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Linus Confirms 2.4 In December
Lothsahn was the first to write to us about the latest statement from Linus regarding the Linux 2.4 Kernel release date. His statement says that he knows of no major showstoppers, and that he's asking the major devel houses to deploy the test kernels internally and start bug testing. Early December, hopefully, for a release.
I haven't heard much mention of the change from ipchains to iptables. I have been waiting for the production 2.4 kernel release to update my firewall from 2.2.17 and would like to know how it works from someone who has taken the plunge already.
Get a new version of modutils... see /Documentation/Changes
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Yes.
What happened to the driving force behind the quality of open source: "thousands of eyes go over the code to find bugs".
You think this ever was true ? I don't and nowadays there's too much out there anyway. Think it over -- 90 + n per-cent of all geeks out there do a ./configure at most and that's it.
Much more important is that those companies can test the kernel in an environment no-one could afford. It is them who do have their databases and big machines and the means to put them under heavy load. I'd be only too glad with not having the means to break the kernel as if it is good enough for them it's for sure good enough for me too.
Aside from that should it not good enough for them, then it'd stay to be a toy system to mention what it was named so often years ago.
Linus does not like version control systems -- do a search on kernel traffic regarding that issue.
I partially agree. For some people, Linux seems like it's 'catching up' because of the USB and larger SMP capabilities. For others, tho, who need a solid web server that doesn't crash, it's MS who is 'catching up' to others with W2k. Some places don't need all the config utilties - often because with a bit of training/experience, Linux is, in some respects, easier to configure (again, not necessarily 'out of the box', but after awhile)
creation science book
Aha! So it's true! All major Linux houses are in fact hackers trying to exploit the linux kernel!
I knew it!
<grub> Reading
Down here, we're using 2.4.0 since 2.4.0-test1 on a our web farm (~ 30 web servers with apache) and it works pretty cool.
The latest reboots of these computers were to upgrade the kernel or the hardware.
We did the upgrade because the 2.2.X were very unstable under heavy load (they froze in one or two days). AFAIK, there is still a problem with the mem management of 2.2.17.
-- Benoit
Good point, and it's also inherently obvious from the first paragraph:
the long-awaited Linux 2.4 kernel for commercial release.
Commercial release? It sounds like someone is selling the Kernel, or that Linus is making money releasing the the Kernel. What the article does fail to say is that the Kernel is being released because it's _ready_, not because of market pressure or financial agony to release a product just for cash (Office).
Perhaps Linus finally grew a spine?
:)
(as referenced in a recent issue of kernel traffic)
(personally I just took the site as a humour thing though I feel the kernel is a bit overdue. but as i'm no k-hacker and just sit on the sidelines and bitch, what do I matter?
-'fester
Does it make you feel all yucky inside if they use business terms? Grow up for god's sake. They're using "market" to mean the segment of the world's population that will potentially use Linux 2.4. "Market" is just an a phrase that saves you the air and allows distro makers and commercial users, who DO think in business terms, to quickly understand what they're talking about.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
To tell the truth, it all depends on what you use it for. On my system with Detonator 3 NVIDIA drivers, Win2K has locked up at least a dozen times this month. Its not random instability, Win2K just doesn't like Windows Media Player 7 and OpenGL. As long as you avoid weird GL apps (not Quake but stuff like the demo programs you get on flipcode) and Media Player, then it is quite solid. Unfortunately, WMA and OpenGL are the only reasons I need Win2K so it is a little self-defeating. Methinks it needs some more elbow grease to work the kinks out.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When's 2.6 coming out?
Then that's not the smartest thing to do. There is a lot of stuff in a server that you don't need in a desktop OS, a lot of stuff that isn't that you do, and optimizations that work for one, not the other. For example, on the TCP/IP stack of a desktop OS, you probably want to optimize the stack for fast response on a couple of connections, while on a server you want to be able to handle many connections consistantly. The VM management also has to be different, (on a desktop, the forground process needs a lot more CPU than the rest of the system). The sheduling quanta has to be different (WinNT Server: 120ms fixed length, WinNT workstation: 20 background 20-60 forground variable length, Linux 2.2 100ms fixed, Linux 2.4 50ms fixed, BeOS 3ms fixed), the priority management has to be different (most computation time, or interactive speed?), disk buffer management has to be different, etc. If you try to do it all (and no I'm not going in and changing these values in the Linux source code!) then you get a sub-optimal experience for all.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I can't even get the damn thing to install. It comes up with 'Loading device drivers' and then tries to load loads of drivers for hardware I don't have and then just stops, but never on the same device. There's no way to skip anything, you have to do the three finger salute. So I doubt I'll ever get the chance to see a W2K BSOD on my machine. On my dad's machine however, it installed fine first go. Weird.
Linus believes he is a 'CVS with taste'.
If that's not good enough for you, try here.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Did anybody else hear about the new Linux kernel having a built-in web server? I found it to be rather odd myself, but then some coworkers began getting emails about it. Anybody have any insight?
Question is, which year?
The root of the problem is that open source software has never really had to worry about release dates before. Just about everyone who was working on it tended to be doing it in their spare time. Those who used it usually had a pretty good understanding that code done in one's spare time is not necessarily going to be completed by any given date. This new age of open source mixed with corporations causes us to have to worry about many of the same issues as traditional software companies do, including release dates, feature demand, and other nasty things that don't always jive with the "I wrote it to scratch a personal itch" mentality.
Personally, I'd rather wait for a release and know the code has been tested and is done right, rather than demand the developers set a release date, build a few binaries, run em overnight, cross their fingers, and ship.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Market? And which particular 'market' are we talking about here? Can't these people not think in business terms?
On the contrary, I would argue that a market exists regardless of price (or lack thereof). I don't think the 2.4 kernel is as major of a release to the Linux community as Win2k is to the Windows community. I think in this case the word "market" refers to an operating system market, which Linux is a part of despite the fact that it's free. Perhaps the lack of a stable 2.4.kernel (and knowing that a stable kernel should be out Real Soon Now) might sway an IT admin to choosing to stay with NT-based machines.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Actually, the guys at BeDope are winning here. Check out this press release
Installation instructions can be found here.
PS> You knew you were asking for this.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've always wondered. Does Linus use CVS? I can understand him wanting to be the central relay station for any and all patches to the kernel, but how does HE manage the source? Does he have thousands of source archives of different patches on his harddrive? Does he manually diff and check in patches? Does he have only the one working copy of the kernel?! Maybe it would be easier on him if he used CVS himself, but made sure only a trusted few (him and Alan probably) had commit privleges so he could still be the grand poobah, but he'd have access to the other features (rollback to any state, automatic merging, source management, etc) of CVS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Go to www.google.com and type "ppp atm linux" in the search box and hit the i'm feeling lucky button.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
Dear Linus Claus:
My birthday is the 18th of December. I would appreciate it if you could release the kernel on that date. Since I'm now too old to get any good presents from my parents, and my girlfriend won't give me a present until I find out who she is and where she's been hiding, I would really like a new kernel as consolation prize.
Sincerely,
Tim
p.s. A little early is OK, too.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
do they ever listen...
IIS is NOT in the kernel, even a little bit, really. It is a userspace series of applications that are executed in the context of one or more service accounts. (no, the account(s) does not have to be give admin priv)
IIS is faster in some cases for 2 reasons
1. IIS is highly multithreaded, Apache is not
2. IIS caches damn near every thing, Apache doesn't.
please let the kernel myth die allready
No showstoppers, evil monkeys, or, I'm betting, a kernel. Judging from the LKML, there's still a LOT of bugs in it.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Or complain to the web admins concerned. Cisco have already released a fix for (at least some of) their products to fix this. ECN has the potential to be a very useful 'tool' in making best use of 'net resources but it cannot do this while some (high profile) sites reject connections which signal that they can handle ECN.
Yes, the article is done up in vapid, breathless 'IT Rag' speak designed to make a manager think their job is exciting and that they learned something important by reading the article.
The article could be summed up in a paragraph or three as:
The stable version of the Linux 2.4 kernel, which was expected to be released 4th quarter of last year, will instead likely be released this December of this year. While the 2.2 kernel is quite functional and adequate for many people's needs, the 2.4 kernel has some nice, long awaited features such as support for USB and better tuned SMP performance, along with a re-written networking stack.
Many of the SMP and networking improvements were made because NT 4 beat the Linux 2.2 kernel in some benchmarks in the beginning of 1999, and it's hoped that the improvements will avoid a repeat of that embarassment.
Several Linux distributions are prepared to release a new version as soon as the 2.4 kernel becomes available, having already prepared for its release in the current versions of their products.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
"A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart project, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algore, MVS/370, and MS-DOS."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What planet are you on, certainly not one with win2000 thats for sure. NT5 does not get the BSOD (i havent anyways) BUT I have had many more reboots than with NT4, yes less BSOD'S and MORE reboots. Me thinks the BSOD was too embarassing and they'd rather have the thing reboot.
try MP3's across a network and open the CDROM at the same time I crash it every time. Thank goodness its the office puter
There are none as blind as those who will not see.. (unknown)
You are conflating two servers. khttpd is a static-page-only accelerator; TUX does both static and dynamic content.
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
Feel free to download TUX from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/tux/Read the README file first, of course. :-)
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
Good god, that damn dealer sold me tainted crack again. I ought to sue ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No, Linus doesn't use version control. He considered BitKeeper, but decided against it due to licensing concerns -- just as well, it's (extremely) buggy. He does the whole thing manually -- yes, it sucks.
CVS also has some serious limitations. I won't go into them here -- let's just say they exist. There are something like three projects right now working on CVS replacements to fix these things. I happen to know some of the developers of one, and wish them luck; some of the features on the drawing board are extremely nifty. Hope for a release (GPLed, of course) by the end of January.
In short, we need a VC system that doesn't suck, and don't really have one yet.
The problem is the Linux community is far from homogenous. Some people think that "success" means Linux on every desktop, or a toppling of Microsoft. Some people think success is simply building a higher-quality OS. Some people think success is spreading Free software. Others think success is scratching their itch, or getting somebody else to think "Oh cool".
But every time one faction gets any media or corporate attention, others stand up and say "Hey, you just don't *get* it. It's not about *that* it's about *this*. Duh!". Please... Linux needs whatever people want it to need, to succeed. For RedHat that might be getting a standardized UI (users are weird and like that sort of stuff), for Linus perhaps it's adding new technologies for embedded and big iron use. For Mr. Debian Hacker maybe it's maintaining a philosophically pure Free distribution. There's no one right answer, there are many.
P.S. Moderators: I would like a large Insightful with a side of Informative, hold the Redundant
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Simple. Linus doesn't want it that way. I believe (i'm not involved with kernel development, or linus) that one of the reasons is that in the end, Linus controls what goes into linux, and by using just the 'patch' system, it allows him better control over what goes in and out of the kernel.
Even more likely than that, is that he likes the way he's doing it, so why change because someone ELSE wants CVS? geek stubbornness. we're all born with it.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Why no CVS for linux ?
Seems I remember a big flap from O'Reilley about there only being little more than a few registry entry differances that prevent more than 10 connection to the workstation version, oh and several hundred dollars (which rarely plays into the comparison - the only conclusion one can come to is that most Msft advocates must pirate their software). And yes the 'Advanced Server' has the sliding bar for "forground application performance boost" over at the 'none' end of the scale to give network server priority over gui.
Everytime I setup RH62 it asks if you are setting up a server or workstation.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
just checking if anybodys reading - yes it's really supposed to be 'Algol'.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
As I said in my other post, I was using the term NT generically, and I just simply regard W2k as a new NT version, in the same way 2.4 is a new Linux version.
An across the board comparison, including other Unix varients AND Win2k would be interesting. Think we can leave Novell 3.11 out of the list though!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Redhat and Suse are both on Linux v7.0. I think that 2.4 must be a typo.
When correctly viewed,
everything is lewd.
I can tell you things about Peter Pan, and the Wizard of Oz,
THERE'S a dirty old man. - Tom Lehrer
or evil monkeys.
Does my bum look big in this?
I left it overnight once to see if it was just a loop, and nothing changed. This is just a Compaq with pretty standard hardware, nothing special.
PPP has less to do with the kernel then the ethernet card. As for the DEC tulip, I have a Linksys 10/100MB based on that and am running test 9 (haven't had time to get 10 up on it yet) and I got it working just great with my Cable Modem at home.
Gorkman
Understanding the Linux Kernel has been released by O'Reilly
Best Slashdot Co
The Linux 2.4 todo list can be found here, and an article detailing the new features of 2.4 is here.
Forwarding to Apache (or whatever) is most useful for complex modules that would be difficult to port to TUXapi. TUXapi is event-driven instead of connection-oriented, in order to provide maximum speed. This makes TUX modules harder to write than Apache modules. Forwarding to Apache lets you take advantage of the ease of writing Apache modules when speed for that particular module is not critical, while still allowing TUXapi modules to directly handle speed-critical tasks.
Lots more detail is available in the /. interview with Ingo Molnar.
(I'm not dissing khttpd; Arjan (author of khttpd) likes TUX. :-)
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
What happened to the driving force behind the quality of open source: "thousands of eyes go over the code to find bugs". ?
Thousands of eyes is great. I'm sure thousands of eyes found lots of bugs. But nothing compares to live load. This is something I learned when working on larger systems, like the ones at AOL. You can comb the code as much as you want, and test it for weeks. There will still be bugs that only a live system will show. What I would guess is that these large Linux shops "test cycles" include things like running live load on the systems, and pushing them harder than they can be pushed on someone's desktop.
Also, you're way off with comparing this to MS. It's not as if you can't pull a copy of the latest test kernel and run it on your boxen and find bugs and report them. Linus is not saying that these large Linux houses get to test the kernel exclusively. All he's saying is that that's where he's expecting to find most of the last minute bugs.
The Linux community should consider itself lucky to have large shops that will test new releases internally. I have seen so much code that has been "released" by companies that are not known for bad software, that has completely fallen apart under live load. It tends to be true that the more load we put on a system, the more obscure the bugs we found. But as obscure as the bugs were, they were showstoppers to a large system. And these were things that the software companies couldn't find themselves in their QA labs because they just didn't have access to the load that we were placing on the systems.
-Todd
---
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
The kernel cannot, inherently, be "late to market," not only because it isn't a 'market' that it's being released to, but by * definition* it is "due" when it is done.
They don't get this. There is, and never has been, a projected 'release' date in the industry sense. There is Linus saying, " I think I can get it done by. . . "
If he does he does, if he dosn't he dosn't.
By the same token everbody who says something along the lines of "Linux needs (Office, IEX, Magically delicious Lucky Charms, etc.) to succeed," ALSO dosn't get it.
What does Linux need to succeed? Glad you asked because I'm going to TELL you what Linux needs to succeed.
It needs *ONE* geek sitting up in his room at three in the morning going "Oh wow."
And anyone who gets THAT gets *it.*
KFG
What I'd like to see is how it holds up against the latest Unix competitors like solaris, AIX and *BSD variants. That's IMHO much more relevant than compare it to NT. Or do you think it's relevant to compare it to Novell 3.11 too? ;)
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The test code is available to everyone to test and find bugs. It is just extra precautions to use commercial testlabs since they can. No harm done, and many many eyes still examine all the bugs, just some testing is more well documented and assured than the rest. Dumping the kernel as 2.4.0 because it looks right to the more experimental users and having many more unknown bugs to fix may have been passable 3 or four years ago, but now Linux is sufficiently mainstream that such practices would be viewed as bad form, leave new users with a bad taste in their mouths, and forever be held up by m$ people as a shining example of the "weakness of linux"
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If December is the "projected" release date, that is certainly not the same as "confirmed." Let's not inflate hopes beyond reason here...
This list is almost always out of date, by definition, since kernel development moves so quickly.
That could explain at least part of it.
Linus's point is that he has asked all the major Linux houses to (if they had not done so already -- I expect that most, like Red Hat, had already started) add their testing resources to the other testing resources (i.e. individual users and developers) already deployed. Different developers (individuals and corporations) have different strengths. Your idea that Linux corporations are not part of the bazaar, not part of the thousands of eyes, not part of the the Linux community, is, well, bizarre. :-)
The theoretical framework of the bazaar model does not imply that all the participants are not paid for their participation. Just because Eric Raymond wrote up what he thought the bazaar model looked like to him, and because his model was recognized by many people as a good description of the process, doesn't mean that his writeup was perfect, nor does it make his analysis proscriptive; it especially does not make others' misunderstandings of his model proscriptive.
Individual users have the widest variety of hardware -- we as individuals do the best job of finding the odd hardware support bug.
However, the Linux development houses have a major financial interest in stabilizing 2.4 in ways that are hard to do without more capital than the average user has, trying to find corner case bugs both by code inspection and by hammering on machines with lots of CPUs and lots of memory, using stress tests and correctness tests. I expect that all the other Linux development houses are doing this; I know for a fact that we at Red Hat are doing this and, as an example, we have (through stress testing) been helping discover elusive memory corruption issues recently, and (primarily through inspection) been discovering and fixing many filesystem race conditions. Those are just a few examples, and are only from my experience at Red Hat. I'm sure that developers from other Linux houses could talk about how their bug testing work has fit into this model as well.
Relax, we're all in this together! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride...
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
I predict it's gonna ship Platinum.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Personally, I'd rather wait for a release and know the code has been tested and is done right.
I think that this version of the kernel is "done right." Most of the development now is centered around fixing bugs. When it comes out it is going to be a very stable peice of software. I'd personally ship one of the test kernels in a linux distro aimed at high end machines. I'd definatly do it before I put in an unstable compiler that wouldn't compile the kernel like Redhat did with 7.0. I personally wouldn't use such a distrobution, but many others would. 2.4.0 will be a very stable kernel. 2.2 will still be used on slower machines due to optimizations favoring new chips especially in the x86 architecture. 2.5 will probally go through some very active development early on if Linus can come to agreements with Hans reiser, and integrate other patches into the kernel. Hopefully when they are tested they will be backported as official.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Read the article carefully... Linus wants to get 2.4 out the door before his third kid is born later this month. You can't delay THAT release date!
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?