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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.
Aha! So it's true! All major Linux houses are in fact hackers trying to exploit the linux kernel!
I knew it!
<grub> Reading
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).
When's 2.6 coming out?
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."
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...
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
It has khttpd which is a kernel module to serve static html pages faster. This will be used by the likes of apache so all web servers should benifit.
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
Why no CVS for linux ?
Redhat and Suse are both on Linux v7.0. I think that 2.4 must be a typo.
or evil monkeys.
Does my bum look big in this?
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
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"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
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?"
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!
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?