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2.4 Kernel Delayed, Says Linus
cnkeller writes with this snippet from an article in InfoWorld: "BERLIN -- THE much-anticipated 2.4 version of the Linux
kernel will take at least another two months to
complete, Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source
operating system, said here Friday.
'It's been a slower process than many people would
like,' he said, remarking that developers are no
longer adding new features, only fixing bugs. 'With
luck, we'll see it in early December, and with not so
good luck, I still hope that we can do it this side of
the year.'"
Tux the Linux Peguin lived in a Red Hat box
and debugged the kernel with a guy named Alan Cox
Little Linus Torvalds loved that rascal Tux
and wrote him strings and bits and bytes and took out all the cruft
Oh, Tux the Linux Penguin lived in a Red Hat box
and wished upon those closed-source guys a great big nasty pox
Together they would travel to a place known as Slash Dot
Old Bill kept a log-book of all the flames that MS got
All the Gates and Windows would close whene'er they came
Stevie B. would have bad dreams and call out Tuxs' name
Oh, Tux the Linux Penguin lived in a Red Hat box
and sorted the linked lists with a guy named Alan Cox
A Penguin lives forever, but not so old man Bill
E.S.R. and R.M.S., they shot his life to hell
One day it happened, Bill could no longer hack
and Tux the Linux Penguin let out a mighty quack
His belly filled with herring, free software fell like rain,
Every man and woman could change the stuff in main()
Without his life-long rival, Tux began a GNU
So Tux that Linux Penguin finally flapped his wings and FLEW
One of the main reasons that the v2.4 kernel has taken so long is the late rewrite of the VM. However, as of a released fix today by Rik van Riel, it's REALLY looking nice. I've tried extremely hard to make my 16MB memory/64 MB swap box to croak, and yet failed so far.
And the new VFS in the kernel leaves most, if not all other OS's NFS:es far behind, imho. Alexander Viro is a genious in this regard.
Some things will simply have to wait for v2.5, such as a good journalling layer for the journaling filesystems, but it would not be too wild a guess that we'll see a journaling filesystem going into the v2.4 series before v2.4.6.
It seems that the only BAD thing is that Linus started us out on the 2.4.0testXXX series way too early. It got peoples hopes up even when the VM was horribly broken and many kernel features were broken...
I can only see this as a good thing, because when 2.4 hits the streets, it will be used by LOTS of people... and we want it to be as stable and reliable as ever...
right?
-Chris
I have been following the development of the 2.4 kernel since test5, which is about 3 months ago.
For starters, a bunch of drivers that worked in 2.2.x are broken currently in 2.4. Those need a fix before 2.4 turns final.
Recently there was a lot of work on the VM (virtual memory subsystem). It's a very smooth VM, reminds you of FreeBSD ;). But it's also a bit buggy at the moment, so it must be fixed before 2.4-final.
With more people testing the 2.4 kernel, with more bug reports, it will be a lot better for the developers to fix 2.4 to perfection, so hurry up and try the new kernel. I recommend trying out test8 or test7, or test9 with Rik van Riel's latest VM patch.
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