Kernel 2.4.12 Released

Whoops. A nasty bug affecting symlinks made it into 2.4.11, and Linus has ditched that "sorry excuse for a kernel" in favor of the new and improved 2.4.12. :) See the (short) changelog or list of mirrors, as usual.

Comments

Re:Stable?

[MartinG]

It isn't a bug with all symlinks. It occurs (if I understand it correctly) if you create a file via a dangling symlink, which is really not a good thing to do anyway. (but Suse's YAST does this)

Re:watch out.

[psavo]

Patch is here:

--- linux/drivers/parport/ieee1284_ops.c.orig Thu Oct 11 09:40:39 2001
+++ linux/drivers/parport/ieee1284_ops.c Thu Oct 11 09:40:42 2001
@@ -362,7 +362,7 @@
} else {
DPRINTK (KERN_DEBUG "%s: ECP direction: failed to reverse\n",
port->name);
- port->ieee1284.phase = IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN;
+ port->ieee1284.phase = IEEE1284_PH_ECP_DIR_UNKNOWN;
}

return retval;
@@ -394,7 +394,7 @@
DPRINTK (KERN_DEBUG
"%s: ECP direction: failed to switch forward\n",
port->name);
- port->ieee1284.phase = IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN;
+ port->ieee1284.phase = IEEE1284_PH_ECP_DIR_UNKNOWN;
}

Re:Definition of a stable kernel

[G27 Radio]

Anytime changes are made to a kernel (or any other code for that matter) there is always the potential for new errors to be introduced. If you want a truly stable kernel then you need to wait until it's been around long enough to be proven to be stable.

The same goes for service packs for Windows. None of the Windows shops that I used to work for would ever install service packs until they had been available long enough to know the new errors they would introduce. In fact many of those companies had policies that declared you would be fired for installing any new service packs until IT had determined that they wouldn't break usability.

If you install software on a production system that was just released yesterday, you're just asking for trouble. This applies to ALL software, not just kernels.