
But yes, the script isn't exactly robust. It actually was a one-liner, but I cleaned it up for readability.
In reality, this would work as well:
#/bin/sh
kill -9 `ps -ax | grep $1 | grep `whoami` | head -1 | awk '{print $1} '`;
And this one will get anything owned by you, instead... plus it doesn't try to kill itself. Yay for Bourne Shell.
Except his solution to this problem is pretty clue--. He suggests "running something like 'tar' on shutdown and boot" to handle devfs permissions. When multiple people thought the idea was totally stupid, he replied that running a startup and shutdown script wouldn't be all that bad...
Obviously, Linus never took catastrophic failure into consideration.
um, "hype"?
are periodic progress reports "hype"?
that is a truly wierd statement you've made. I don't call frequent press releases and talking to the press, talking about how Fun and Easy the next WIndows will be with very few specific details anywhere, NEAR equivilent to the steady stream of periodic, sober, low-key descriptions of features and implementation details about 2.4 that have poured out from the people who make the kernel. Hype in my mind is essentially attempting to rile up the future end user and make the end user want whatever is being hyped. Whereas practically everything i've seen written about linux 2.4 isn't even intended to be READ by end users; just stuff by kernel developers for kernel developers..
if you're tired of hearing about the progress of linux 2.4, then don't just read things written about it until it's released.. sheesh.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
These are important pieces of functionality that worked once. Why were checkins/merges allowed that broke these?
The cache (among other stuff) were changed so it would be way faster and use about half the memory. Good, eh? All filesystems then needed an overhaul for this to work.
Wasn't the code reviewed? Didn't anyone test for these?
It is being reviewed right now. All software manufacturers do this: Change something, and a lot of stuff is temporarily broken until fixed/adapted. A developer typically work on only a few files at a time. Of course no release take place during the broken time. The same happens to linux, with the difference that you may indeed take a look at code in the "broken state", because you too may do development if you want to help out. The code is not released though, it is merely available. Release happens when they roll out 2.4.0
that was much too long to be a "classic" me too post, also, your post even contained a small tidbit that may be interesting to others..you should be more careful when labeling your posts "classic"...
=P
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
try out killall program_name..if you don't like that then write yourself a shell script or something to what you want. Not to mention that would not be a kernel thing.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
well..if you hack the kernel with the best of them...sleep is optional anyway. :)
'Sleep? Isn't that a totally inadequate substitute for caffeine?'
- Sorry, I don't know where this one's from. Anyone else know?
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Ooo... that IS good.
Personally, I'd bet on either the kernel, KDE2 (it rocks, BTW - been using it for a month and a half, and it's getting better every day!), or Mozilla.
I don't know exactly when the change went in. But if its there, you want it. If you need it and don't have it, you'll know because X will be super slow (MIT-SHM obviously relys on SHM working).
As usuall, all of those latest packages will release -before- Debian 2.2 (which is frozen) does and only after that Debian 2.2 will release to ensure that we, the Debian users, are always runnunng previous versions of everything ! :p
There's just a few days left of April, and even if it doesn't make it (and those chances are good) it's damn near... ;)
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Don't forget to put an entry into fstab for shm (shared memory) /var/shm. I had a REALLY hard time finding that out when I upgraded; maybe I was looking in the wrong places.
The mount point for that filesystem should be
See you, space cowboy...
alias killnet='killall -9 netscape;rm ~/.netscape/lock'
A handy alias I find. Just waiting for Mozilla to get a tiny bit better.
It's really sad to see so many items on the list that indicate regressions caused by earlier checkins/merges. For example:
>msync fails on NFS
>UMSDOS was broken by the fs changes
>Restore O_SYNC functionality
These are important pieces of functionality that worked once. Why were checkins/merges allowed that broke these? Wasn't the code reviewed? Didn't anyone test for these? Say all you want about "open source is better" and "debugging is parallel" but these sorts of things would never have slipped through the checkin/review process in any decent OS group (I should know, I've been in a few).
The msync and O_SYNC bugs would have shown up using any number of public-domain standard tests, and the people who broke them should never have forwarded the code to _anyone_ else with bugs like these still present. That's basic "software hygiene", and failing to require even that much just gives the whole Linux community a black eye. Why are we doing MS's PR folks' job for them?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Amen brother.
As a test engineer who has seen products released
way before they were done I have only respect for
developers who won't release until the shit is done.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Disabling Java will dramtically reduce the crashes.
well..if you hack the kernel with the best of them...sleep is optional anyway. :)
I've got my money on KDE2.0.
: )
BTW: My dream distro is Debian with *all* of the above... imagine it with the 2.4 kernel, KDE2 with Konqueror or GNOME2 with Mozilla and Evolution on top of XFree86 4.0 all placed on a nice journaling filesystem... oh, what a glorious day that shall be. I can then die in peace and happiness.
Each has its advantages, so keep both- don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
-bugg
I personally like GPL just so there is no confusion), but why is comunism bad?
---
He's repeating a very old idea.
10 years ago there was a great debate on SMP versus distributed computing. Already then it became clear that SMP is a dead end. It cannot scale because of cache coherency etc.
IBM for example never wanted to make SMP machines. Later they gave in to customer demand and made some SMP AIX machines, but internally they still don't believe in it (they push more for massively parallel, so distributed such as the SP2 machines).
X does not require inetd to function. When you
run X, it listens on a port for clients to connect
to it. inetd is for those programs that do not
set up their own listener.
I could be wrong here, but I think X can be set
up using UNIX sockets, which require no IP
addresses.
The (really interesting) problem with this is cache coherency and consistency: if you've got (say) 256 independent nodes all accessing the same dataset for CRUD operations (as against straight shared reads with non-interdependent writes), how do you ensure that the data's kept in sync without spending vast amounts of time waiting on locked data. The semantics of transaction processing mandate that your transactions be atomic, consistent, isolated and durable: it's difficult to do this (particularly the consistent and isolated requirements) when you've got lots of nodes each with their own private caches unless you enforce frequent cache flushes and reloads. Even doing this you start seeing a lot of waiting: fundamentally your access to data is serialised, at which point a lot of the benefits of massive parallelisation disappear (this is better known as Amdahl's Law, which states that the potential speed-up offered by massive parallelisation is limited by the fraction of serial work in the problem) - see her e for further discussion.
This is less of a problem with highly read oriented systems (such as DSS) and jobs such as crypto-cracking, but with OLTP this is a fundamental bottleneck.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Why so much anger? Each has its advantages and disadvantages as do other *nix variants. Maybe someday you'll come to realize we are on the same side; not that this is some kind of jihad anyways.
USB has a much greater bandwidth than your parallel port. Your zip drive would be faster using USB.
CleverFox
That's sort of the effect from the user's point of view, but if I understand vmware, it slides underneath the two OS's and makes them run side-by-side with one appearing in a window in the other. With the user-mode port, it is really Linux inside Linux. If you run it and do a ps, you will see a whole bunch of "linux" processes, plus what they really are inside the virtual machine.
That's simply not true. If you have win98 running in Linux, then VMWare is a Linux process that emulates a virtual machine for win98. There are virtual machines that run below all OS's, but VMWare doesn't work like that. For instance VMWare can crash of freeze solid, without disturbing any other Linux app (or the kernel).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I had forgotten that Windows was suitably large so that 65K bugs is not that many bugs/line of source code.
The endemic EEE culture could be really interesting in a post-breakup future with two behemoth software companies in Redmond (call them OS Products and Everything Else).
Care to speculate what would happen if Windows 2003 came out with a new "innovation", such as a swallowed version of something that looked a lot like Word+Excel+Access+Outlook? Hey, if it can eat IE, it's got a pretty good-sized mouth!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It's great reading, even if you're not a direct kernel hacker, being something of an education as to what the issues are, the pro's and the con's and plenty of subjective opinion about the what's "beautiful" and what's not.
As far as I'm concerned, this is like reading about the Chronicles of the Mightiest, but sadly, I never expect to see a terse laudatory Alan Cox comment with my name on it, though I much admire those other names that do get put in the parentheses.
Fixed a long-standing bug. (Little Ole Me)Cured subtle race on 8-way SMP (Me Again)
Speeded up khttpd by 5x. (Aint I Great)
Implemented VMware like win32 interpreter. (You Know Who)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And the give me one good reason why someone who buys a zip drive now would want the parallel version when he can have the faster, more reliable USB version.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Do you really want him to stick to a release date, and then end up releasing an extremely buggy non-fully functional kernel?
I find myself reviewing the KT and diving into the referenced discussions in the archive when something grabs my attention. I am not a kernel hacker, and much of the discussion is beyond me. Of course, exposure over time helps, but the other reason I read it is to see the Open Source development process in action. Very cool!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Phear my l33t homepage.
http://freshmeat.net/search.php3?query=kill+netsca pe
Lars -
That's not a kernel matter... and your plight is one that has been solved before. Use the shell command 'killalll netscape' ... That'll send a SIGTERM signal to netscape. It if still refues to die: killall -9 netscape ... sudden death.
I do beleive that the cycle from 2.0 to 2.2 was nearly a year long or thereabouts. The 2.1.x series was up to 2.1.132 (correct me if wrong) before the 2.2.x pre's came around.
Justin Buist
-- We should kill all the intolerant people in the world.
I think it would be extremely cool if they started having it so when you wanted to kill say netscape then you could just type kill netscape. I find that is becomes extrememly annoying when netscape crashes every two seconds.
"I INSTALLED LUNIX AND FPROTTED HIS TARBALL!!!!!@#"
Anyone have any friggin' clue on when this is coming out? The hype for 2.4 has reached the level of which Microsoft once garnered.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
I use 2.3-pre5. Its stable as hell and alot faster than 2.2 for me as it supports udma for my motherboard. Install it and start sending bug reports, or better send patches. If you dont do any of these things you SHOULD NOT complain...
Then why did Linus himself say that 2.4 would come out in the first quarter of 2000?
(only to change that later to summer 2000)
(which looks like another promise that he might not be able to keep...)
Vaporware, anyone?
N.B. No need to moderate this down. Address complaints directly to Linus.
I once supported and tested a product which had very rigid release deadlines, even though at the time there were only 3 sites using the product, and all three were still not in production. The 'project manager' would often promise a new version by the end of the week to one customer, and the programming team would often work long hours just to get everything working as promised, often ending up with code that was tested enough to check that it was working. The project was an utter shambles. If we had shipped new versions when they had been ready, perhaps the test customers would still be using it today, instead of abandoning it as unready.
I like kernels get updated, but why they update them? Surely all popcorn the same?
-- Sergio - This is here, This is the place, This is now!
>But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most
>libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
Win2K has a complete scripting language, Windows Script Host, so it would be fair to include a Perl or Python in the mix. And, since WinNT/Win2K have a rudimentary POSIX system, it seems only sane to give Linux a rudimentary Win32 system and include Wine.
We should also include a modern browser, probably either Communicator or Mozilla, either of which will raise our bug count severely.
Win2K also includes some basic network functionality that NT was missing (under the strange moniker "Services for Unix"), like a telnetd and the like, so removing network daemons is not actually fair. There's Dynamic DNS, so we'll include BIND, which actually is less capable. Also encrypted filesystems, Kerberos (hey, it's not strictly correct, but it's in there), IPsec, telephony, OpenGL & DirectX...
And, IIS, XML parsing, COM system, PPTP, Distributed File System, ActiveDirectory -- you'd need Apache, PHP, probably Mozilla for XML, some ORBish system, any of the horribly buggy PPTP implementations for Linux, Coda? AFS?, OpenLDAP....
The list goes on and on. To say that Win2K is analagous to a stripped-down Linux distro is really not correct -- there's a LOT in there, way more than in the average Linux distro.
None of which is a defense of Win2K; I just think it's important not to use the 63K alleged bug count as FUD ammo -- I could file 63,000 bugs against ANY Linux distro if our definition of 'bug' is the same one used for the Win2K count -- anything that displeases the tester, even as small as tiny aesthetic visual issues with a program.
>Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working
>on the core components of a Linux distribution, either.
That's kind of an excuse, and gets really pretty close to saying that expensive commercial software should have fewer bugs than Open Source since they have more money to throw at it.
--
In all fairness, comparing 95 known bugs in the Linux kernel with 63K bugs in all of Windows 2000's kernel, GUI, services, userland programs, games, icons/graphics/media files, POSIX subsystem, scripting language, and so forth is comparing apples to oranges.
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
--
Thanks... now to work out how to put some of the other nifty features of the 2.3.99'ish kernel to use...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Thanks for pointing all this out - I'm familiar with fstab, just not familiar with shm use in Linux... reading the Documentation/Changes file now, which also appears to answer my other questions related to how to find out more about the new features in the new kernel.
:) And I'm happy to say, it's been totally worth it all along.
For the longest time (been a Linux *user* since 1994, the days of Yggdrasil, pre-RedHat), I've never even bothered to really read the kernel docs, I'm ashamed to admit. Most of the time, for me anyway, it's been a matter of build the kernel, install the kernel, run the kernel (for a year or so), then upgrade a year later...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
Obviously comparing the kernel to Windows 2000 is outrageous, but comparing Windows 2000 to a full Linux distribution is also unfair. The average distro ships with some 3,000 or so packages, the vast majority of which are applications that you won't find an equivalent for in Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 is more comparable to the kernel, X, glibc, GNOME, samba, Apache (maybe-- does IIS come with the base OS now?), some common libraries and small utility applications. Probably a few other applications, too. But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
And then, you have to factor in the fact that most Linux distributions run on several hardware architectures, many of the libraries and applications in that distribution run on various operating systems, too.
But still, you do have a point: we've got our share of bugs, too. Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working on the core components of a Linux distribution, either. Imagine what you could do if you had a billion and half dollar development budget (which is about what they spent on Windows 98 and IE4/5).
The result of the massive changes is likely to be a diminishment of the amount of time Al Viro has available for other things, such as sleeping...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
There is a problem with the "when it's ready" philosophy, which is that the release schedule of a piece of cooperatively developed software is bistable. In one mode, releases are frequent, so the "penalty" of your favourite feature being held over to the next release is small, and so the pressure to get features into the current release is reduced, and it is easier to make frequent releases. In the other mode, the opposite happens. Everyone wants their feature in the current release, because they don't know when the next one will be, so it gets harder and harder to get releases stable and out.
Steve
First of all- to preempt the question that I KNOW is going to come time and again here: KERNEL 2.4 WILL COME OUT WHEN IT IS READY AND NOT A MINUTE BEFORE. Incase anyone is wondering, Mozilla will also be released WHEN IT IS READY. As will KDE2. As will any other project your waiting for.
:)
For those of you new to Open Source, the reason you can run linux for months without a crash is because the developers take great pride in it. We don't release our software as a final version until it is ready and fairly bug-free.
If you truly want to know when it will be coming out, subscribe to the kernel-dev list and read the status. Or, if that's too much mail, at least check out kernel traffic. It makes for good reading.
This particular list has been on kernel traffic for atleast a month. Alan has been updating it and revising it for a while now, with no huge changes. Why it's slashworthy now--I have no idea. Oh well, a minor rant.
Erik
pid=`ps -ax | grep $1 | head -1 | awk '{print $1} '`
kill -9 $pid
echo "Killed $1, pid: $pid"
now you can run ./killg netscape
What I find strange about that is that Windows 95/98/ect runs in a similar fashion. Apps are launched in a user-mode virtual machine that is either 8, 16, or 32 bit. This is part of the reason M$ software runs a little tighter than third party stuff, they have full access to the vm control components where no-kernel-access-granted people only had published documentation.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Interesting, but I think there is a slight flaw:
Take your favorite linux distro. Remove inetd completly, install X with kde since it is releatively similar look and feel wise to linux. Install kde progs to match standard Win2k utilities. Add smb and a stable kde gui frontend. Remove all console utilities that have no equlivant in win2k. Now install a natile portman desktop theme on both computers. Compare the amount of known bugs
I believe that X is a Client/Server applications and thus relies on inetd to function. We at least need a loopback configured.
Besides - my opinion is that KDE is full of bugs and because it's still not fully operable you should halve the version numbers.
>That's simply not true. If you have win98 running
>in Linux, then VMWare is a Linux process that
>emulates a virtual machine for win98.
So, if you do a ps, you will see a process that has win98 running inside it? Cute.
In that case, that is fairly similar in effect to the user-mode port. The basic design is entirely different, though.
Jeff
I use Gnome. Really.
With regard to the foot menu, it's not an essential part, and it's easy to remove (right click on the foot->Remove from panel).
For that matter, the entire panel could be removed, or easily configured in almost any way that suits you. Or you could have several of them, each configured differently.
In any case, WM does have a root menu, and how this is different from a foot menu is difficult to fathom. Except that there's an icon on the panel for it, but like I said, there doesn't have to be.
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Since devfs is a file system, you can add it to your backup rotation. You might choose to dump it to tape nightly or rsync it to a remote host hourly.
If you want higher reliability, add a journal to the filesystem. If you want high availability mirror changes to the other servers.
Linus made it so you can add as much catastrophic failure tolerance as you feel is necessary.
I understand his complaint about numbering sysctl branches and nodes, but it's not as big of a deal as he makes it out to be- things don't get drastically changed with this practically ever.
The fact is, being able to get your data with one or two syscalls is fast. A lot faster than having to drag the VFS code into things. Case in point? Here's a look at top on a sourceforge box:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
7014 bugg 18 5 1156 1156 844 R N 0 6.8 0.2 0:02 top
6.8% of the processor. (this box has 238 processes)
What kind of processor is this?
model name : Pentium III (Katmai)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 598.506870
Unacceptable. Procfs is great for users who want to read things, but programs need to have a lower level interface for the sake of speed, and code simplification. It's a lot easier to use sysctl than it is to open up a file and read the data from it, hate to break it to you.
-bugg
That would be a neat poll, but you'd have to and an extra one that you forgot.
9)Hemos
comparing a bugcount of the two kernels is not fair because the windows kernel is not really seperate from the rest of the OS, while the linux kernel could be placed on a system without any of the traditional unix tools and a custom init and work
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Can you provide more details about how to set up /etc/fstab, or point me (us) in the direction of a web page that has a reference for how to use these new features in the Kernel?
I'd be really happy to get into using 2.3.99, but I don't really have a lot of time to wade through the sources looking for details on how to use the new features. I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but maybe there's a page out there that contains a guideline for the new features and more importantly - how they might be used?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yes, this is a classic "Me too!" comment. Kernel Traffic is wonderful, a godsend to someone like myself who really is interested in what's going on in kernel-land, but can't possibly read 100 messages a day (or whatever) on the mailing list. Anyone else in the same boat (and I'm sure heaps of Slashdotters are) would be mad not to check it out every week.
And, if you're not aware, Kernel Cousins is a collection of "cousins" to Kernel Traffic, for other mailing lists. Currently the Gimp, Wine, Samba and Debian HURD mailing lists are summarised weekly or thereabouts. So if you're interested in the bleeding edge of any of those projects, there's something for you too.
Massive kudos to Zack Brown and the other traffickers for these summaries!!
Incidentally, the portion of the Kernel Traffic discussion where Linus discusses devfs , mentioning thus:
This is one of those things that shows that Linus most definitely does have a clue. Further devfs changes will likely have an impact on VFS code, and thus be "injurious" to Alexander Viro. And it looks like there may be some side-effects whereby /proc gets nearly "reimplemented." And I can see the glimmerings of the VFS changes providing the kernel support needed to make managing ACLs and kernel capabilities a whole lot better.
It may take some time, and may not be complete until 2.5, but there is definitely some ongoing Good Stuff getting implemented in the Linux kernel.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I am talking, of course, Larry McVoy's thoughts on scalability and SMP clusters. Here is a link on the problems with SMP, and here are the slides without explanation.
:-) The other piece of the puzzle is making a cluster work like one machine, and Ron Minnich has been doing some work there.
:-) :-) :-)
The theory goes like this. In an SMP system all of the CPUs have to be made to pay attention when any of the CPUs wants to do something where races would be bad. To do that you need good latency, which means that you need to fine-tune what is locked where and for how long. This introduces a lot of overhead.
Instead what Larry wants is to have a machine with a lot of CPUs turn itself internally into a cluster of Linux machines that just happen to network Really Fast. There are good theoretical reasons why this should scale Really Well.
One of the key items in this vision is the ability to run virtual machines within Linux. Guess what User Mode Linux is?
In 2 years, care for a 1000 CPU multi-threaded database server? With failover?
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Reading the first couple of pages where all of Linus' quotes are in red text, I had some Deja Vu. Reminds me a bit of the New Testament.
> It seems to me to be like a VMWare that only
> does Linux (to put it simplistically).
That's sort of the effect from the user's point of view, but if I understand vmware, it slides underneath the two OS's and makes them run side-by-side with one appearing in a window in the other. With the user-mode port, it is really Linux inside Linux. If you run it and do a ps, you will see a whole bunch of "linux" processes, plus what they really are inside the virtual machine.
> trying out new
> kernels/distributions/configurations without
> needing to mess with your current setup.
This part is fun. The kernel boots out of a file in your normal filesystem. I've got Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, and SuSE filesystems. This makes it a lot easier to play with new distros.
> One also wonders then if Linux could be ported
> to other call interfaces
There's been talk of a windows port. According to one of the guys on my mailing lists, 95 is out, but 98 and NT look possible. The really important thing is the ability to intercept and annull system calls. If that's there, everything else can probably be made to work.
Jeff
The two most exciting things here for me are being able to look at the kernel in user-space while running, in ways that wouldn't be possible on a traditionally running Linux, and trying out new kernels/distributions/configurations without needing to mess with your current setup. For kernel developers in particular this could be very valuable.
One also wonders then if Linux could be ported to other call interfaces - Linux under *BSD/*dows/etc for dual booters who need to do something quickly in Linux while still in their other OS.
The web page is here.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
I'm not holding my breath for 2.4
;-) If you've been running 2.3.99 you'll know there are still a few "issues" remaining, though these kinds of things hardly stand comparison with the bug list of a certain monopol^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware provider I could mention.
:-)
That's very wise
On the whole though, when it is ready, and it's a lot closer than you'd think from the jobs list, it's going to be a real killer. Just a couple of things: Built-in pcmcia and USB; extensive support for video, including USB Webcams; vastly improved SMP support; a new virtual device filesystem that makes major/minor device numbers go away; bags more drivers for all kinds of things; many, many other goodies I didn't mention.
I'll weigh in with a guesstimate of 3 months to 2.4.0 then another 2 months before you see 2.4.x start appearing in distributions. Very, very definiately worth waiting for, or just download it now and use it if you can't wait
Don't forget to put an entry into fstab for shm (shared memory) - this has now become part of vfs, and your distribution won't know about that.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
1) Linux 2.4
2) Debian 2.2 (potato)
3) Mozilla 1.0
4) XFree86 4.0 (The real version)
5) The multi-headed XFS/Reiserfs/ext3 beast
6) KDE 2.0
7) Evolution (The upcoming GNOME email app)
8) (insert your favorite software-under-development here)
Anyone willing to make a few bets as to which one we're going to see first? Hmmm, maybe this would make for a descent poll... (c:
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Excluding the "Done" and "Probably Post 2.4" sublists, they have exactly 95 issues to address. And even that number includes quite a few "Fixed but not yet merged" items.
If it was Microsoft, they would have shipped it 62,905 fixes ago.
C'mon, guys. If you raise customer expectations you're gonna wreck the industry. It's waaaay too expensive to ship shit that actually works.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade