Linux Kernel 2.4.10

erinntriggs writes "Kernel 2.4.10 is out and available at the usual places." You know the drill people! Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

Comments

So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

I ask as a swap-laden 2.4.7 user...

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

The ChangeLog doesn't mention any VM changes, so I'd have to assume it still blows.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[be-fan]

That's a stupid comment. If someone has been using the 2.4.10-preX series and can volunteer some information, isn't it easier if he just talks about it rather than making everyone go through the processes of trying it out?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

pre11:
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

... but what does that mean? Less suckage? Different suckage? What?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[grahammm]

The VM is greatly improved. It uses less swap, and swap is released rather than just accumlating.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[jrwilk01]

From the changelog:

pre11:
- Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
- Andrew Morton: console locking merge
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

It know its hard, but lets read before we post.

jrw

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2.4.10-pre11 Linus changed a great deal of the VM subsystem and put in its place a new design (or implementation, I don't know for sure) by Andrea Arcangeli. There are some reports of much better behaviour with this new VM code. Check l-k mailing list archives, read the upcoming LWN report and try it for yourself :)

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[selmer]

Under Pre11:
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge
Sounds like a major VM-change to me :-)

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone has had a problem with swap since 2.4.7 which came out, when, in July, don't you think they would have been paying closer attention to the dev process, rather than bitching about it in public. I would only forgive that comment if the chap in question had a 16mb, 150mhz or less PC in which case he might have been brighter to stay with 2.2.x in the first place.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

major VM merge

Well, yeah, I read that. But what does it mean? Is MAME now part of the Linux virtual memory subsystem? Is it optimized for playing MP3s? What does this "major VM merge" contain, and what does it fix/break/improve?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

Dr. Mr. Genius,

I'm beta-testing Redhat 7.2, which includes the 2.4.7 kernel. Fat lot of good my bug reports would be if I started switching out major components, like the kernel.

I would only forgive that comment if...

Bite me, bitch.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

And "doesn't mention any VM changes" is still true to you?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[uhmmmm]

What do you mean? From the Changelog, these concern VM:

• VM/shmem cleanups and swap search speedup (pre13)
• VM race fix and OOM tweak (pre12)
• major VM merge (pre11)
• update sysctl/vm documentation (pre8)

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[OiBoy]

Check your glasses :)

pre11:
- Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
- Andrew Morton: console locking merge
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[XO]

jesus the VM in 2.4.2-2.4.8 sucked BADLY. 2.4.9 shows marked improvement.

Tip: after boot, issue a swapoff on all your swap space, get your X up and running, and all your other stuff, then AFTER that, su root and swapon your swap devices.

Makes my system run a TON faster.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[gallir]

There are lot of changes in the VM. In fact it's almost entirely new with a big patch from Andrea Arcangeli.

Answering to another post, YES, it _should_ be better for listening MP3 files because the mmap used for most players should work nicely with the read-once technique.

Although cannnot be assure until is hard tested, Linus found several mistakes in the cache and page aging.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a kernel hacker (although I tried it ;-). I just knew it reading every day the linux-kernel mailing list.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[marm]

The VM has been totally rewritten by Andrea Arcangeli using his idea of 'classzone' balancing, and was merged in at 2.4.10-pre11.

I've been using 2.4.10-pre13 for a couple of days and... it's AMAZING! All your swap problems will disappear, and for me at least, the VM system is ~3x faster than any 2.4 kernel before it, adn faster than any 2.2 kernel as well by some distance.

Go get it whilst it's hot! No longer must we look enviously at FreeBSD!

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Chops]

It may or may not still blow (I haven't tried it), but there have been substantial changes. Andrea Arcangeli did a large rewrite in pre11 ("major VM merge.")

If you're looking for a stable VM, I've heard a handful of good things (like this) about 2.4.9-ac10. Alan's been much more cautious than Linus about merging VM changes.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

Wow, "swapoff -a" takes for-freaking-ever to run.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[LinuxHam]

Come to think of it, my laptop (ThinkPad 570) has been freaking out on me the last couple of days. I'll be using it when all of a sudden the hard disk activity will peg.. the system gets so loaded that sar statistics even stop.. twice now, after letting it run with a pegged hdd for a couple hours I've had to just shut it off hard.

RH71, 2.4.9, and Ximian Gnome desktop. I use Red Carpet to keep everything up to date, and occasionally compile some things by hand when no updated RPM is available, like OpenSSH 2.9.2p2.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

It know its hard, but lets read before we post.

I did read it, but I confess that I missed that one entry. I expected that if there were significant VM changes we'd see a whole list of entries like "fixed XXX bogosity from previous VM changes" instead of a single line.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until the very idea of an "OOM Killer" dies, the Linux VM will continue to be a laughingstock and will continue to drive away users who need a system that doesn't kill processes even under heavy load. When a basic idea is so incredibly stupid, no amount of tweaking its implementation will make much difference.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only were there several occurances of VM changes in the ChangeLog (including things along the lines of "fix VM race.."), but you have to think of the way the kernel is developed. Bits and pieces are developed by separate projects and merged by Linus. Which means that somewhere out there, there is a VM tree that is newer than the one in Linus's kernel. So the maintainer of the VM gave Linus a patch that merged the VM changes since last it was updated. It was accepted, and logged in the ChangeLog.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Jeffrey Baker]

Well, AA contributed an enormous VM patch that basically changes the whole system. Apparently it has good effect for interactive uses like MP3 players and web browsing, but testers at HP labs say that the performance of the 2.4.10 VM is the worst of the (very bad already) 2.4.x series on their 4-8 GB machines with 30+ SCSI devices each. They make this conclusion based on NFS benchmarks.

On my machines, I've had tons of problems, and 2.4.10-preXX didn't make them go away. Until Linux drops the concept of memory overcommit, I'm afraid that the VM is going to continue to suck.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been licking carpet! I've got a pinkbelt in box-fu! I'm a bigger lesbian than you'll ever be!

;D

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. The VM rocks. Try it. Then get yourself a beer. Put the beer in your belly.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Ami Ganguli]

If your system is out of memory (totally out - no RAM, so Swap) then stuff will fail. That's true on any system. The "OOM Killer" applies some heuristics to try to fail somewhat gracefully.

It's a fair assumption that on a production machine you'll run out of memory only when something has gone terribly wrong - some process is leaking badly or under attack. If you can kill that process then you're more likely to get your system working again quickly. (Or at least into a state where you can log in and repair things.)

In any case, even when the OOM killer chooses the "wrong" process, it's probably no worse than killing a "random" process, which is what happens without the OOM killer.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[marm]

Until Linux drops the concept of memory overcommit, I'm afraid that the VM is going to continue to suck.

No offence, but you don't seem to know what you're on about. Linux does not overcommit memory by default, although it can if you tell it to.

root@funkster:~# cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
0

which is the default setting. To turn on memory overcommit...

root@funkster:~# echo "1" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

Don't be an ass. Things like "VM/shmem" cleanups" (pre13) and "sysctl/VM documentation" (pre8) don't give any indication of serious changes to how the VM subsystem actually works. Similarly "VM race fix" (pre12) could as easily refer to something that has been in there for a year as to something that was introduced recently. Aside from those, there is still exactly one hint that anything major occurred - "major VM merge" in pre11. That phrase is still pretty darn vague; "major" could still refer to a bunch of fixes that merely required lots of lines without really changing anything deep. I already 'fessed up to the error, which was a simple honest mistake, so I'm not going to take any more gratuitous crap from karma whores about it.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

If your system is out of memory (totally out - no RAM, so Swap) then stuff will fail. That's true on any system

That is untrue. There is no need for any existing process to die in an OOM condition, although it may be necessary to prevent new processes from being spawned. The problem that the OOM killer tries to address is exhaustion of paging space by a rogue process, but that can be handled adequately by higher-level policy means (e.g. per-process limits, applying quota to paging space). Rejecting the policy-based approach in favor of warping the entire VM system's page-replacement strategy is IMO a mistake of the first magnitude. Contrary to what you imply, most other systems get by just fine without an OOM killer; many of them - but notably not including any flavor of NT - behave much more gracefully under memory pressure than Linux does.

Before you attempt to lecture me on how VM systems work, I should point out that I was at one time the go-to guy for a VM system more sophisticated than Linux's on one of the earlier SMP UNIXes (Encore's UMAX V). I do know how these things work, and that is why I make the claims that I do. The OOM killer does deserve to be killed.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus fixed a GFP_ATOMIC allocation bug
in the 2.4.10pre14 that was causing the problems.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Ami Ganguli]

There is no need for any existing process to die in an OOM condition, although it may be necessary to prevent new processes from being spawned.

• For the existing processes to continue they would need to be able to keep working without allocating any memory. That's feasible on a real-time OS, but on a general purpose OS at least some of the processes are going to become useless, even if they don't actually segfault. In that case it's better just to kill them off and free up the memory.
• Preventing new processes from starting is very bad. It means you can't, for example, start a new console session in order to administer (and hopefully save) the system. I've had this happen on commercial Unixen and it sucks big-time. I would much rather have had an OOM killer that gave me a chance of regaining control of the box.

The second part of your arguement regarding quotas doesn't really contradict what I said. I said that if the system is truly out of memory then something has gone horribly wrong. You said the system should never run out of memory.

In order to prevent the system from running out of memory you would like a nice quota system. I can't argue with that, but it doesn't conflict with the idea of an OOM killer. Ideally we should have both.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[marm]

The OOM killer does deserve to be killed.

So you would rather your box locked up if it happened to run out of memory? I know I sure wouldn't.

There's nothing stopping you from implementing resource quotas as well. The Linux OOM killer just gives a little breathing room for those who failed to set them. The fact that in earlier 2.4 kernels it triggered far too early does not make it a bad idea, it's just a bug that has been fixed. Or do you throw out every code idea you have the moment you discover a bug in it?

Sun disagrees with you too - Solaris has an OOM killer...

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

So you would rather your box locked up if it happened to run out of memory? I know I sure wouldn't.

Neither would I. I'd prefer that the condition be prevented than that it be allowed and then handled so stupidly.

Or do you throw out every code idea you have the moment you discover a bug in it?

That's totally uncalled-for. I've been a developer for over a decade, and a significant portion of that time has been spent fixing bugs in my own and other people's code - including VM-system bugs (no, not in Linux). I know the value of leveraging existing code - which is what makes me wonder why the Linux crew reinvented yet another wheel in this case instead of taking the opportunity to adapt and improve on existing tried-and-true approaches. The Linux VM system as it exists today bears all the hallmarks of code written by people who didn't find out what they were getting into before they started.

Sun disagrees with you too - Solaris has an OOM killer...

Someone at Sun might have thought it was a good idea, but I know other people at Sun who realize it stinks. BTW, do you really think Solaris is that exemplary an OS?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let it go man, just do a search next time, no biggie. And stop trying to defend why you missed it. You're only kidding yourself when you say "major vm merge" might not mean anything.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

For the existing processes to continue they would need to be able to keep working without allocating any memory. That's feasible on a real-time OS, but on a general purpose OS at least some of the processes are going to become useless

No, it's entirely feasible and has been done in general-purpose OSes. If every process has adequate paging space as it should, and there's also an emergency reserve as there should be, then you can be smart about how you apply that emergency reserve and avoid having the system lock up. It's actually a generalization of the policy decision that the OOM killer makes, in that you have choices between "allowed to survive" and "killed". In a degenerate case you could get behavior very similar to what the OOM killer gives you, with certain "victim" processes starving instead of being killed, but you can also do much better because of the additional flexibility.

Preventing new processes from starting is very bad. It means you can't, for example, start a new console session in order to administer (and hopefully save) the system

Again, this is where emergency reserves and policy-based mechanisms come into play. Some filesystems on Linux have space reserved only for root; the same can be done for paging space. Nobody has to die in order that root may live.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[pslam]

He knows what he's talking about. Even with overcommit_memory=0 the behaviour is still somewhat overcommit. "Turning overcommit off" just enables a check that any SINGLE allocation doesn't exceed available memory. This is fine except available memory == paged in memory. Easy example to kill a program:

256MB of RAM in machine...
Allocate 100 * 128MB using mmap. None of these ENOMEM.
Clear 100 * 128MB. Receive rather ungraceful SIGBUS.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[pslam]

For the existing processes to continue they would need to be able to keep working without allocating any memory. That's feasible on a real-time OS, but on a general purpose OS at least some of the processes are going to become useless, even if they don't actually segfault. In that case it's better just to kill them off and free up the memory.

Actually i'd say it's better to tell the process it can't do what it asked. Return an ENOMEM to a brk or mmap. It's much better to know that there isn't enough memory at the point of allocation than at the point of usage. It's practically impossible to implement error handling in a user app when all you get is a SIGBUS at the point of accessing. I suppose you could use mlock() but you still have to deal with that SIGBUS somehow... and this only works for root apps.

There are systems where every app is controlled and written with non-overcommit in mind, and there's no reason Linux should intentionally ignore these possibilities.

In fact, the OOM killer blatantly does the wrong thing for an embedded device that I'm working on. There's a single process (apart from a custom init) which is the only userland allocator in the system, and it allocates pretty much all of memory (13-15MB out of 16MB). Trouble is the OOM handler quickly decides that this isn't OK and kills the process. Solution: comment out the OOM handler. Everybody's happy.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sed humor is most comedic.

I am really laughing out loud and unable to exlain it to my peers that are looking at me really strangely.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Ami Ganguli]

If every process has adequate paging space as it should

Um, then you're not out of memory.

Really I don't think we're disagreeing. You keep bringing up ways to prevent a true out of memory condition. Fair enough and totally valid. There were actually some RSS limit patches floating around once, but I don't know if they ever made it into 2.4. If not then I assume they'll go into 2.5.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

Um, then you're not out of memory.

Yes, you are, you're just not overcommitted - which is sorta "out of memory, and then some". The whole point is to stop selling tickets when all the seats are full, instead of selling more tickets than you have seats and then shooting someone in the head to make room when everyone with a ticket actually does show up.

OK, maybe that metaphor's a little bit too colorful, but you get the idea.

Possibly not, except that if these mechanisms had been in place sooner there would never have been a (perceived) need for an OOM killer at all...and I think that would have been a good thing. In any case, it has been nice talking to you.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

Oops, that last paragraph was in response to an accidentally-omitted blockquote. "Possibly not" was in response to "Really I don't think we're disagreeing".

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Ami Ganguli]

There are systems where every app is controlled and written with non-overcommit in mind, and there's no reason Linux should intentionally ignore these possibilities.

That's what I meant by real-time, although I suppose you're right. My only experience with that kind of system is in real-time applications under a real-time OS, but there's nothing inherently RT about it.

There's a single process (apart from a custom init) which is the only userland allocator in the system, and it allocates pretty much all of memory (13-15MB out of 16MB).

That's a pretty unusual situation, but maybe the answer is to make the OOM killer a configure option. I still think that for the general case the OOM killer is a good idea.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Trinn]

You're definately not the only one with these sorts of problems. Even here on my family's 1.2GHz/256M Athlon, there have been problems of that nature. I hope the VM is better. I remember the days when Linux would easily install on a 486/66/16M and run forever w/ no problems.

Join me in lobbying for the .dot domain. http://slashdot.dot (http slash slash slash dot dot dot).

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[gengee]

Okay...that's just rediculous:). Whatever memory is curently being used most frequently stays in physical memory. Whatever is being used most infrequently stays in swap. Simple as that.

And if you're already using swap space when you first boot up your computer, I might seriously recommend you invest the 30$ for some more memory:P

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Hazzl]

Until Linux drops the concept of memory overcommit, I'm afraid that the VM is going to continue to suck.

Overcommit has been made optional quite early in the 2.4.x series (2.4.4 IIRC) there is a /proc interface so you can switch it back on (default is off) just do a cat 0 >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to turn it off in case it is still enabled in your build.

I have to say that I have never had any serious VM problems in the 2.4.x series. Also the old VM system had worked fine in most cases after 2.4.8. The problem reports that appear on linux-kernel nowadays are from people having more than 1GB of RAM or such things.

I am really excited about trying out the new VM by Andrea Archangeli though, I have read great things about it.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

My point was that the ChangeLog entry of "major VM merge" was vague only because of the way open source development tends to take place. There are several trees to several parts of the kernel, and much of what Linus does is just keeping the forks in synch.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Jeffrey Baker]

I know about the /proc setting, but the kernel overcommits regardless of your preference. It just does it more or less aggressively. Either way, the kernel will deliver SIGBUS to your process just because you tried to use some memory that was sucessfully allocated. How is any programmer supposed to deal with that?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[XO]

It's got 96MB ram. If I run free, it says i have typically about 48MB free after boot, then i run GNOME, and an xterm, issue free, and it starts telling me i've got 96MB in the swapper, with 32MB free. It never really ever USES any of my free memory, it uses swap.

This has been happening since 2.4.2. 2.4.9 seriously decreased the constant swappability (X process no longer takes up 800+MB after only 4 hours).. but turning swapoff right after system startup, then turning it on after getting all my personal stuff running seems to greatly help.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[seann]

whats the VM?
:P

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offence, but you don't seem to know what you're on about.

Quite correct, Jeffrey W. Baker does not know what he's on about, although quite a few people have recently been wondering what he's on. Just yesterday or the day before, he posted a profanity-ridden rant to the debian-user list complaining that all his work disappeared from his machine after a reboot. This was because he was storing his work in /tmp, and apparently didn't know until then that /tmp is cleared out during the boot process. What a dumbshit.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[t]

That's just like dec unix, it had an option to turn this off and run in over-commit mode. Usually what it would do is every time a program requested memory, it would guarantee that there was swap to back that request up. The problem was that when we needed as much performance as possible, we had to change it to run in over-commit mode since the extra overhead of borking with swap was killing it. And in reality we didn't even need swap since we wanted to run "real-time" and bought enough ram to make sure we wouldn't do anything stupid like running a "real-time" process out of swap.

That's a roundabout way of me saying I hate swap. I think it's pointless in a development box like mine with 3/4 GBs of ram. What me worry?

btw, I'd have to disagree with your statement, if you're running in a non-overcomit mode then you can still run out of memory. The only difference is that the program that tries to do malloc will get a failure. If that is a very important program that has piss poor error handling then you could die really badly.

t.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[barneyfoo]

Well, yeah, I read that. But what does it mean?

Read the fucking mailing list. God you slashdot jockeys are pitiful. Here's the mailing list url:

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /

Start with the long threads where Andrea Archangeli, Linus Torvalds, Rik Van Riel, Marcello Tossatti, and Daniel phillips are going back and forth. Yes, it is a major VM change, and for the better. Rik's vm that started in 2.3.99 is not showing signs of getting better, so they are scrapping most of the experimental stuff and going for a solid design from andrea (the guy who finally got 2.2's vm stable under heavy load).

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Usama swap Laden? (it's the kernel source of all evil)

--
"I rant, therefore I am"

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[pslam]

That's a pretty unusual situation, but maybe the answer is to make the OOM killer a configure option. I still think that for the general case the OOM killer is a good idea.

I agree that in the general case of a multi-process environment (your typical desktop), some sort of OOM killer is a good idea - even better would be quota controls and non-overcommit, with OOM as absolute last resort (root processes with priority). Having a configure option would end this subject of much debate :)

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Teukels]

I have tried the VM in 2.4.10-pre12 and in 2.4.10-pre15 although I have patched the latter with a Preemptionpatch and a speedup for reiserfs.

The VM has long been a problem because of highmem issues. It seems troublesome to keep every party happy (and that is what Linus tries to accomplish, atleast that is how it seems from my perspective.)

I must say the sluggishness of 2.4.7 and before is gone. The changes made in 2.4.10-pre11 are really helpfull and it stabilized (with regard to my system. ie: results might differ on your setup.) quite fast. I am fairly happy with 2.4.10-pre15-preempt-reiserfs.

I hope Linus gets his guts together and starts out with 2.5.x. Let Alan Cox or Ted T'so fix the brown-paper bag bugs.., I am really looking forward to all those new ideas I keep hearing about. Rik van Riel has cool ideas, ALSA inclusion and lots of other stuff.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Teukels]

I believe it was Andrew Morton who said it could be improved by an order O 1 * 10^6 in speed. I don't know wether _that_ happened but I do know I saw something like "swapoff improvements" lately.

So please try a later kernel and I just bet your problems will fade.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Teukels]

Update to comment posted above,
in the Changelog of 2.4.10-pre4 it reads:

"- Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups"

So Hugh fixed the problem in the end.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

You are an arrogant prick, but thanks for providing a little info anyway.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Salamander]

If you're running in non-overcommit mode, without an emergency reserve, and your important program has piss-poor error handling...whose fault is that? The VM-system designer's? Hardly.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wouldn't go around spreading FUD, you wouldn't get flamed. You obviously looked at the changelog briefly, didn't even search for the string "vm", and assumed no VM changes were made.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you aren't going to swap out the kernel for beta test reasons then it doesn't make one fig of difference if 2.4.10 fixes your swap problem.

But surely it makes sense to beta test the effects of a non RH kernel, given that compiling your own kernel is a good thing, which should be encouraged.

So get to it. Other posters seem to think 2.4.10 is a big improvement. Sounds like it's worth the effort. And like that, you don't look like a karma whore.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's pretty much it. How is that FUD? Answer: it's not. Fuck off, coward.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Miles]

But perhaps the poster's question was more for the 'slashdot jockeys'--more along the lines of--what have your experiences been with the VM? Or maybe, I don't have time to wade through the mailing list stuff, so could somebody post a summary?

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. When i try 2.4.X kernel to use more than 1Gb of memory it damage a filesystem and could not run. It seems, Linux could not work with a large memory. This mean, 2.4.X is unstable and dangerous kernel and there is no warnings from Linus. I wonder.

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

"1 * 10^6" doesn't make any sense at _all_ with O notation. I think you mean "6 orders of magnitude".

European mirror

[DeadInSpace]

For those in Europe, especially near/in the Netherlands:
ftp://galileo.luon.net/linux/

Re:European mirror

[pj7]

In Europe nothing. I live in eastern Us and got a steady 240K on this one. Was still living with a 2.4.5 kernel and decided to upgrade. Thanks for the link since kernel.org is down, so no access to a mirrors list.

Re:European mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

THANX! kernel.org is down, but your mirror gives me 74 kb/s to Stockholm!

nice :)

2.4.10 Changelog

[mnordstr]

final:
- Andrew Grover: ACPI update
- Al Viro: block devices..
- Andrea Arcangeli: fix list manipulation bogosity
- Trond Myklebust: 64-bit file locking fixes
- Brad Hards: USB CDC ethernet
- Chris Mason: reiserfs speedup
- Robert Love: re-merge AMD 761 GART support that was lost in -ac merge
- Adam Richter: check pci_module_init() return value

pre15:
- Jan Harkes: make Coda work with arbitrary host filesystems, not
just filesystems that use generic_file_read/write
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Hugh Dickins: swap device lock fixes - fix swap readahead race
- me, Andrea: more reference bit cleanups

pre14:
- Richard Gooch: devfs update
- Andrea Arcangeli: clean up/fix ramdisk handling now that it's in page cache
- Al Viro: follow up the above with initrd cleanups
- Keith Owens: get rid of drivers/scsi/53c700-mem.c file
- Trond Myklebust: RPC over TCP race fix
- Greg KH: USB update (ohci understands USB_ZERO_PACKET)
- me: clean up reference bit handling, fix silly GFP_ATOMIC allocation bug

pre13:
- Manfred Spraul: /proc/pid/maps cleanup (and bugfix for non-x86)
- Al Viro: "block device fs" - cleanup of page cache handling
- Hugh Dickins: VM/shmem cleanups and swap search speedup
- David Miller: sparc updates, soc driver typo fix, net updates
- Jeff Garzik: network driver updates (dl2k, yellowfin and tulip)
- Neil Brown: knfsd cleanups and fixues
- Ben LaHaise: zap_page_range merge from -ac

pre12:
- Alan Cox: much more merging
- Pete Zaitcev: ymfpci race fixes
- Andrea Arkangeli: VM race fix and OOM tweak.
- Arjan Van de Ven: merge RH kernel fixes
- Andi Kleen: use more readable 'likely()/unlikely()' instead of __builtin_expect()
- Keith Owens: fix 64-bit ELF types
- Gerd Knorr: mark more broken PCI bridges, update btaudio driver
- Paul Mackerras: powermac driver update
- me: clean up PTRACE_DETACH to use common infrastructure

pre11:
- Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
- Andrew Morton: console locking merge
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

pre10:
- Alan Cox: continued merging
- Mingming Cao: make msgrcv/shmat check the queue/segment ID's properly
- Greg KH: USB serial init failure fix, Xircom serial converter driver
- Neil Brown: nsfd/raid/md/lockd cleanups
- Ingo Molnar: multipath RAID personality, raid xor update
- Hugh Dickins/Marcelo Tosatti: swapin read-ahead race fix
- Vojtech Pavlik: fix up some of the infrastructure for x86-64
- Robert Love: AMD 761 AGP GART support
- Jens Axboe: fix SCSI-generic queue handling race
- me: be sane about page reference bits

pre9:
- Greg KH: start migration to new "min()/max()"
- Roman Zippel: move affs over to "min()/max()".
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA update (make sure not to IRQ-unmask a vt82c576)
- Jan Kara: quota bug-fix (don't decrement quota for non-counted inode)
- Anton Altaparmakov: more NTFS updates
- Al Viro: make nosuid/noexec/nodev be per-mount flags, not per-filesystem
- Alan Cox: merge input/joystick layer differences, driver and alpha merge
- Keith Owens: scsi Makefile cleanup
- Trond Myklebust: fix oopsable race in locking code
- Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update

pre8:
- Christoph Hellwig: clean up personality handling a bit
- Robert Love: update sysctl/vm documentation
- make the three-argument (that everybody hates) "min()" be "min_t()",
and introduce a type-anal "min()" that complains about arguments of
different types.

pre7:
- Alan Cox: big driver/mips sync
- Andries Brouwer, Christoph Hellwig: more gendisk fixups
- Tobias Ringstrom: tulip driver workaround for DC21143 erratum

pre6:
- Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
- Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
- Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
- firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
- NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
- Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
- me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
- Merge with Alan
- Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
- Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
directories in page cache
- Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
- Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
- Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
pl2303 driver update)
- David Miller: sparc and net update
- Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
overwrite ramdisks
- Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
- Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
- Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
- Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
- Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
- Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
- Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
- Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
- Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
- John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
- Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
- Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
- David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
- Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
- Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
- Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
- Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
- Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
- Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
- Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
- Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
- Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
- David Miller: networking and sparc updates
- Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
- OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
- Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
- Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
- Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
- Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
- Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
- David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
- Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
- Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
- Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
- Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
- Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
- David Gibson: airport driver update
- Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support
- Daniel Phillips: swap read page referenced set - avoid swap thrashing

Re:2.4.10 Changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

huh huh huh uhhh heh heh there is a guy named Huge Dickings. heh eheh

Changelog

[felipeal]

From the
changelog file:

final:
- Andrew Grover: ACPI update
- Al Viro: block devices..
- Andrea Arcangeli: fix list manipulation bogosity
- Trond Myklebust: 64-bit file locking fixes
- Brad Hards: USB CDC ethernet
- Chris Mason: reiserfs speedup
- Robert Love: re-merge AMD 761 GART support that was lost in -ac merge
- Adam Richter: check pci_module_init() return value

pre15:
- Jan Harkes: make Coda work with arbitrary host filesystems, not
just filesystems that use generic_file_read/write
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Hugh Dickins: swap device lock fixes - fix swap readahead race
- me, Andrea: more reference bit cleanups

pre14:
- Richard Gooch: devfs update
- Andrea Arcangeli: clean up/fix ramdisk handling now that it's in page cache
- Al Viro: follow up the above with initrd cleanups
- Keith Owens: get rid of drivers/scsi/53c700-mem.c file
- Trond Myklebust: RPC over TCP race fix
- Greg KH: USB update (ohci understands USB_ZERO_PACKET)
- me: clean up reference bit handling, fix silly GFP_ATOMIC allocation bug

pre13:
- Manfred Spraul: /proc/pid/maps cleanup (and bugfix for non-x86)
- Al Viro: "block device fs" - cleanup of page cache handling
- Hugh Dickins: VM/shmem cleanups and swap search speedup
- David Miller: sparc updates, soc driver typo fix, net updates
- Jeff Garzik: network driver updates (dl2k, yellowfin and tulip)
- Neil Brown: knfsd cleanups and fixues
- Ben LaHaise: zap_page_range merge from -ac

pre12:
- Alan Cox: much more merging
- Pete Zaitcev: ymfpci race fixes
- Andrea Arkangeli: VM race fix and OOM tweak.
- Arjan Van de Ven: merge RH kernel fixes
- Andi Kleen: use more readable 'likely()/unlikely()' instead of __builtin_expect()
- Keith Owens: fix 64-bit ELF types
- Gerd Knorr: mark more broken PCI bridges, update btaudio driver
- Paul Mackerras: powermac driver update
- me: clean up PTRACE_DETACH to use common infrastructure

pre11:
- Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
- Andrew Morton: console locking merge
- Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

pre10:
- Alan Cox: continued merging
- Mingming Cao: make msgrcv/shmat check the queue/segment ID's properly
- Greg KH: USB serial init failure fix, Xircom serial converter driver
- Neil Brown: nsfd/raid/md/lockd cleanups
- Ingo Molnar: multipath RAID personality, raid xor update
- Hugh Dickins/Marcelo Tosatti: swapin read-ahead race fix
- Vojtech Pavlik: fix up some of the infrastructure for x86-64
- Robert Love: AMD 761 AGP GART support
- Jens Axboe: fix SCSI-generic queue handling race
- me: be sane about page reference bits

pre9:
- Greg KH: start migration to new "min()/max()"
- Roman Zippel: move affs over to "min()/max()".
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA update (make sure not to IRQ-unmask a vt82c576)
- Jan Kara: quota bug-fix (don't decrement quota for non-counted inode)
- Anton Altaparmakov: more NTFS updates
- Al Viro: make nosuid/noexec/nodev be per-mount flags, not per-filesystem
- Alan Cox: merge input/joystick layer differences, driver and alpha merge
- Keith Owens: scsi Makefile cleanup
- Trond Myklebust: fix oopsable race in locking code
- Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update

pre8:
- Christoph Hellwig: clean up personality handling a bit
- Robert Love: update sysctl/vm documentation
- make the three-argument (that everybody hates) "min()" be "min_t()",
and introduce a type-anal "min()" that complains about arguments of
different types.

pre7:
- Alan Cox: big driver/mips sync
- Andries Brouwer, Christoph Hellwig: more gendisk fixups
- Tobias Ringstrom: tulip driver workaround for DC21143 erratum

pre6:
- Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
- Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
- Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
- firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
- NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
- Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
- me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
- Merge with Alan
- Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
- Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
directories in page cache
- Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
- Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
- Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
pl2303 driver update)
- David Miller: sparc and net update
- Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
overwrite ramdisks
- Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
- Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
- Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
- Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
- Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
- Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
- Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
- Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
- Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
- John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
- Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
- Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
- David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
- Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
- Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
- Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
- Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
- Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
- Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
- Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
- Al Viro: block device cleanups
- Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
- Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
- Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
- David Miller: networking and sparc updates
- Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
- OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
- Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
- Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
- Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
- Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
- Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
- Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
- David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
- Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
- Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
- Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
- Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
- Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
- David Gibson: airport driver update
- Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support
- Daniel Phillips: swap read page referenced set - avoid swap thrashing

Re:Changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

moronic moderators did it again
I posted a changelog from an older kernel (I think it was 2.4.7) and they failed to moderate it -1, offtopic
morons

Hmm...

[mortyr]

Wreck my 450-day uptime or upgrade? Choices, choices.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the same thing?

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrading sucks, choose to wreck your uptime instead...

Re:Hmm...

[plankers]

The system uptime rolls at 471 days anyhow... upgrade. :-) (I wish the uptime didn't do that -- Netcraft said I had the world's best ISP, uptime-wise, until two of my machines rolled).

Re:Hmm...

[cat5]

11:30pm up 110 days, 4:50, 1 user, load average: 0.27, 0.17, 0.17

Running Kernel 2.2.19. No thanks. I don't need the headaches of running the 2.4 series kernel until 2.4.2x or so.

Then I know it will be more stable.

Re:Hmm...

[St. Vitus]

anathema:~$ uptime
10:51pm up 489 days, 6:53, 3 users, load average: 1.52, 1.56, 1.50

Wooohooo, new kernel to try

[Linuckspimp]

Wooohooo, new kernel to try

Re:Wooohooo, new kernel to try

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, thanks for the insightful comment.

2.4.9 and broken X font server ?

[SaberTaylor]

anyone know what to do?

Re:2.4.9 and broken X font server ?

[Anonymous Coward]

install windows 2000

Re:2.4.9 and broken X font server ?

[powerlinekid]

get yourself a new version of X... or check the patches, etc...

Re:2.4.9 and broken X font server ?

[Clowning]

Then he would have a broken computer.

Umm Taco

[Anonymous Coward]

> Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

People who run lates 2.4 kernels are probably couldn't care less about uptimes.
But why do I even bother, you are just a pretentious marketing droid disguising as a geek.

Re:Umm Taco

[Anonymous Coward]

People who actually use their systems for work probably couldn't care less about uptimes. It's downtime that counts. If 15 minutes downtime during kernel upgrade prevents hours of downtime when actual work has to be done, then so be it.

I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that 2.4.10 is stable, 2.4.5 was a load of crap.

cool,though my servers need to run this weekend :(

[green pizza]

Quite cool to see this latest upgrade. Kudos on the quick announcement. I'll start upgrading my workstations in a about an hour, but we have a pretty big project going on this weekend, so I won't be able to upgrade any of our servers until mid-week at the earliest. :(

Here's to progress! (Maybe time to finally upgrade to to KDE 2.1.1, too).

Anyone know how soon the nForce chipset will be supported?

Interesting quote, Taco.

[SumDeusExMachina]

Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

By "wreck those glorious uptimes," are you referring to rebooting so that you can start running the new kernel? Or do you mean after rebooting, you will never see those "glorious uptimes" again after having enough stupidity to install a new, bleeding edge kernel without so much as finding out how stable it is from others?

Re:Interesting quote, Taco.

[Bradee-oh!]

He meant rebooting to start running the new kernel.

Re:Interesting quote, Taco.

[Anonymous Coward]

2.4.9 has been rock solid for me. I don't know what kind of hole you're living in. Granted this machine has 256 meg in is, so I haven't noticed any of the vm issues other people have been having. Memory is cheap anyway. 256 meg pc2100 was going for $39 a stick at a computer show I went to today, that's like 4 pizzas. I haven't rebooted a single one of a my 2.4.9 machines because of "issues". And I run quite a few servers.

Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2.2 series of Linux kernels were indeed impressive works, with stability and performance on par with the far more expensive products put out by commercial entities such Microsoft and Sun. Unfortunately, Linus and the other kernel developers decided to sit on their laurels as Windows, Solaris, and even FreeBSD surpassed Linux in almost every category, and then tried to "catch up" by pushing out a half-baked "2.4" kernel. Unfortunately, this gaffe has made Linux into all but a laughingstock of an operating system.

• The copy-on-record algorithm used by the new VM is a horrible, O(n) NP-complete way of managing swap space. Any CS undergrad could come up with at least 20 better ways of managing the swap space, such as inverse buffer-partitioning or full-duplex write caching, which are used in FreeBSD to good effect.
• The new ReiserFS's attribute-tree modeling produces even more pathetic disk performance. Opening a file takes three times longer than ext2fs in 2.2 kernels, and almost five times longer than using Windows 2000's block-spacing scheme used in NTFS. It is truly a pathetic, rushed product, whose mediocrity is hidden behind meaningless buzzwords such as "journalling".
• The 2.4 developers made a huge mistake by replacing the 2.2 kernel's direct bus device management with a much clunkier frontside multiplex. This extra abstraction means that Linux has no chance of ever matching the AGP throughput of Windows, which is a necessary acheivement if Linux ever hopes to make headway into the home environment. Performance of all other devices, including USB devices, parallel-port printers, and IDE hard drives, is far lower than any competing operating system. The decreased hard drive performance is especially staggering when coupled with ReiserFS's depressed filesystem speed, making the whole Linux system entirely inadequate for even simple server tasks such as web serving.

It's plain to see that Linux 2.4 will never get off the ground; future versions promise only to bring more poorly-implemented systems into the fold. It is sad to see such a promising system waste away so; I would suggest using a 2.2 kernel to people interested in Linux, except that those kernels have been obsoleted by almost every other product in the marketplace. If you want to learn Unix, I suggest you go with Solaris or FreeBSD instead, or to just forget it and use Windows XP.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops...

You criticized the Holy Grail OS. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to /dev/jail.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd care to post the method by which you determined these statistics, along with some benchmarks to compare them to, I'm sure some people would gladly check your numbers for you. If they prove to be right, then I'm sure someone will gladly start working on fixes as well. But please try to post evidence with your claims before flaiming work that I truly doubt that you could match or surpass on your own.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Any CS undergrad could come up with at least 20 better ways of managing the swap space,

I agree.

The thing that pisses me the most about Open Source is the diletantism of it all. People who have never been trained in algorithms or clean design keep re-inventing the wheel (badly) when they could spend some time getting familiar with the recent developments in the field. But no, it's "code, CODE, CODE!".

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, if it weren't for the fact that absolutely none of that information was even remotely valid, you might have been able to make a point.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah!?!?! Well at least linux doesn't suck! :)

Real men buy gobs of ram, 256 meg sticks can be had for under $40, so even if this were true, which it isn't I don't care, there's a major vm fix in 2.4.10 anyway, maybe another undergrad came up with a better method.

I use reiserfs and haven't notice a single slow down. All my apps still open zippity zip. All the benchmarks I've seen don't put the file systems very close to each other.

And OMG, abstraction to provide simplicity of code and a better interface? The horrors, how will I ever cope with that loss in 1 fps in quake3a?!?! My housemate's win2k box locks up constantly for no reason. I can't help but snicker while staring at the output from "uptime" on my machine. :)

Linux pimpbot 2.4.9 #1 Fri Aug 17 19:55:01 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
18:05:52 up 36 days, 22:08, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Anyway, what kind of linux hating asshole spends time trolling on the all mighty linux loving slashdot? Go troll with the rest of the morons on shugashack or something and leave us alone. :) (no offense to sCary, but his active users in his forums make me fear for humanity)

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

People who have never been trained in algorithms or clean design keep re-inventing the wheel (badly) when they could spend some time getting familiar with the recent developments in the field.

But people trained in algorithms and familiar with recent developments don't code, or their code isn't usable by anyone else. If undergrad OS final projects would be to implement swap space for linux, instead of stand-alone projects which collect dust as soon as the grades are out, the World would be a better place.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[JabberWokky]

This extra abstraction means that Linux has no chance of ever matching the AGP throughput of Windows

Actually, that performance hit is alleviated by the fine grain security model that allows for DMA access to kernel threads. By loading additional channels for multipath sychro-byte emulation (necessary for future 64 and 128 bit systems), a parametric pseduo-attenuated curve is achieved on both framebuffer and X driven graphics. This, combined with the new temporal_io_queue() system call, allows pre-fetch of as yet uncalculated frames, resulting in a framerate on AGP devices only limited by a simple #define statement. Somewhat cryptically, Linus has chosen the value 4711 for this in his branch, while AC has chosen the more conservative 5, with the cryptic inline comment that there is an "Erisian principle to consider - see random number functions". Not being too familiar with the inner workings of the kernel, I can't comment on his choice.

--
Evan "Who feels a bit like a random poem generator" E.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[Oscillatory]

AC has chosen the more conservative 5, with the cryptic inline comment that there is an "Erisian principle to consider - see random number functions".

Fnord.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[TheSolution]

TSIS-IL-PS
(the solution is simple - install linux - problem solved)

Muahahahahahaha.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

[MySamoanAttorney]

O(n) *and* NP-Complete? I haven't seen many NP-Complete problems solved in time "order N". Maybe P=NP after all...

Use the mirrors, people!

[Dwonis]

Some of the mirrors already have the files, so make sure to use them. Also, be considerate! Try to get the patch-*.bz2 files, rather than the linux-*.tar.gz files.

Re:Use the mirrors, people!

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a 100mbps second link ok fagboy, stop karma whoreing, the kernel archive is never slashdoted ok cock goblin.

Re:Use the mirrors, people!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a fucking moron. Oh god, no, we're using 50mbps of their dedicated 100mbps line! Jesus.

Re:Use the mirrors, people!

[Dwonis]

So then why was anonymous access denied on ftp.kernel.org? HUH??

Re:Use the mirrors, people!

[Anonymous Coward]

what, are you paying for their bandwidth out of your own pocket? STFU, bzatch.

Re:Use the mirrors, people!

[Roundeye]

'Cause the user limit was reached?

Which is a good enough reason to be using the mirrors as well.

i810e victim waiting..

[LinuxHam]

I've given an IBM NetVista S40 legacy-free to two other guys so the three of us can try to get X working on 'em. I spent a couple hours hand patching some stuff in drivers/char/agp and drivers/video to improve the AGP handling for an i810e, but make bzImage still isn't compiling..

I'm probably not going to upgrade to 2.4.10 on that box for quite some time.. my laptop, though.. I use that every day so I like to try out new kernels. Anyone know if kernel bug reporting will ever get as easy as Ximian's? That is just plain nice.

Re:i810e victim waiting..

[konmaskisin]

10 years from now maybe there'll be a kernel debug trace and auto-mail of oopses "talkback" style with Artificial Intelligence Enhanced bugzilla version 5 for fixing them and the kernel could be under source control overseen by a committee of the UN ...

Or of course we could all be fried to a crisp in a nuclear war.

x86-64 stuff

[spiro_killglance]

Did i see x86-64 stuff in the change log, some of this being
merged into the standard Kernal. AMD will be happy.

How much x86-64 support will be in the
standard kernal release (and gcc) by summer
next year? (Which is Hammer time).

I refuse to download a official kernel until ...

[thopo]

... linus merges ext3 in the official kernel. what is he waiting for? ext3 support is in the AC kernel for some time now and has proven to be stable.

But the question everyone is asking is

[geirt]

... when will 2.5.0 be out ?

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're out of new ideas and have not started the new development thread because of that.

Now they also have to deal with big corps like IBM, Oracle and SGI who would like to see their stuff in the kernel.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

XFS is pretty sweet. What are they waiting for?

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

your mom

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

no, methinks I'll wait for 2.6 / odd releases tend to be rather, well, chaotic; what with all the new features and experimentation...

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[LinuxHam]

2.0 went to what, 2.0.34? And they released a lot less frequently back then.. I'm not holding my breath for 2.5.. there's too much I'm waiting for in 2.4 still

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[HaftenRok]

You probably mean 2.6.0...
I think odd numbered releases are used for development(unstable).

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[GrenDel Fuego]

You're forgetting that 2.5 is the development kernel. They're already discussing what it's going to encompass, and some of the projects have already begun, but no release date for the first test kernel have been announced.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Soon Now

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the development Kernel!

When they finally stabalise they
should jump straight to 2.6

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[tekniklr]

You mean 2.4.6, and that will probably be out in several months.

2.4.5 already exists, when it becomes suitably non-crashy, they wil release it as 2.4.6.

Didn't you notice that a 2.3 kernel was never officially released? They went straight from 2.2 to 2.4.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[damiam]

He means 2.5. There has been a long period w/out a development kernel, even though Linus has promised several times that he was going to fork one soon.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[LinuxHam]

You're forgetting that 2.5 is the development kernel.

You're absolutely right. Six year user here, and I have never booted a devel kernel once. I do forget about that odd/even thing. When I think about how far back I stay from the bleeding edge, I realize how true the phrase I use when training a newcomer is:

the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[tao]

Uhm, actually, the latest v2.0.xx kernel is v2.0.40pre1, and more are expected. Released a couple of days ago. AFAIK, the v2.1-tree was forked from v2.0.21.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[tao]

Some cleanups and a common journaling layer to avoid duplicating code in all the journaling file systems that will go into the kernel; hence v2.5 is a better time for a merge than v2.4; a backport might be possible, though. Oh, and Alexander Viro had some interesting comments on XFS on LKML the other day.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[PurpleBob]

You mean 2.4.6,
He means 2.5.

and that will probably be out in several months.
Or maybe it's already out, considering this article is about 2.4.10.

2.4.5 already exists,
Wow! I spotted the single true fact in your comment! Do I get a prize?

when it becomes suitably non-crashy, they wil release it as 2.4.6.
How interesting... you're applying the odd/even devel/release idea to the micro version number and not the minor one... and pulling the rest of the numbers out of your ass. Incidentally, 2.4.6 has been out for a while. And so have 2.4.7 through 2.4.9.

Didn't you notice that a 2.3 kernel was never officially released?
2.3 was the devel series which became 2.4. An odd minor number is always a development kernel.

They went straight from 2.2 to 2.4.
I congratulate you on your consistency in being wrong.

Re:But the question everyone is asking is

[tekniklr]

He means 2.5.
So did I, I just accidentaly added the '.4'. I'm sure you've never made a mistake before.

Take out the .4 from the first 2 sentences and I stand by them.

Didn't you notice that a 2.3 kernel was never officially released? They went straight from 2.2 to 2.4.
I got the last paragraph right, as I meant it (which shows what I meant to say, and I do understand how kernel versions work).

The 2.3 kernel was never officially released, not in the same way that 2.2 and 2.4 were anyway. I know it was available, but it wasn't official becaue it was stil devel.

So I stand by my last statements and attribute the first ones to a minor brain fart.

EMU10k1 anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know they fscked it up under 2.4.8, and 2.4.9 had no fix. Anyone know if .10 is any better? Cuz I'm not leaving 2.4.7 until they fix it ;)

Re:EMU10k1 anyone?

[DaSyonic]

emu10k1 was fixxed in 2.4.9, and the only problem you're referring to is when built as a module. This is further refined in 2.4.10, and it works perfectly.

Re:EMU10k1 anyone?

[shadz]

I beg to differ. It's still broke. Thinks its a Cirrus Logic fer chrissake.

not as a module either.

*sigh*

Re:EMU10k1 anyone?

[DaSyonic]

Then report the problem at linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

Posting to slashdot will do nothing.

Not 'make bzimage'...

[mojo-raisin]

... but 'make-kpkg'

If Mr. Taco was a real Debian user, he would use the kernel-package tool. It rocks.

don't waste bandwidth

[Ender Ryan]

And remember folks, don't waste precious bandwidth, download patches!

patch-2.4.7
patch-2.4.8
patch-2.4.9
patch-2.4.10

Links for the lazy folks ; )

Re:don't waste bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, or you could use mirrors, too. that might help.

Re:don't waste bandwidth

[mrfiddlehead]

And if you still haven't figured out, or forgotten, how to apply a patch, assuming you've got linux-2.4.9 installed in /usr/src/linux,

cd /usr/src/linux
bzcat ../patch-2.4.10.bz2 | patch -p0
If you've got an earlier version, download the patches up to the newest and apply them one by one from oldest to newest.

Then do a 'make oldconfig' to update to your existing .config. I usually save mine before patching,

cp .config ../config-2.4.x

See the top level README for details.

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[nagora]

ext3 support is in the AC kernel for some time now and has proven to be stable.

I seem to remember a serious bug appearing within the that two weeks. I don't use it so I don't really care at the moment.

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't bring new stuff into a stable kernel tree.

Wait for 2.5.x.

The kernel mail list is full of VM stuff

[akc]

You only need to read last weeks kernel mailing list to see how much has changed with the VM and why.

Oh no!

[jonabbey]

<despair>

How could the kernel developers be so stupid as to leave Linux with an uncompetitive parallel port printer implementation? Now I'll never be able to drive my Star NX-10 printer at a decent rate of speed!

</despair>

Re:Oh no!

[greenrd]

*Slaps forehead*

Doh!! I should have noticed that big red flag! I am a moron.

Thanks man -nt-

[Anonymous Coward]

-nt- Stands for No Text, which means this should be an empty message

Re:cool,though my servers need to run this weekend

[avalys]

(Maybe time to finally upgrade to to KDE 2.1.1, too).

Hate to break it to ya, but KDE 2.2 has been out for a while...

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[blakestah]

You will have to ask Linus.

I think the big issue is that there was an oops associated with autofs/nfs usage, and that this oops was fixed just a week or two ago.

So I suspect Linus is letting it percolate in the ac series now.

Or maybe the ext3 team has not asked for it to be merged in the stable kernels yet. They are pretty conservative in adding stuff to stable kernels.

Anyhow, I've been using ext3 for a while now, crashed a few times, no worries in replaying the journal and booting really fast.

Ext3 may eventually debut in the 2.5.0 series and be re-merged back into the 2.4. But there will be patches for 2.4.10, I am sure.

This box is behind a firewall, right?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I'm not positive, but I believe close to ANY 450-day old kernel must have an exploit or two in it. Then again, if you're well protected, go with the flow and don't upgrade until your computer actually crashes.

Re:This box is behind a firewall, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares, it's the services that matter.

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[LWolenczak]

I have used Ext3 on production servers, and they continue to work well, especially when I have installed lids on the box. I have a server out there that has ext3 and lids on it, and it has been running without trouble for almost a year.

Neadless to say, it took some hand patching to get lids, ext3, freeswan, and something else all on the box, and running fine.

I say it stable, the tools are available, and they work well. Time to go in.

Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Leto2]

Sligthly off-topic, but I can't find the answer to this:

Lately I've been getting this error on a lot of utilities (like ps, top etc):
{bm_register_driver} {__VERSIONED_SYMBOL(bm_register_driver)}
Warning: /boot/System.map does not match kernel data.

I can assure you I have the right System.map in all the right places (both in /boot and /usr/src/linux is a System.map corresponding to the current kernel).

Any ideas?

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

I have:

/boot/System.map-2.4.9

for

/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.9

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[OiBoy]

I'm getting the same thing. I have no idea why.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[mackman]

You may have checked your System.map, but did you make sure you ran lilo and acutally booted into the new kernel first?

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[SubtleNuance]

i got the same problem when i took the stock 2.2 potato kernel to 2.4.9 - no idea what was causing that.

but a major bork (probbaly on my part) caused me to break pppoe (roaring penguin user space pppoe...)

I couldnt fix the pppoe prob and had to dump back to 2.2 for the time being... or until i figure out what is necessary for 2.4.9 to work w/ rp-pppoe 3.2(?)

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy fix! delete everything in /boot (or move it somewhere else temporarily) except for your kernels, and then re-install lilo. run lilo and reboot, and it should not give that error anymore.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Leto2]

So nobody has any idea. Hmmm.
I think I read somewhere that this _could_ be because of faulty include files.

Should I or should I not make symlink to /usr/src/linux/include/[linux|asm|scsi] from /usr/include? This used to be the way to go from the beginning of linux up till somewhere in the 2.2 kernel. Then it was said that you should just leave the glibc includes where they are.

I tried both options, both give me the error.
Running Debian unstable glibc-2.2.4.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[prog-guru]

Should I or should I not make symlink to /usr/src/linux/include/[linux|asm|scsi] from /usr/include? This used to be the way to go from the beginning of linux up till somewhere in the 2.2 kernel. Then it was said that you should just leave the glibc includes where they are.

That's what I do on my Debian stable system, and Slackware 8 came like that. Can't hurt to try it, I also symlink /usr/include/asm to /usr/src/linux/include/asm.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny. Linux is such great OS with such meaningful error messages. HAHAAHAHAHAHA

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[MadAndy]

I found this happens occasionally when the modules installed in /lib/modules/(version) aren't updated correctly - sometimes even doing a make modules_install won't always fix it.

As a result, when I last built my kernel (only 2.2.19 - I fear the bleeding edge :-), I renamed the /lib/modules/2.2.19 to /lib/modules/2.2.19-old before rebuilding the kernel and running make modules_install. This way you can be sure it's all clean.

Failing that, go through the standard escalation procedures: make clean, or if really desperate: make mrproper :-)

Once you've got your current problem sorted, also consider moving to holding multiple copies of System.map in your /boot directory (eg /boot/System.map-2.2.17, /boot/System.map-2.2.19). This way everything still works when you choose an older backup kernel from your boot loader.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the problem too, look through the logs files, i didnt have the async pp or async tty or somethign along those lines, obviously pp and the ethernet driver...make sure you do ifconfig ehtX down before runnign the program too, thatn seems to helps

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

don't do that.

the headers should match the kernel that libc was
compiled under, not the kernel that you are booting. you are risking potential errors with brinaries you build if the linux kernel should diverge. this is why no distro for several years have done this.

Re:Odd kernel error message [slightly OT]

[Leto2]

Just for posterity's sake:

Do not symlink, it actually triggers the error.
AC in the parent post was right.

I put the original headers (that came with glibc) back in place, recompiled the kernel and the errors are gone.

OpenWall Patch

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it quite commical and quickly done by Solar Designer about the status of the openwall patch for 2.4 series kernel. It used to state that the patch would surface for 2.4 around 2.4.10 but today the page was updated to say 2.4.15 :-) Look at google and you will see 2.4.10 and look at the main (real) page and see 2.4.15 and also a modification date of Sept 23.

Re:OpenWall Patch

[Defiler]

Actually, I noticed that they changed the page several days ago. It still made me laugh, though.

Hmmm... swap

[powerlinekid]

So some other people have had problems with 2.4.7 (Redhat 7.2 beta)? How many people out there are actually using 2.4.8,and.9 and if so... do they handle swap better? There should be no reason why a box with 512 megs of ram should be swapping running xmms (i'm not kidding... after being up for about an hour just running X, Gnome and xmms... my computer hits the swap... of course i fixed this (more ram, hasn't swapped yet) but its a little concerning about the aggressivness of the kernel to swap. I'd be appreciative if anyone who has used one of the new kernels could tell us whether swapping is handled a little more gracefully.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[nagora]

I'm on 2.4.9 and the swap situation seems a bit better but not much. I assume this is part of the VM merges they keep talking about.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[MwtrV]

I would assume the swap problem you describe as a memory leak. Memory leaks are, I beileve, the fault of a poorly written program. Today my computer (2.4.9, X 4.1.x, deb unstable) actually became totally unresponsive in X due to what I am sure was a memory leak.. Had to hit reset because I wasn't getting anywhere with the usual keys.

There ought to be some sort of mechanism in the swap code one can activate in kernel config (yes, I am not a coder, but this is pretty goddamn true. I even know the excuse: Why/how limit? This isn't limiting, this is a safety check, check to see if the fucking thing has been writing for an indecent amount of pages.) that detects when the system is getting overwhelmed to the point of it becoming frozen (I listened to my poor HD churn for three hours, for crissakes) and TAKE DOWN THE goddamn offending program(s). I'd gladly enable that option -- in response to you fucking brainwashed knee-jerk response zealouts out there, I won't code the goddamn thing. That's up to people far far more talented at programming then I am.

Linux is not the ultimate icon of human teamwork, dedication and moral ideals in the technical field. Linux has problems just like all the other operating systems out there. It's also becoming a little too political for my tastes. Here's some real sacriledge: I'm starting to wonder if the XP install I have wouldn't be half bad with Cygwin for file manipulation and other nifty programs that are appreciatable.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[berteag00]

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can start UT on a 256-mb machine, play for an hour, come back out into X and still not have any swap used. It passes my stress-test ... we'll see about 3 days without a reboot or swapoff / swapon...

Re:Hmmm... swap

[sfe_software]

Thought I was the only one. I have the Roswell beta on two machines, a laptop (192 megs) and desktop (256). The laptop is constantly swapping. Gnome, 2 Mozilla windows and KMail, and I'm swapping. Slowly.

The desktop isn't nearly as bad (faster drive, more RAM, faster CPU), but it's still noticably slow...

I'll probably snag 2.4.10, once I get the ext3 and wvlan crap working... hopefully the swapping will not slow it down as much (at times, with a few windows open, the laptop drive is constantly grinding; battery time sucks in those situations).

Re:Hmmm... swap

[mcelrath]

There have been some persistent VM bugs for several versions (since about 2.4.4). 2.4.10 fixes them because Linus incorporated Andrea Arcangeli's VM patches. I'm running 2.4.10pre13aa1 and things are vastly improved. The "swap storms" of previous versions have completely gone away. 2.4.10 should be excellent.

If you still find swap problems, grab Andrea's latest patches (look in the people/andrea directory on the kernel mirrors). He's added some modified swap code the other day that's not in 2.4.10.

--Bob

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Jeffrey Baker]

This is rubbish. The reason that Linux 2.4.x systems get into swap when running XMMS is because they read from the disk a lot, and they only need the page they read once. Consider an XMMS process that reads 4GB of MP3 from the disk over the course of a day. Well, Rik's VM is going to push *all* other processes out of memory in order to cache all of those disk pages that nobody ever wants to see again. Obviously this is the wrong policy. But, Rik the megalomaniac is never going to fix it because he's convinced that his system is the best thing that can be acheived by human beings. He should get together and have a beer with Hans Reiser.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Salamander]

The reason that Linux 2.4.x systems get into swap when running XMMS is because they read from the disk a lot, and they only need the page they read once.

That shouldn't be a problem. Effective methods of recognizing and/or dealing with this sort of process-doing-sequential-I/O problem have been well known for the better part of a decade. After the first few accesses, XMMS's activity shouldn't be polluting the rest of the page cache with no-longer-wanted pages.

Rik's VM is going to push *all* other processes out of memory in order to cache all of those disk pages that nobody ever wants to see again.

That would be totally inane, if it were true. I don't think it is, but I have to admit I haven't actually looked into that particular aspect. God, I hope you're wrong.

Rik the megalomaniac is never going to fix it because he's convinced that his system is the best thing that can be acheived by human beings

OK, Rik has pissed me off with his defensiveness and general attitude lately, but I still think that's unfair. Despite its warts, there are also some good reasons not to go making major architecture-level changes to the VM system at this stage in 2.4 development. If a strong enough case can be made that something is actually broken - not just subject to improvement - and that the proposed fix will do no harm or invalidate the testing that has already occurred, I'm sure Rik and the others would listen.

He should get together and have a beer with Hans Reiser.

I've been in the room with both of them and a bottle of liquor. They've had their opportunity to just that, though I can't quite recall whether they took advantage of it. Must've been because I was drinking too. ;-)

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Jeffrey Baker]

I hope I'm wrong too, but I'm right. The 2.4.9 VM didn't understand pages that were only read once, as by a DVD player. Hence all of the read-once patches floating around on l-k lately. Most of them are questionable hacks, but the idea, as you note, has been around for a long time and should be implemented.

Simple test: dd if=/dev/dfd of=/dev/null, then see if your other programs got swapped out.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Anonymous Coward]

My machine just freezes when it swaps. Every time. If I start XMMS and then a terminal, it freezes. Browser at the same time I'm searching for a file, freezes. Compile two things at once, freezes :> All under X of course, either Gnome or KDE..KDE freezes before it starts up. This is kind of a pain, as I want to run Linux but I need the USB support of the 2.4x kernel line..-but-, nothing above 2.2x works properly on my machine :/

Re:Hmmm... swap

[lvv]

It was a problem under Solaris too. I used to disable swap complitly on Solaris, when system was doing a lot of disk IO, to make interactive programs more responsive.

Sun fixed this problem already.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Listen Up]

Please do not mix up and unfortunately actually believe yourself that mixing up "megalomaniac" with vision, genius, and SELF CONFIDENCE is the truth. By your *exact* definition, Linus Torvalds HIMSELF is a an insane megalomaniac.
Do you even think that maybe if just one person actually should by what they believe in and code and didn't get put down by comments like yours, we might have a better computing environment today?

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Listen Up]

Believing that you know everything there is to know about something does not make you a "megalomaniac" either. I hate people like you. Have you ever heard of Einstien? Maybe you should label him a "megalomaniac" too. He knew he was right no matter what anyone else said. Especially little pricks like you. Was he wrong. NO. Believing you truly are able to know everything there is to know about something makes you confident and an authority on a topic, not a "megalomaniac". What about Einstein? What about Andrew Wiles? What about Stephen Hawkings? You are a prick, kid.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[CTachyon]

Have you ever heard of Einstien? Maybe you should label him a "megalomaniac" too. He knew he was right no matter what anyone else said. Especially little pricks like you. Was he wrong. NO.

YES. He died knowing that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were mutually incompatible, but both "right". Worse yet, he believed in the Hidden Variable flavor of QM ("God does not play dice with the Universe"), although the Copenhagen Interpretation ("spooky action at a distance") is generally accepted as being the "real" QM (look up Bell's Inequality for more info). Even geniuses and visionaries make mistakes; only megalomaniacs refuse to acknowledge their own fallibility.

Re:Hmmm... swap

[Listen Up]

How do you seperate ambition, belief that your way is the right way, confidence, vision, and not letting anyone else tell you that you are wrong when you believe that you are right different from being a "megalomaniac". The definition says "Dillusionment of wealth, power, or omnipotence." Wouldn't you telling me that I am wrong and that you are right also make *you* a "megalomaniac"? And what is "dillusional" anyways? The term is horribly vague. Does dillusional mean the same thing as "I am right. I know I am right. I am believe that I am right. And I am confident that I am right now matter what anyone else says."? That is the exact same definition you could give to self confidence and self belief. Neither or which are "megalomaniac". What if I believe that I know the secret to the Universe (solving the GUF of Physics). Would my belief that I am completely a genius and that my approach may be the only correct approach as opposed to anyone else's approach make me a "megalomaniac"? No, it would not. Or would I only be that way if someone didn't like me and wanted to label me as something and make it sound terrible by calling me a "megalomaniac"? And is being a "megalomaniac" really a terrible thing? Does asking for help even once make you NOT a "megalomaniac"? I hate it when a definition can/could be applied to almost anyone, anywhere who is confident in themselves and their opinions, values, education, and beliefs. Are you a "megalomaniac" for correcting me?

2.4.10... feck !

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just got my system on 2.4.9 ... and now they go and release 2.4.10 .... WAAAH !

Re:cool,though my servers need to run this weekend

[JabberWokky]

(Maybe time to finally upgrade to to KDE 2.1.1, too).

Hate to break it to ya, but KDE 2.2 has been out for a while...

And 2.2.1 is done and in the hands of the packagers, with the announcement of release due any minute now.

--
Evan

Current bandwidth utilization: 96.11 Mbit/s

[bram.be]

That means:
1 kernel every 2-3 seconds
or
5 patches every second
or
96% of the bandwith from kernel.org is used

Re:Current bandwidth utilization: 96.11 Mbit/s

[mrfiddlehead]

Shouldn't that be 11 patches per second?

Glorious Uptimes?

[Jeff Probst]

Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

adapting a Linus phrase to the current situation: like masterbation, recompiling and installing a new kernel as soon as it is released feels good, but doesn't get any work done.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[DaSyonic]

masterbation? Please, Give Linus some credit. Not only do I doubt he would say that, I doubt he would spell the word like a 4 year old would.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[Jeff Probst]

Not only do I doubt he would say that

you need to get a clue you piece of shit

http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.2/0 906.html

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[DaSyonic]

Should I be mad? No. I laugh just looking at your bio:
User Bio

i created survivor. now i troll slashdot. first probst bitches.

Yes, you're a troll. You don't bother me. Unlike you, I can spell. So get mad, have a fit, and go to school.

Congratulations. You can search archives. Too bad you don't have the capacity to understand anything spoken on that mailing list.

I too have the ability to post mindless links, try this one. That should help you avoid looking so stupid in the future.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[Jeff Probst]

I look bad because I spelt masterbation wrong? You look bad, i mean look at those photos you post of yourself on the web, four eyed freak.

I am in fact smarter than you, and I can understand what is being talked about on the list. I have hacked kernel code before. Not that hard. The good thing about trolling slashdot is that you know that the audience is stupid and that they dont actually run linux, they just moan about Microsoft.

You are nothing more than a Linux conformist, arguing about lame linux distros and talking like you can hack, when in fact you use windows.

I had to laugh at your idea of moving your firewall to OpenBSD. If you knew your operating system as well as you think you do then you would realise that OpenBSD buys you nothing unless you are too clueless to set up a secure box and know what the configuration options actually do.

and your lame webpage needs more logos at the bottom.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[tie_guy_matt]

"Do you ever read advocacy newsgroups?...you find nothing but 'My system is better than your system' nonsense. It's its own form of online masturbation."

-Linus Torvalds in his book "Just For Fun."

So no I don't think he said the first quote but he does sometimes compare stuff to masturbation. He may even spell things wrong sometimes; after all, he isn't a native English speaker.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[DaSyonic]

Okay, I'm gonna play along. Yeah, I use windows. On 2 computers. Out of a dozen others. And you dont need to run Windows to write about it.

About OpenBSD? I said OpenBSD because it has better bridging support. People don't always use OpenBSD just because 'its more secure'.

And I 'talk like i can hack'? I'm not some script kiddie, I dont talk in 'idjit sp34k' or anything like it. So where you get that idea from, I dont know.

And logos at the bottom? Hmm, gee, showing my support for the EFF, Debian, RedHat, Apache, Snort, Sourceforge, of course Slashdot, and other things that I rely on DAILY is bad? I just give credit where credit is due.

I am in fact smarter than you, and I can understand what is being talked about on the list. I have hacked kernel code before
Good for you. So have I. (specifically 2.2 firewalling. again, for bridging.) Big deal? Tens of thousands of other people do too.

four eyed freak? Haha, I don't even have to respond to that.

Now here I am getting in a flame war, On slashdot no less. I guess I'm allowed a few a year.

Either way, How bout just ending it? I apologize for taking your spelling and blowing it out of proportion. I wasn't aware of the Linus quote. Otherwise, I wouldn't have ever replied to your post (A link would have been nice in the beginning) It's a waste of time trolling/flaming over nonsense, and isn't my thing. I won't be responding to any more flames, unless you have something constructive to discuss.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[daveman_1]

It will be interesting indeed to see if your prediction for the future of Windows product activation holds true. Time most certainly will tell, but here is more along the lines of what I predict happening: people will download the "corporate" version of winxp from their favorite warez dump site and will not be required to activate. Problem solved... For the moment.

Re:Glorious Uptimes?

[Anonymous Coward]

apology accepted. and mine offered. took things a bit far.

On your servers so soon?

[barzok]

Disclaimer: I work in a Windows shop

Any patch/upgrade for software installed on our servers we place on test servers first, check out for a week to ensure there are no ill effects, then patch the productional servers the following weekend. We can't afford downtime due to "well, this should work OK" (yes, I do recognize the irony of this with my above disclaimer).

Only the most urgent of patches/upgrades get applied in the rapid-fire manner to which you allude. And even then we install it on a test box first so we know what to expect on the productional one.

Re:On your servers so soon?

[PSUdaemon]

That's why you don't overwrite your kernel and the module directory tree changes, and you add an additional entry in lilo. So if something is fucked you go reboot and use the old setup. This is something you can do when you patch your system manually and not let windowsupdate do it for you. Big brother knows best eh??

Re:On your servers so soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when the patch breaks your test servers ? ... Don't patch and risk exploits ?

Re:On your servers so soon?

[Shanep]

Disclaimer: I work in a Windows shop

Not that Windows shops came up with those ideas.

In '96 I was working for a stock exchange. We had, seperate networks for production, development and office workers.

Prod and Dev had machines ranging from big DEC VAX'es running DEC VMS and DEC Unix, to multi CPU DEC Alpha's running same plus WinNT.

So, that level of care is not common to MS shops and uncommon to us Unix zealots. What was definite though, was that the servers running WinNT were nowhere near as reliable as the Unix and VMS servers. Including those on the same hardware (Alphas).

BTW, we had a Y2K team, working on fixing date issues that could be demonstrated to bring our trading systems to its knees, back in 1996. Which angers me when people say Y2K was overhyped or a myth (It was'nt overhyped, it was mostly fixed).

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[Draoi]

But there will be patches for 2.4.10, I am sure.

Yeah, we've been using ext3 for some time (and in an embedded product!). It's cool. Here's the 2.4.10 patch. It's a cinch ... :)

Pete C

aight. no lazy out this time

[SaberTaylor]

:o)

NFS readdir() still broken

[RangerSpeedBumpp]

I had high hopes for this release, but NFS readdir() is STILL broken, and has been since at least 2.4.5. I've got a patch that fixes it but I don't know who to send it to. Anyone know?

Re:NFS readdir() still broken

[blinx_]

Proberly the nfs mailling list - look at http://nfs.sourceforge.net for info.

How exactly is it broken?

Re:NFS readdir() still broken

[tao]

My best wager is Trond Myklebust or Neil Brown. Hint: there are two very useful files in the kernel; "Documentation/SubmittingPatches" and "MAINTAINERS". Combine the two, and voila!

Re:NFS readdir() still broken

[RangerSpeedBumpp]

How exactly is it broken?

readdir() calls don't return all the files in a directory. For example:

> ls /d/serpent/dir
bar baz foo

> ./ls.py /d/serpent/dir/
bar baz

'ls.py' is a one-line program which behaves like 'ls'. Python can't see the file 'foo' in this NFS-mounted directory, even though 'ls' can see it. It doesn't consistently drop the last file, or drop just one file. This behavior isn't Python-specific: it occurs in the file browsers of several heavily-used programs here.

It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Mike McTernan]

Having a VM system that is a bit slow/agressive/plain bad wouldn't be a problem if X didn't need to use so much of it.

When Win98 is booted up (ouch) it rarely swaps until I start office and some other big apps.

When X starts the whole thing slows badly and goes into a swap nightmare.

Sure, I only have 64 Meg of RAM and could upgrade... or I could use Win98 more often since it seems to do much better here.

Or I can just use a few more VTs and no X!

I'm sure X could be a lot better... which would make Linux much better!

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[jmauro]

Err...The majority of X's memory is video card memory mapped into X's memory space. The actual software the comprises X is actually very small.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[efgbr]

It's not X's fault at all.

You can run XFree86 on a system with 16 Mb of RAM.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or for very little you could go and get a 256 meg sdram stick and do a lot less swapping to begin with.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Explo]

X in itself should not be a problem with 64 megabytes of RAM - are you running something like Enlightment and Gnome too? The window managers differ quite a bit in their memory usage, and Gnome/KDE grab some of it too.

Personally, I still use Windowmaker without Gnome/KDE (or rather have the neccessary library stuff installed for programs that are for KDE/Gnome, but not actively using resources) even though I have 256 megabytes of RAM.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Mike McTernan]

Why should I? As I said, Windows has no problem win 64 Meg.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Mike McTernan]

KDE2 and you are right, it does drain the system. But when I look at top or whatever this is what I see.

6680 root 16 0 86932 75M 4060 S 3.7 124.1 4:40 X

That is 124.1% of my memory it is using. Guess that must be used/physical then.

Sure, using Windowmaker or other older window managers does save memory and will make it all go faster (I remember from an early Suse install where X flied), but Windows seems to give me a very decent GUI (better or on par with the latest KDE/Gnome?) without consuming all this...

Basically, I am saying that the Linux community need to do better to get onto the desktop.

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[Mike McTernan]

Okay, so top tells me this:

6680 root 16 0 86628 75M 4060 R 4.9 123.7 4:50 X

RSS is 75Meg!!!! Now I wish my vid card had half that much video RAM, but it only has 16Meg.

So where is that other 59Meg being mapped from then?

(Clue: disk AKA swap!).

Re:It's not all about the VM, what about X?

[jmauro]

This explains it much better than I could. Besides, without knowing what other applications are currently running one cannot make that judgement. Memory can be mapped multiple times and top is commonly WRONG (it's a dumb program, just does what it thinks is right, what else can you expect). I wouldn't really trush a value from it. Look into X, you'll see that id does mmap memory more than once, so top will count it more than once. Added to the fact that memory counted against X is actually another program's display, then you'll see that the actual main system RAM used is very little.

how do I?...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I install this on Windows 2000? Or is it better for Windows XP?
Could somebody please give detailed instructions to me?

:)

Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[marm]

Those of you who use Linux as a desktop may be interested in the pre-emptible kernel patch for 2.4.10, available from here.

This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run.

What it means in practice for the typical desktop user is a major enhancement to interactive performance under Linux, especially when under heavy load. Your X pointer will never freeze with this patch. Using this patch, I have played skip-free mp3's whilst my system has had a loadavg of 20, and my KDE desktop was still usable. I could never hope to achieve this with ordinary Linux. It's a really impressive bit of work. Go try it out.

Of course, people with the need for proper real-time response out of Linux (musicians, for example) will love it even more... maximum latencies for me with this patch are under 4ms - again, very impressive.

It's slated for inclusion in the mainline kernel early in 2.5, but could do with lots of testing first... you know what to do.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Anonymous Coward]

you know what to do.

Take off every zig?

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[chabotc]

I've been running this patch on my desktop and notebook systems for a few days now, and my experiances have been very(!) positive. Desktop interaction, games, movies and music all interact a lot smoother (quite noticable on high loads, like compiles etc)

However as someone pointed out, the average throughput does suffer somewhat (last figure i heard was 4% decrease). This might not be the right thing for a server.

However if you primary use a system as a desktop system, go for it and try it out! it could use all the eyeballs it can get.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[metatruk]

This looks _very_ interesting.
So effectively, this patch would not allow a forkbomb type script to starve CPU cycles from the rest of the system?

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Webmonger]

I dunno. I've installed the patch and built a preemtible kernel, and mp3s still glitch pretty easily when I switch from X to console or switch workspaces.

I was really excited about the preemtible kernel when I first heard about it. Now I'm disappointed. This is one place where Linux is actually worse than Windows. Feh.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[CoolVibe]

I'm running it right now, built it with make-kpgk on debian and it indeed seems less swapperish. I'm right now playing skip-free mp3's, editing a webpage with Quanta, and checking out the modifications and switching desktops on KDE 2.2.1 like there's no tomorrow on a PII 400 with 64 MB. It's still slow (but tat's because of low mem and a slow box), but without this (and the VM changes which seem to work better than the previous version) I would have a box that would be frozen because of the HORRIBLE swapping. Much better indeed...

I'm keeping an eye on these people. Very nice for desktops indeed. Thanks for the pointer :)

Oh and it hasn't crashed on me yet, so that's even an added plus :)

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[cyba]

How do you "switch from X to console or switch workspaces" under windows? If you don't then how do you know if it's faster?

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[marm]

I dunno. I've installed the patch and built a preemtible kernel, and mp3s still glitch pretty easily when I switch from X to console or switch workspaces.

Well then, there's a few things to consider:

• Is your mp3 player running with real-time scheduling? Even with a pre-emptible kernel, if your mp3 player is not running real-time, which is the default for both XMMS and Noatun, then it can easily get starved of CPU time for long enough that it causes a skip. The Linux scheduler is... just too fair to other processes on your system. From the symptoms you describe, this sounds like the most likely cause. Yes, this should be fixed in XMMS and artsd (which does the mp3 decoding for Noatun), but it's pretty easy to turn real-time scheduling on for both of them.
• Are you using a filesystem other than ext2 on your system? The filesystem code is generally the largest source of latency in Linux, and the pre-emptible kernel patch has had most of its testing so far on ext2-based machines. This is why the pre-emptible kernel patch needs all the eyeballs it can get, to pick out areas of long-held spinlocking that have been missed.
• Do you have a very slow hard disk, or maybe your partitions are highly fragmented? All the fancy kernel trickery in the world can't help you if your hard disk simply cannot seek or pull data off the disk fast enough.
• Is your sound card driver broken? The only machines I've seen the pre-emptible kernel running on were using the kernel sb16 and emu10k1 drivers. If you're running one of the less-used kernel sound drivers, or worse, a sound driver that's not in the mainstream kernel (this includes ALL of ALSA, btw) then all bets are off. For instance, it could be that your sound driver is a little too cocky abouts its buffering, and when the PCI bus gets busy (as could well happen when switching to a VT or switching workspace, especially if you have a PCI graphics card) then the sound driver's kernel buffer overflows. ALSA in particular seems to have some kind of interaction problem with the pre-emptible kernel, again, this is why the pre-emptible kernel patch needs eyeballs.

Hope that helps.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Webmonger]

How to switch workspaces: There are multiple-workspace window managers for Windows. VirtuaWin is the one I use.

How to switch to console: DOS fullscreen mode. It's true that I don't often switch to a fullscreen dos session (i.e. text mode) under Windows. I'll let you know how that works out.

You're right, though. Part of the problem is that I do things with Linux that I'd never try with Windows.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Webmonger]

I'm using ALSA, and I didn't set high priority for the mp3 players I tried (mpg123 and xmms).

I had thought the preemtible kernel would make it unnecessary to set a priority, but I see now that it doesn't help if the sound syscalls aren't blocked but the app is stuck.

Looks like I'm in for more testing. I did recompile the ALSA driver, but would that be enough to make it preemptible? Hey, stop laughing!

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW forkbombs and the like are a nonissue if you add something like this:

ulimit -v 262144 -u 128

to /etc/profile. That limits all users to max 256M virtual memory and 128 processes, which should be plenty.

Re:Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[Webmonger]

Okay, the suspense is over. MP3's play flawlessly under Windows even when you switch to DOS fullscreen mode, which uses the same text mode as the standard Linux console. Multiple workspaces are also no problem for Windows.

Still \[n^{2}\]

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the subject says, linux swap is still n^2.

By comparison, and not for any troll reasons, FreeBSD has a log_{2}{N} swap
algorithm. It's time the kernel team had a look
at the data structure used for their backing store.

Links to mirrors

[TheEviscerator]

The kernel.org main ftp site is being hammered, but if you follow the link here, you'll be taken to a pretty exhaustive list of mirrors.

http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/

Re:Links to mirrors

[hpa]

kernel.org is down for the count; unfortunately, we can't get it restarted until at the earliest some time tomorrow (there are some issues that hadn't been resolved yet after the move, and remote management when the kernel deadlocks fall into that category...)

You can access the mirror list at:

http://master.kernel.org/mirrors/nindex.html

Re:Links to mirrors

[hpa]

Bother... make that

http://master.kernel.org/mirrors/nindex.shtml

Re:cool,though my servers need to run this weekend

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if there's any way to upgrade KDE 2.1->2.2.1 easily without the chance of getting the whole system trashed?

Re:cool,though my servers need to run this weekend

[Adramelech]

actually, its been announced. I'm runing konq from 2.2.1 right now.

Re:cool,though my servers need to run this weekend

[Anonymous Coward]

so I won't be able to upgrade any of our servers until mid-week at the earliest. :(



Who fucking cares?

ROFL

[marm]

Damn you trolls are getting better. Yes, it seems you can indeed fool Slashdot by stringing together a bunch of complicated sounding words with some plausible-sounding but completely false arguments.

Nice one :)

Re:ROFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it works for Star Trek, doesn't it?

Re:ROFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if we just modify a phaser and vent some plasma from the warp core, then we can fix our computers and make linux more efficient, and finally kill off "Gates of Borg". A few extras will have to give up their lives first though. Sound like a plan?

Re:ROFL

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Damn you trolls are getting better.

Good to see this apocryphal post get mod'd to OT.

Thanks!

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[mackman]

Having asked this question myself, it turns out that Linus is ready to merge ext3 any time right now, but in order to do so he needs to merge a bunch of other VFS changes from Alan's kernel. Since this release seems to have focused on merging a lot of Alan's other changes, perhaps Linus will get to the VFS merge in 2.4.11. That's just speculation.

Leland Dallas Multipath...

[mackman]

Can somebody fill me in what the new md/multipath driver does? Other than blow up evil aliens and save all life, of course.

Re:Leland Dallas Multipath...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty similar to Leland Fort Worth multipath. In fact some would say the two are almost indistinguishable.

Re:Leland Dallas Multipath...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well shit, you just came up with the name to my first born son.

I'd put my money on tomorrow...

[Ami Ganguli]

Well, I wouldn't be a lot of money, but I think if the VM on 2.4.10 looks good then 2.5 will start very soon. Linus has been hinting at it for ages, but I don't think he wants to pass 2.4.x on to Alan until it's up to standard.

On the positive site, it looks like there's a ton of stuff ready to go into 2.5. This will be the first development kernel where the big boys (especially IBM, but also Compaq and SGI) have been involved from the beginning. They all started on projects during 2.3 that never made it into 2.4, but are now pretty much ready. The quiet time between 2.4.0 and 2.5.0 has also given a lot of other patches time to mature. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Re:I'd put my money on tomorrow...

[izzertaq]

"quiet time between 2.4.0 and 2.5.0?" Linux 2.4 has hardly been a "stable" kernel, in the sense that 2.2 and 2.0 were ...

Re:Congrats, awesome troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, it looks like that dumb ass maybe takes his idiocy personally. :) Step 1 is admiting you have a problem.

So what's the downside?

[Julian Morrison]

You say "This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run." - does that mean that syscalls can pile up and logjam behind some higher-priority process? Does it slow up the kernel?

Basically, why is this not the default behavior?

Re:So what's the downside?

[slamb]

As I understand it, it's not the standard behavior because to take advantage of it, you need to have much finer-grained locking in the kernel. But...they added that anyway in 2.4, for SMP. This guy just took the existing locks and made them work for a new purpose.

Re:So what's the downside?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a "from the sidelines, subjective, IANAKH, LKML lurker" opinion. I've followed this one with interest.

This preemption code that's being discussed was originally worked on by Nigel Gamble but is now maintained by Robert Love.

I'd say it's not being included yet because:
- It's not considered SMP safe. However people have reported various levels of success running it on SMP so it's probably not a major job.
- It hasn't received a lot of attention until recently, when RML revived the code and posted a message to LKML. That was (from tech9 hp) Aug 26, 2001. Preemption has been discussed a fair bit before on LKML, with notable contributors being MontaVista (?who Nigel works for?) and Andrew Morton.
- The kernel hackers have been busy with other things ;) like replacing the VM and stuff. (Andrea's ~3000 LOC patch in pre11 iirc) My word.

Cheers
AndyM

Re:So what's the downside?

[MadAndy]

Basically, why is this not the default behavior?

Primarily because it's so new. Everybody has to go over the consequences of it, given that it uses the SMP code in a way slightly different to how it was intended. It may in fact be rock solid, it's just that nobody knows yet, and doesn't care to 'test' it on their production boxes :-).

But if you're just tinkering on a linux box at home then go for it - and report any problems. I feel a download coming on...

Re:So what's the downside?

[Shanep]

Basically, why is this not the default behavior?

My clean 2.4.10 kernel patched with this does not compile, giving me undefined reference in kernel.o, do_signal and syscall_trace functions.

Maybe I missed some config setting?

Re:So what's the downside?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you need
patch-rml-2.4.10-preempt-ptrace-and-jobs-fix-2
in addition to
patch-rml-2.4.10-preempt-kernel-1

YMMV, but it worked fine here.

Thanks to the developers for this very nice patch!

Re:So what's the downside?

[Shanep]

in addition to patch-rml-2.4.10-preempt-kernel-1

Grrr, thanks. Late night last night. ; )

Re:WTF, "O(n) NP-complete" ???

[roystgnr]

No, "O(n) NP-complete" proves that trolls don't actually have to understand the jargon, they just have to use a lot of it to get modded up by someone who understands less.

My server mirroring over http and freenet

[krogoth]

You can slashdot my server or get it on Freenet: KSK@kernel-2.4.9-2.4.10 or KSK@kernel-2.4.10.

Re:My server mirroring over http and freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran your little perl script in your signature, and your e-mail address was spit out as richard@krogoth.dyndns.org. Is that the correct address?

Thanks and have a nice day.

Re:My server mirroring over http and freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

jerk.

XFS - Soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am hoping to see XFS in the std kernel, it works
quite well so far for me.

Re:XFS - Soon?

[Ami Ganguli]

I read on Linux kernel (I'm a lurker, but not a kernel hacker) that the current XFS patch contains a lot of cruft carried over from Irix. It helps SGI to keep the code base mostly the same as Irix, but it offends the sensibilities of the Linux hackers who don't want to have an Irix compatibility layer tacked on to their nice clean kernel.

I'm not sure what the compromise will be, but I'm sure they'll work something out. I wouldn't count on anything too early in 2.5.x - it'll take time to make whatever changes are agreed upon.

Re:XFS - Soon?

[t482]

A bit big no? XFS patch is 300K or so from what I have read. Problem being that it makes the kernel almost too big to put on a floppy.

JFS and ReiserFS are much smaller. Don't know about EXT3.

linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2 is really 2.4.9!!

[quan74]

Downloaded linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2 from ftp.kernel.org, imagine my surprise when I tar'd it out it was really 2.4.9, someone make a boo-boo? the tar.gz is good though :>
props to the kernel team for the AMD761 support, works great :)

Re:linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2 is really 2.4.9!!

[nofutureuk]

if you remarked that, you probably had the 2.4.9 sources lying around...
so why didn't you get the patch ??

Re:linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2 is really 2.4.9!!

[tao]

This sounds extremely unlikely, as ftp.kernel.org has a buildrobot; if you upload a tar.gz, it'll create the tar.bz2; if you upload a tar.bz2, it'll create the tar.gz. Very neat indeed. It also creates checksum-files.

Re:linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2 is really 2.4.9!!

[highspeednerd]

in fact that is what happened to me with 2.4.9 which turned out to be 2.4.8.

Don't want to reboot my machine

[raynet]

I think it is finally time to write a new kernel that supports Linux kernels as module so I could just compile a new Linux kernel and then with modconf just unload the old one and kick in the new one. This is because usually I wait until the machine crashes before doing kernel updates. This is bad due to stability of Linux. Last time my server crashed it had 397 days of uptime (and the crash was a IDE hardware error), now the machine has 347 days and this time I hope to exceed the 400 day limit, but this forces me to use 2.2.14 kernel (until next crash).

Re:Don't want to reboot my machine

[konmaskisin]

Use an s390 machine and you can just create a new virtual hardware device to install the new kernel on leaving the other to gather uptime.

Mind you with os/400 400 days uptime isn't that much ... ;)

Re:Don't want to reboot my machine

[cos(0)]

I would think that it would be better for everyone if you scheduled a "maintenance downtime" ahead of time (maybe at night?), so that all users would be aware of it, then upgrade the kernel, instead of waiting for some crash (that might happen at the worst possible time) and keep the system down for longer than it needs to be (inconveniencing everyone else) just so that you could maintain higher uptime.
A bit self-centered, no?

Re:Don't want to reboot my machine

[Anonymous Coward]

[andreak@www] ~$ uptime
2:20pm up 459 days, 2 min, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.07

[andreak@www] ~$ uname -a
Linux www 2.2.12-20smp #1 SMP Mon Sep 27 10:34:45 EDT 1999 i686 unknown

Re:patches & RedHat

[AstynaxX]

I downloaded patches, many of them [2.4.3-2.4.9 so far] but my RedHat 7.1 box does not seem to like them [I get complaints about 'patch already applied' or something like]. Aside from downloading and recompiling a mound of source, anyone know how to get RH to swallow a 'standard' patch?

NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Dimensio]

Went through the usual procedure of make menuconfig/make dep/make modules/make modules_install/make bzImage/lilo, etc. Reboot, rebuild the NVidia drivers and install them, but X keeps crapping out.

It seemed to be something like this in the log:
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (vrefresh out of range)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (hsync out of range)

It did that for every possible display mode.

Is something broken here or have I just messed up?

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[nofutureuk]

try make clean in your nvidia source directory.

if it doesn't help, check the agpart setup in kernel and XF86Config-4
cheers

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Binary-only third party crap. No wonder Alan Cox hates them. It's not kernel's fault, but theirs'. I'll ditch my Riva TNT as soon as I can.

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Mizar]

I just built the 2.4.10 kernel, and the NVidia drivers (v. 1512) and everything worked just fine. No problems here.

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same problem and I use:

Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"

in the device section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "RIVA TNT2"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"
BoardName "Unknown"
EndSection

--Raf (rdorado(AT)pacbell(DOT)net)

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine works fine too, why don't you use nvidia 1541 drivers? released on the 19.

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fag. The kernel module is released under the GPL, and I've already submitted a few patches to it myself.

Re:NVidia driver broken under 2.4.10? :(

[Hagabard]

NVIDIA GeForce2 MX but my IgnoreEDID option is in the "Monitor" section. Worked fine with "make clean", "make install" under 2.4.10. I have AGP disabled (would freeze after running GL apps. Here's my section:

Section "Monitor"

Identifier "MyMonitor"
VendorName "NEC multisync"
ModelName "FP1350"

# be sure to replace these values with values appropriate for your
# monitor!
HorizSync 31-115
VertRefresh 55-160

Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"

# 1600x1200i @ 87.59 via xvidtune
Modeline "1600x1200" 229.50 1600 1664 1856 2144 1200 1201 1204 1222 +hsync +vsync

EndSection

AT&T UNIX SysV 4 (SVR4) contains Microsoft pro

[Anonymous Coward]

# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
# All Rights Reserved

# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
# The copyright notice above does not evidence any
# actual or intended publication of such source code.

#ident "@(#)clear:clear.mk 1.5"
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# All Rights Reserved

# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
# Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.

# Makefile for clear.sh

ROOT =
INSDIR = $(ROOT)/usr/bin
INS= install -f
CFLAGS = -O -I$(INC)
LDFLAGS = -s

all: clear

clear: clear.sh
cp clear.sh clear

install: all
$(INS) $(INSDIR) -m 0555 -u bin -g bin clear

clean:

clobber:
rm -f clear

It's amazing who they'll put into the changelog...

[moniker_21]

these days.

"Keith Owens: get rid of drivers/scsi/53c700-mem.c file"

Oh yea?! Well I deleted /tmp/jar_cache42039.tmp, where's my acknowledgment?? I'm sure this guy had very good reasons for recommending the removal of this file, but it still struck me as pretty funny.

There may be no downside

[marm]

Basically, why is this not the default behavior?

Well, the traditional view on this is that reducing latency by whatever means tends to lower overall data throughput, which is just what you don't want for a server OS, which is still what accounts for most Linux installations.

However, it may be that the traditional view is wrong. It may well be that the increased usage efficiency that comes with kernel pre-emption may actually increase throughput - high-priority disk I/O for instance now never has to sit waiting for the CPU to complete a syscall. There were some interesting results posted linux-kernel regarding this, see here.

The linux scheduler ensures that no process is ever completely starved of CPU time, so no huge backlog of syscalls ever builds up.

The other reason that it's not the default behaviour is that it's an interesting and new approach to how to achieve a pre-emptible kernel. All other pre-emptible kernels have been designed as such from the ground up - Linux certainly hasn't. There are a couple of white papers, here and here from MontaVista (who kickstarted the pre-emptible kernel project) about the approach taken. They also detail a few other approaches to making Linux more responsive for real-time and interactive tasks.

Re:There may be no downside

[farrellj]

Thinking about it...on systems in the past, they ran fairly slowly, and to get a real-time pre-emptible systems ment making the system very small, so that each event didn't hog (relatively) system resources too long. But today's systems that run at upwards to 2 gigahertz, the process switching time even for large processes is so fast, that resources can be quickly reallocated and thus are not spent waiting. TANJ, it's been too long since I studied OS kernels and read Tannenbaum's book! I bet Minix's message passing system would run real nice on today's hardware!

ttyl
Farrell

Re:There may be no downside

[frleong]

Well, why isn't this configurable, requiring people to patch it? Windows NT/2000 has a similar setting (Optimize Performance for Foreground/Background) for quite a long time. It's time for the Linux kernel to add such a capability to gain more desktop accetance.

Re:There may be no downside

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that windows setting is similar to running X reniced with a negative number, so that GUI tasks pre-empt non-GUI ones.

It even tells you to do this for desktop machines in the X manual.

I have found that negative-renicing X provides a sufficent boost to X to make it the GUI as snappy as a windows box.

Re:Linux 2.4 is an .... FUD succedes

[kurt555gs]

Oh my GOD ...... after all this time i find out im ruined ..... now i will have to go out and buy all the properlicensed WIN2K things to replace the evil, slow, pre-mature, hack of linux i have on my machines...... my poor mail server has been up for 186 days and now ill have to switch to Win2K because i didnt realize lixux wasnt any good .......... wait .. the old mail server is running RH 6.0 ... hmmmm ok ill just have to replace linux on my machine then

does M$ pay these guys to troll /. ?????

Why is Ext3 still a patch?

[konmaskisin]

It works fine on several architectures why isn't it in the default kernel?

Re:Why is Ext3 still a patch?

[tao]

Pretty simple: because the author hasn't submitted it to Linus yet; he wants it to be as close to perfect as possible first. A honourable decision, if you ask me.

Re:Why is Ext3 still a patch?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely that he wants his employer (Red Hat) to have it before the rest of the world.

Re:Why is Ext3 still a patch?

[tao]

(Dunno why I bother to reply to this, but...) Obviously, if he wanted his employer to have it before the rest of the world, he wouldn't be able to release it under the GPL, which he has. Any user or distributionmaker who wants ext3 in their system can simply download it from ftp.kernel.org and patch it into their kernel... Can we PLEASE stay on the sane side now?!

My, how quick we are to assume

[barzok]

We do not ever use Windows Update, everything is installed manually after verifying that we really do need it. Sometimes, we'll get a patch for a piece of software we don't use. Why install it if it's not needed?

We attempt eliminate every possible chance for error by testing before putting a patch onto our live servers. We like our service level agreement statistics to be in the black, and that means getting it right on the first try. 2 reboots on a Tuesday afternoon, one for "well, let's try the new version" and the second for "oops, didn't work" do not go over well with a client who only grudgingly accepts 4 hours of downtime early on Sunday mornings for scheduled system maintenance.

Great!

[mindstrm]

So... Why don't you just go ahead and take charge of fixing these 'obvious' problems.

Oh. Reiserfs. It's got some things that are not good... so? Who said you had to use it?

And to boot.. what's preventing you from using 2.2.x?

You know I'm an idiot but..

[theneo]

I never got a kernel update to work.

I compiled, put the stuff in its place, but the new kernel never boots.

*Cries*

Re:You know I'm an idiot but..

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to tell the bootloader. See the docs for lilo . Have a look at your /etc/lilo.conf and then run lilo . Check out the LILO-HOWTO.

Re:You know I'm an idiot but..

[JJC]

You need to use lilo or another bootmanager (probably best to use whichever your distro uses) to actually boot the kernel. I'd suggest you look at your distro docs.

UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[TheFlu]

6:30pm up 365 days, 9:14, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Today marks my one year anniversary of uptime on not one but TWO Linux machines herer. The only reason I powered them down a year ago was to move them into rack mount cases. There's hardly any load on either box, since ones a router and the other a name server, but still...

Re:UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[RobNich]

Damnit, my uptime would be great if it weren't for stupid power problems--a racoon got into the transformer cage the other night and fried, killing power to the building. Our UPS had a fuse blown inside of it, so the extra batteries were disconnected. Instead of 75 minutes of battery uptime, we had 18. Our AS/400, which had close to 700 days (since the last hardware upgrade), lost its uptime, and so did my Linux box. The reboot last week was a KVM switch problem, and the one before that was a kernel upgrade (2.4.4 to 2.4.8). The box is rock solid, to bad I can't prove it.

Re:UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[(H)elix1]

You know, this kind of thing just kills me. I suspect you did it right, so this is not aimed at you personally, but I work with a bunch of folks who would not fix security holes or other GOOD patches because it might case them to reboot - having to run over to my cube to telnet into their box because the x server horked up again, etc.

Granted, its nice to reboot because you need to rather than the box just doing it on its own, but come on (you know who you are) its time to try the 2.4x kernal like the rest of us. I, for one, will not let my uptime get in the way of adding another CPU!

Re:UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[kimihia]

After installing 2.4.9 at a maximum my uptime would be about a month, except for an unfortunate hardware failure.

18:49:30 up 17 days, 1:31, 3 users, load average: 2.00, 2.02, 2.00

What kernel was the most recent a year ago? Would that be one of the ptraceable 2.2 series?

Looks real good to me!!

[ArtieChoked]

Just downloaded it and built it. I just came off of a 2.4.5 kernel ... was used to an instant free memory drain -- 512Mb used to go to about 40Mb free in no time with X up. WOOHOO ... now showing 328Mb free with full KDE 2.1, xawtv, mozilla, and a few other thingies running - 60 processes in all. I think I'm gonna like this!!

Re:WTF, "O(n) NP-complete" ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, that means it's NP, but with an O(n) approximation alogirthm. Still poor when R-B, splay and AVL trees are available for the backing store.

and in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

night follows day.

Seriously, this ain't newsworthy!

Re:patches & RedHat

[Sapien__]

RedHat add their own patches to the kernel, so if you want the standard Linus patches to work you'll have to download a fresh kernel first.

"Some of my best friends use Linux"

[konmaskisin]

... and I did too. The 2.2.* kernels were awesome. Now however Linux - despite it's promise - is a failure. </gist>

That was some tricky trolling there ... I was almost lulled by your compliments into believing your FUD. Only thing is 2.4.* shows a vast overall improvement in performance for me ... har har ...

Anyway don't panic or anything, nothing has changed, XP will come pre-installed on 99.9999% of computers and manufacturers will continue to cherish and suck up to Microsoft for decades to come. Linus' remark about "world domination" for Linux is a **joke** ... do you get it? Mind you that was way back in the days when irony ruled so ...

Anyway it sounds like you need to stick with what you know, but be polite enough not to spread FUD under the age old guise of pitting one's competitors against one another. The [(solaris vs. freebsd vs. linux)] vs. XP is a dubious analysis at best since loads of linux boxen were once running NT.

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[thopo]

I think the big issue is that there was an oops associated with autofs/nfs usage, and that this oops was fixed just a week or two ago.

By that logic there shouldn't be an oopsable piece of code in the current kernel, but i know there are still some oopses left. Like a very old ISDN MPPP oops i've reported over and over and noone fixed it yet (i would if i could).

I like ext3 a lot, especially since you can upgrade from ext2 to ext3 without any data loss. Linus show ext3 to the masses!

Re: your sig

[prizog]

Shooting a gun inside an airplane is moronic. Besides, except for the 4th plane, nobody expected the slamming into buildings bit. So, nobody would have risked her life to stop hijackers who would have been caught and caused no lasting harm anyway.

And in the case of the 4th plane, there's evidence that they did fight before the F16 took them out.

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[Anonymous Coward]

will these VFS changes break all the structs OpenAFS relies on again? please? here at CMU we just loooooooove recompiling kernels for fun

Unixware 7 uptime 825 days and counting

[Anonymous Coward]

put that in your pipe and smoke it.

High Load

[color]

The server (www.kernel.org) is so loaded y can't even get to the mirrors page.

It's been slashdotted!

Re:High Load

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Slashdot shouldn't post news about new kernels on Sundays. There are too many of us geeks at home with nothing better to do than upgrade our boxes.

Sheesh!

[0x7F]

Today I decided to write me a perl script to check for the latest kernel version and get the changelog for it. After hours of trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong, I took a break to read slashdot, and discover that it was because kernel.org was slashdotted!

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[bicatu]

BTW How do I convert an ext2 to an ext3 ?
I've tried to use tune2fs but I am not quite sure it did it ok...

moving the box without shutting it down

[avij]

I assume you don't have one of those computers with two (or more) redundant power supplies in it, as in some Dell Poweredge servers. I had to move our file server from one room to another, but didn't want to shut it down just for that. So, I got a long power cord and attached it to the 2nd power supply and disconnected the first. Then I moved the computer towards the other room and switched it to use the other power supply and disconnected the now-unneeded power cord. I repeated this procedure a few times and finally the server was happily churning in its new place, all without rebooting. Using this method for moving the computer was absolutely unnecessary, as there was nobody at work at that time (except for me), but at least I managed to keep the high uptimes :)

Unfortunately nearly the whole city lost its electricity for a few hours just a few days after I had moved the computer. Damn lightning strikes.. And as Murphy's law dictates, our UPS was just having its battery replaced so it didn't help in this case. Bummer.

Re:moving the box without shutting it down

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to sound off like a big fat n00b, but how might i go about setting up a dual redundant power supply configuration?

Re:moving the box without shutting it down

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd better use hardware that is originally designed for such applications. Quite a lot of recent servers have an optional extra power supply (Dell, Compaq etc), so you'd better just buy a new system if you need that functionality. Adding a 2nd power supply to a regular PC might be difficult, I'd assume it requires some kind of a "back-plane" for those power supplies.

How swappable kernels ?

[Goody]

When is someone going to make a patch for the kernel so that you can hot swap kernels, thus preserving your glorious uptime ? Or has someone done this already ?

Is this possible ?

Re:How swappable kernels ?

[daveman_1]

No, this is not possible. Far too difficult of a project.

Re:How swappable kernels ?

[dsb3]

two kernel monte:

http://www.scyld.com/products/beowulf/software/m on te.html

(hyperlink didn't work/wouldn't preview - you can cut/paste yourself)

You know..

[mindstrm]

Why? The only reason you don't want to down the machine for a kernel upgrade is ego? To show a big uptime?

In the *real* world, it's okay to reboot a server as long as you can schedule it to an appropriate time.

"Erisian principal"...see below for more info.

[farrellj]

Goto fnord.org, and click on the funny symbol with an apple and a pentagon on it. You will be enlightened.

ttyl
Farrell

fnord

Re:"Erisian principal"...see below for more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Goto fnord.org, and click on the funny symbol with an apple and a pentagon on it. You will be enlightened.

fnord

Re:Afganistan

[Anonymous Coward]

Every Muslim pig should Look at THIS PICTURE and get ready to piss in his pants along with filthy Mohammed (piss be upon him) and his dirty QUEERAN, which tells that they will have 72 houris and 28 gay boys for sex in heaven. Funny the media doesn't ever mention the GAY part of the QUEERAN.

two kernel monte by scyld

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs to be redone and integrated but it would be so cool. It was part of their big linux project and was for a time a independant program.

Re:two kernel monte by scyld

[daveman_1]

This is not the same as what the original poster has asked for, as it is not going to preserve long system uptimes. It basically reboots to the image that is in memory. This will flush all processes and their states. To truly swap kernels without any perceivable downtime and no loss of process data is a VERY difficult thing. Nonetheless I do remember a while back this was discussed and someone started a sourceforge project to this end. But I would say this is a long way off. ;0)

Re:I refuse to download a official kernel until ..

[Reid]

Have you read the using ext3 page? If you think you did things okay, look at the output of the mount command; it should report the filesystem types as ext3.

Did they fix the "Probable hardware bug...

[Kymermosst]

Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: clock timer configuration lost - probably a VIA686a motherboard.
Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: restoring chip configuration

I have an ALi Alladin V chipset, not a VIA686a.

I remember seeing on Linux-kernel that the algorithm used to detect this may be incorrect, and in any case, the printk is uneccessary. Or, it could be a one-line message instead of two, so that the syslogd can say "last message repeated x times" instead.

'Course, I could remove the printk myself, but I think the issue at hand should be taken care of by the kernel developers.

First Impressions 2.4.10 from 2.4.8

[hackus]

My System:

Redhat 7.1
X 4.0.2

Hardware IBM ThinkPAD A21p PIII 850/512MB

1) Graphics performance for my M3 ATI processor in my IBM Thinkpad has quite frankly increased a great deal. This is way obvious do to the rapid spinning of my OpenGL plugin for XMMS.

MESA demo's show a 23% speed improvement. Especially tunnels mesa demo frame rate.

VWARE shows a drastic improvement in sound processing ability on my thinkPAD when I use 2.4.10. I am not sure why, 2.4.8 was a good improvement but 2.4.10 is even better.

(Gotta have my ArtBell...)

2) Virtual memory now shrinks its pool considerably when free memory is used up and you start to quit processes.

I loaded Oracle 8.1.7, VMWARE 2.0, Forte' , Bugseeker, and my website up, and MySQL. I was short 170 Megabytes of memory and the virtual swap space handled it very well.

Wasn't slow at all, at least too me. I then logged out and quit all my apps after running some non trivial tests.

I did notice my SWAP shrunk from 170 to 30MB when I logged out and shut everything out.

This is very good, I haven't tested whether or not the kernel will kill a process that takes all memory and is obnoxious about memory, without killing the machine. I would like this feature as normally Linux will just die.3) Startup time was faster by 5 seconds with no changes. I am not sure why, probably do to the memory management fixes.

My use of VMWARE suggests some rather dedicated speed improvments to the basic software.

If you have 2.4.8, you have little reason and everything to gain by upgrading to 2.4.10.

Speed, more effective VM, and graphics are improved noticably.

I highly recommend you upgrade.

-hack

On 2.4.10 now..

[LinuxHam]

After refreshing and reading the postings from the first few minutes, I realized that the servers were going to be slashdotted and I needed to get in there quickly! I got the patch, compiled it, and make modules_install failed with unresolved symbols in all of the ACPI power management stuff. Took it all out and recompiled again, and I'm up in it now.

I'm on a ThinkPad 570, p2 566 128MB, RH71, 2.4.10, X 4.0.3, ximian Red Carpet - fully updated. On first boot, it hung on freeing unused kernel memory. Hard reboot and it booted all the way to X. It seemed much slower. Much much slower. Now that its up in X, its quicker. It sure is weird seeing the swap going unused in the cpu/mem/swap monitor as well as in vmstat and top. The cpu monitor shows much more activity.. not a higher load mind you, its just a lot jumpier than it was under 2.4.9. Not a very scientific analysis I know, but that's all I can give you :)

Mirrors?

[Sp00nMan]

Please post the mirrors again.. I forgot what the "usual" places were 'cept for ftp.kernel.org. Thx!

Re:Mirrors?

[hpa]

You should always be able to get to a mirror via ftp..kernel.org, e.g. ftp.us.kernel.org.

mmmm OBSD..welcome to The Fold ;^)

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be anon, but I'm happy to see more of us, wait till ya recomplile yer kernel, it's a breeze. Good luck and enjoy the bsd'ism's, they won't take long to get over.

Oh I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

>If you want to learn Unix, I suggest you go with
>Solaris or FreeBSD instead, or to just forget
>it and use Windows XP.

I quite Agree. In my C.S. degree, there were plenty of times that we had to learn about how NOT to do things. I think that Windows XP is a great example of what not to do. I also, think these trolls need to stay with bill

is kernel.org dead?

[dfelznic]

Hello,
Is kernel.org dead? I can't even get a connection to web, ftp or rsync. Not even a too many users message...

Re:is kernel.org dead?

[CormacJ]

I think it was moving physical location/ip address etc

If it ain't broke....

[sg_oneill]

...don't fix it.

Seriously, unless it's a performance thing, sounds like your machine is doing sweet:). Leave her alone, and let that big red fire engine clock the 400h....... Then inform management(Just incase they are getting a horn over XP *ugh*)

Re:If it ain't broke....

[Anonymous Coward]

As other posters have pointed out, a 400 day uptime indicates a pretty old kernel. (One that may have security issues, more precicely). I suppose if the machine is firewalled appropriately, then this might not be a problem. Just something to keep in mind :)

wow mem usage rox

[Ankou]

I know about the problems with the previous kernels 2.4.* - 2.4.8, but resources got better in 2.4.9 and now with an uptime of so far 4+ hours i am seeing increadible performance with the new 2.4.10. VM rules in this rewrite. Keep up the supurb work guys ...

2.4 is stabilizing as proportion of the whole

[hta]

According to the Kernel stats of the Linux Counter, the proportion of 2.4 kernels has actually gone slightly DOWN recently - it was briefly above 50%, but is now back to 47.7%.
Two possible reasons:

• More 2.2 persons have registered
  
• The 2.4 persons have forgotten to use "machine-update -c", and have slipped out of the list after not updating for 60 days.
  

The first 4 2.4.10 persons are in there already - but all of them run prereleases.

Go register!

Re:+5, Infromative

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Blinton!
You are really rocking the counter today!

May taco's mom be w/ you

2.4.10 and the defeat of uptime...stupid xfs

[quelrods]

well some of us get to wait a few more days to wreck the uptime waiting for sgi to release the xfs patch...ah the wait!

Re:2.4.10 and the defeat of uptime...stupid xfs

[iceburn]

Actually, I'm compiling with the 2.4.10-pre13 patch, just to see if it works, and it compiled just fine. Now I just hope it boots ok...

Mirror site

[Aragorn379]

http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ linux-2.4.10.tar.bz2

Found through google. Enjoy.

Re:Mirror site

[quelrods]

got the kernel at abt 150kb/s from here: http://www.jp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/lin ux-2.4.10.tar.bz2

another mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mango.ldg.net/~joerger/linux-2.4.10.tar.gz

if anyone wants it

What do you do about XFree86?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernels 2.4.8 and up have support for DRI which is compatible with XFree86 4.1 only. RedHat 7.1 ships with XFree86 4.0; I have bee trying to upgrade to XFree86 4.1, but it is not trivial.

What do you guys do about it? Did you upgrade XFree86 too? Is there any patch on Linux-2.4.10 to support XFree86-4.0? Any ideas?

Re: Why isn't this configurable

[Denny]

Because it needs to be tested first, as someone already mentioned quite clearly further up in this thread.

If you want to run untested code, install the patch (or Windows XP *wink*). If you don't want to, then a base install of Linux should be nice and stable, because stuff doesn't (usually) get in the kernel until it actually works!

Regards,
Denny

Re: What's VM?

[Denny]

Virtual Memory

Regards,
Denny

To overcommit or not ...

[Macka]

> Until Linux drops the concept of memory
> overcommit, I'm afraid that the VM is going
> to continue to suck

Whether you want to overcommit or not depends on what you're doing. Most of my experience comes from Compaq's Tru64 Unix, where you have the option of selecting either mode. But Compaq only recommend you don't use overcommit on workstations or small non-critical systems. For large database/mission critical systems overcommit is a must. You absolutely do not want your big expensive multi-terrabyte database to get a bullet in the head from the OOM manager when memory runs out. Better that processes fail to start when memory gets tight.

There is no one size fits all solution to this issue, so different memory management algoriths are needed to suit the different usage types.

At the end of the day though, no software solution is better than sizing your system usage properly, and buying enough memory to handle it. Systems perform best when they never have to swap.

Macka

And even....

[Listen Up]

And even a person by the name of Andrew Wiles? Ever hear of him? The man who single handedly solved Fermat's Last Theorem. The only man over the age of 30 to be granted the Fields Medal in Mathematics. Ever hear of him? Are you calling him a "megalomaniac" too. People who don't listen to others, people who go out on their own, people who never believe that they are wrong are not "megalomaniac". They are geniuses, they visionaries, they are people you should always look towards with awe, for these are the people who make the world and these are the people who change the world. Are you going to call Harry Truman a "megalomaniac" for basically leading this entire country as one of the last "true" presidents this country has ever seen. He also didn't take shit from anyone and never let anyone tell him he was wrong. Labeling people is a VERY dangerous thing. Later.

Re:And even....

[Anonymous Coward]

Labeling is labeling. Especially prematurely. If there is something wrong with the swapping implementation and someone has an obviously better methodology, then the correct thing to do is to either beat the "even better" one or to atleast match it. It is not to try to patch an existing one to be approaching as good. Don't get me wrong, I don't know that there even is anything really wrong, but if the assertions made by the poster about the often used data being pushed out to make room for 'use once and throw away' data (and kept that way) then it seems obvious that should be fixed. It should also be noted that _labeling_ someone a genius just because they go out on their own and go against the crowd doesn't make much sense either. There are probably a very small fraction of geniuses in the mix with all of the nuts that go against the grain. I don't know about Rik, but you can't blindly believe someone just because what they tell you is different from what someone elses ideas may be.

VMWare?

[GeekBoy]

Hi, how do I get vmware to compile and run on any linux kernel greater than 2.4.6? It always fails to compile the kernel modules.

Thanks.

Re:VMWare?

[Mr.Phil]

you need to download the beta from VMWare... it worked fine on my 2.4.9 kernel

Re:VMWare?

[Legion303]

The beta is also a whole lot faster, even running in debug mode!

But if you (the author of the parent article) don't want to run a beta, there is a patch that fixes the vmmon compile problem on newer kernels. Unfortunately I don't remember where I found it, but do some searches in Google and you should hit it.

-Legion

Won't compile

[EllisDees]

Hmm. Downloaded the kernel and attempted to compile on my k6-2 with gcc 3.01. Get the following message when trying to compile signal.c:

gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/local/src/linux/include -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=k6 -DEXPORT_SYMTAB -c signal.c
signal.c: In function `kill_proc':
signal.c:714: Unrecognizable insn:
(insn 124 116 117 (parallel[
(set (reg/f:SI 3 ebx [47])
(const_int 0 [0x0]))
(clobber (reg:CC 17 flags))
] ) -1 (insn_list:REG_DEP_ANTI 116 (nil))
(expr_list:REG_UNUSED (reg:CC 17 flags)
(nil)))
signal.c:714: Internal compiler error in insn_default_length, at insn-attrtab.c:223
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/bugs.html for instructions.
make[2]: *** [signal.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/linux/kernel'
make[1]: *** [first_rule] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/linux/kernel'
make: *** [_dir_kernel] Error 2

Whee! Looks like I get to submit a bug report.

Re:Won't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

Whee! Looks like I get to submit a bug report.

Whee! Looks like you might read the bugs mailing list now and again. Old one.

Re:Won't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you do not get to send a bug report.
GCC 3.01 is unsupported. And only developers
or fools use it to compile the kernel.

Re:Won't compile

[Legion303]

I don't know why, but no one seems to like gcc 3.xx, judging from what I read in INSTALL files. The kernel folks recommend 2.95.3, which worked great for me with kernel 2.4.10.

-Legion

Re:Won't compile

[EllisDees]

Turns out it was a pretty easy fix, anyway. All I had to do was change my arch from K6-2 to i586.

A kernel developer

[fungai]

A kernel developer gets C#ursed and goes into a slumber for 100 years. What's the first thing he posts to the kernel ML when he wakes up?

"Has the VM been fixed yet?"

Linux is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes today its official, Linux has died. The operating system for the collpse of the us economy and license issues. :)

soundrivers fail to link? :-(

[bagder]

I just patched my 2.4.8 kernel two steps to 2.4.10 and look what I got! :-O

ld -m elf_i386 -r -o sounddrivers.o soundcore.o es1370.o es1371.o ac97_codec.o
es1371.o: In function `gameport_register_port':
es1371.o(.text+0x5ea0): multiple definition of `gameport_register_port'
es1370.o(.text+0x5cd8): first defined here
es1371.o: In function `gameport_unregister_port':
es1371.o(.text+0x5ea4): multiple definition of `gameport_unregister_port'
es1370.o(.text+0x5cdc): first defined here
make[3]: *** [sounddrivers.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [first_rule] Error 2
make[1]: *** [_subdir_sound] Error 2
make: *** [_dir_drivers] Error 2

Re:soundrivers fail to link? :-(

[bagder]

Hm, this worked out if I removed the 1370 driver when having the 1371 enabled... Odd.

Real men don't make bzImage...

[Bklyn]

they

fakeroot kernel-package --revision custom.1.0 kernel-image modules-image

and dpkg -i the results.

Stuff I need from Linux (VM/Scheduling/IO)

[t482]

1) stable VM (which I guess is almost there...)

2) Better scheduling (for lots of processes)
look at the schedule patch from http://lse.sourceforge.net/scheduling/
or HPs nice patch
http://resourcemanagement.unixsolutions.hp.com/W aR M/prm_linux/index.html

3) bounce-buffer elimination for IO devices
For a lot of disk IO, you want to look at the progress of the bounce-buffer elimination for IO devices, like my Fibre Channel adapter.
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/axb oe /patches/

Need more!?

[TooTechy]

So, the new kernel is out. Great. The last kernel failed to compile on the Alpha. (OK I know 2.2.19 is the last kernel on alphalinux.org)

I have followed (not lead) Linux for the last 10 years with interest,used it extensively, absolutely love it and what it has done for the reliability and enjoyment of personal and now professional computing.

Unfortunately we can all foresee (if not accept) the end of our beloved Linux as the kernel of choice. Even CmdrTaco mentioned it this morning. We have to reboot. Hot swappable kernel, as was mentioned in a previous post is a possibility but I believe this is just bolting on functionality to a now outdated kernel proposition. Linus and the community did a fantastic job of emulating a UNIX kernel. Just what we wanted. We now want more. Linux is not the answer to our future. GNU and the tools around it maybe but not the kernel and I think Linus will be amongst those to accept this.

Maybe HURD is the answer for reliability, extensibility, versatility, Hot Swapability etc. in the future. I will love to follow this trend when it lifts.

To the HURD folk. I watch and wait and long to follow. Thanks.

I like it for everything but quake3

[cs668]

I just tried 2.4.10 with the preemption patches for the first time and it is great. KDE runs much better everything feels more responsive -- except quake3.

I tried playing some urban terror this morining and my framerate is cut in half and it feels very jumpy.

Re:I like it for everything but quake3

[Anonymous Coward]

Make it a realtime process then. /bin/nice --19 /usr/local/quake3/quake3.

Re:NFS readdir() NOT broken. Irix broken.

[RangerSpeedBumpp]

Oops, I need to revise my accusation. The NFS faq tells me that when Irix is the NFS server, it (the Irix system) doesn't handle 32-byte file handles correctly.

Apparently this is SGI's problem, which has been fixed in Irix 6.5.13

Sorry to accuse Linux of being buggy. I'll say three Hail Linus'es and be forgiven for my sins.

ALSA currently broken WRT latency

[Astastrafal]

It's ALSA's fault: read this message by Robert Love, the preemtible-kernel-patch's author. The guy who reported this problem later switched to OSS/Free and the latency problems were gone.

Big improvement over 2.4.9

[poing]

I had big problems with 2.4.9, despite 512 megs of RAM it was swapping needlessly when using KDE which slowed the box to a crawl sometimes (screen redraws taking seconds, CD writes messed up). Reiserfs also seemed slower than it should have been (e.g. listing a directory with hundreds of symlinks in Konqueror) - both of these things seem completely fixed in 2.4.10, box is running perfectly now. A very worthwhile upgrade

Sorry man

[Anonymous Coward]

Take out the .4 from the first 2 sentences and I stand by them.

Taking out the .4 from your second sentence makes it:

2.5 already exists, when it becomes suitably non-crashy, they wil release it as 2.6.

This is false. 2.5.0 does not exist. And that's what the original poster refered to. You are indeed very confused. No offense! :)

Re:Sorry man

[tekniklr]

This is false. 2.5.0 does not exist. And that's what the original poster refered to. You are indeed very confused. No offense! :)

2.5 is the devel kernel for 2.6, the same way 2.3 was the devel kernel for 2.4. I think development on 2.5 started soon after the 2.4 kernel was released.

Re: What's VM?

[seann]

thank you very much.
:)

I was thinking Virtual Machine, but that did not make sense.

FreeBSD envy?

[jacrawf]

Why must you look enviously upon FreeBSD? It's free software too. Just burn yourself a CD and go to town. :-)

Yes, I know this isn't what you meant. I just wanted to take the opportunity to be mildly facetious. It's the ass in me.