Slashdot Mirror
Linux 2.4.16 Released
tekniklr writes: "They just released Kernel 2.4.16. Download it
here, and you can read the changelog here. This hopefully fixes the error that 2.4.15 had of corrupting filesystems on unmount." Update: 11/26 14:14 GMT by T : p.s. Don't forget to look in the mirrors.
Another Linux release...
Has this one been tested this time?
Prize to the first person to find the data corruption bug in this one. How about a sweepstake on how long it takes?
I'll take 2 hours.
Well unless this will allow me to recover my 24 gigs of trashed data I will not use a new kernel for the forseable future. Whoever caused this problem should be strung up by their thumbs to never code again.
Linux sucks.
I love linux! I can't wait to download it! yeah! linux rules!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Current bandwidth utilization 96.75 Mbit/s
.tar.gz from the slashdot homepage was not a good idea, timothy.
Out of 100mbps..
Linking directly to the
You should have pointed to the mirrors, instead:
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
I wonder howlong it will be untill another kernakl is releced???
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
for those who are brave enough to immediately try out fresh kernels that may break one's system so I don't have to - and for those responsible for putting the fix out so quickly.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
everywhere i look, i find rampant faggotry homosexuality.... AND I FUCKING LOVE IT!!!
Sorry for anyone that got hit with the bug in 2.4.15 - I was the one that messed that up. My fix for it is in 2.4.16 - its not totally fixed though. You will still be affected if you are a nigger.
I suppose these later 2.4 kernels will get a good number of downloads, due to the early version of the kernel shipped w/ Red Hat 7.2 (and the fact that they finally got ext3 into the main kernel tree). At least I'm semi-restlessly waiting for a kernel to settle on, to get that new "better" VM.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
No sense in beta testing something that's supposed to be stable with your production machines. Linux is no better than MS in that respect... you always have to wait for the service packs. Hopefully this one's different but I'm certainly not going to rush out to get it.
do niggers like uberchicken?
2^4 = 16
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
I've been using 6.2 for the LONGEST time....installed an update or two, but there's no sense in upgrading what is proven to work great, unless you NEED to.
linux blows.
because cannibalism is forbidden by their religion!
bwahaha!
er,
At least the linux kernel is fixed before I was aware of the problem ... and I am normally close on the heals of the latest kernel.
Apple on the other hand released their partition destroying software and let it run rampant for weeks.
gus
.. if only.
Sales of MacOS version 9.11 in Israel increased 1000% 1 week before 9.11.2001. Coincidence?
Remember USS Liberty (sic)
- Peace
I've been following all the kernel releses, and their bugs. I was just curious, what is the best way to tell which kernel is currently the most stable, without jumping immediately to the latest release? Obviously there is no way of knowing if it is, without it being out there for at least a couple of weeks.
I was hoping that kernel.org or somewhere would list what is currently the most stable. I know that from roughly 2.4.5 through to 2.4.11 or so suffer from some sort of swapping/memory leak, I can't remember. This is just from loosely following what has been posted to slashdot in the past few weeks.
Is there any resource tracking for this? What is the most stable of the latest kernels?
Linux is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Linux community when last month IDC confirmed that Linux accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Kreskin test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. RedHat Linuxis the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mandrake Linux leader Gael Duval states that there are 7000 users of Mandrake Linux. How many users of Corel Linux are there? Let's see. The number of Mandrake Linux versus Corel Linux posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Corel Linux users. SuSE posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Corel Linux posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SuSE. Arecent article put RedHat Linux at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 RedHat Linux users. This is consistent with the number of RedHat Linux Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Debian,abysmal sales and so on,RedHat Linux went out of business and was taken over by Corel who sell another troubled Linux. Now Corel is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is survive at all it will be among Linux hobbyist dabblers. Linux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead.
Linux is dying
Now I'll have to wait for patch-2.4.16-to-2.5.0.bz2! Maybe next week...
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Although I like to be as "leading edge" as everyone else, I've held back on migrating to the 2.4 kernel because of the sorts of things that have been happening to this release.
Although the 2.4 kernel seems to be overall a major step forward from the 2.2 kernel, there have been too many major changes with too little testing to make it a 'stable' kernel yet. It was only a couple of 'mod levels' ago that the VM was entirely rewritten to fix a performance problem that the original 2.4 VM (rewritten from 2.2) introduced. And, the 2.4 kernel (finally having been pronounced 'stable' by the kernel team) is discovered to have a major file corruption problem (now, apparently fixed in the +1 mod).
Not to disparage the kernel team (whom I think have done a wonderful job in giving us the next generation kernel), but I think I'll wait until this 'stable' kernel stabilizes a little more.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
It's time to admit that most people don't need the newest kernel, and should just run whatever their favorite distro has properly tested. Unless you enjoy pain and you have no data of consequence, chasing kernel versions is a losing proposition.
Yes folks ignore this article it is old and somehow leaked onto the front page. I just saw Linux 7.2 version in the store yesterday. We don't need to confuse people with all this Kernel talk. In case you are new to linux, linux = kernel.
We're awaiting x>y (in 2.4.x and 2.2.y).
my other sig is a 500 page novel
I looked at the 2.4.15 and 2.4.16 changelogs but I cannot understand if they fixed whatever problem happens with the disk cache. I often find myself with 2^32-1 Kb of RAM devoted to cache, which has some interesting results.... If you just ignore it goes away after a bit, so it's probably a counter somewhere which underflows. :)
But it's certainly fun, have you ever seen bubblemon turn pink? Or blood-red?
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred in September, and now we're involved in a WAR against the Islamic faith (against the holiest of Muslim clerics and scholars, the beloved Taliban leaders of the Afghanistan people) during the holy month of Ramadan (that kind of sounds like the name of a soup mix, don't you think?) and you people have the gall to be discussing file system corruption???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about your missing data files, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!
You people disgust me!
You really have grey hair on your nipples?
Ms Driver, are you English or just stupid?
For those interested, the preemptable patch against 2.4.16-pre1 also applies cleanly to 2.4.16 final.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
2^4 = 16
And this one is an even number, they are supposed to be stable.
2.2.x --> stable
2.3.x-> development
2.4.odd --> seems to heve unexpected bugs.
2.4.even --> might be stable. who knows?
2.5.0 --> unstable! it had to be. now everyone who said that 2.5.0 would be the last 2.odd stable one will be proven wrong.
Didn't this have to to do with the odd and even numbers of the start trek movies 8-). Or don't you think this is funny after downloading 2.15 just a few hours ago and syncing/fscking like hell now?
Seems that there's always a bug in every new kernel release lately and it either is so major that it warrants switching to a previous kernel lest I suffer catastrophic effects or its minor but it's still something that affects me (such as ntfs or emu10k support).
I somehow missed the 2.4.15 announcement so fortunately I wasn't hit by any problems (I also missed the 2.4.13 release, dunno how), but even though I normally pop in the newest kernel upon release I'm pondering waiting this one out.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Most people should wait a day or so to grab the latest kernel. As I'm finding (most of the US mirrors at least), 2.4.16 hasn't been mirrored to many of the mirrors yet :-)
I downloaded the 2.4.15 kernel, but was too lazy to compile it. I think that this is the first time where laziness actually paid off.
until the first major bug is found and 2.4.17 is out
-- just a geek - trying to change the world
Is 2.4.16 going to trigger the release of 2.5.1 ? =P
Which Apple partition destroying software would that be? I must have missed that one. I am only aware of two.
The iTunes partition destroyer was pulled in something like 24 hours and replaced not long after.
Some years ago there was a problem with certain models of hard drives (Quantums I believe) that didn't handle their write caches well on a scsi reset. That went on for quite a while, but was not an issue with supported Apple hardware, it was some 3rd party drives that had tweaks to enable write behind caching. (The very large Oracle installation on Alphas that I work with had the same problem with them. Unable to resolve it with the vendors we finally scrapped all the disks and replaced them with a different vendor's drives.)
Why is it that every time this happens we /. the hell out of all the home and mirror sites. It seems to me that the first thing to do would be to get it out on as many distributed file sharing systems as posable. I'm getting this onto all the file sharing programs that I use as soon as the DL finishes. It would be nice if everyone did the same.
must every kernel release be posted here?
4000 dead on 9/11?
israel is committing genocide against the Palestinean peoples!!
> groin area so that I'm forced to go to the toilet regularly.
> Do any other readers have any suggestions for keeping me regular?
Well, you'll only get modded as offtopic, but since this is probably of interest to most slashdot readers I'll help out.
Give All Sands laxatives or the constipation constitution advice a peruse.
Try eating lots of peanuts, prunes, sweetcorn, beans and fried eggs all mushed together in a blender.
Good luck!
Now ext3 is in the 'stable'-release, could someone please point me at a document describing
1) how to migrate the filesystems to ext3
2) what flags to set in lilo.conf so that I will be able to have the root-partition in ext3
3) tell what slackware boot-scripts I should change (and how)
4) what packages I should upgrade
I could find it out myself, but I'm convinced someone did all of that already
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
They're out of "Evil Bill Gates is going to take our civil rights away and turn us all into Microserfs" stories...
The box will be going down for maintenance this afternoon, so everyone grab the update now, just in case you need it! If you can't get through, just constantly keep trying until you do!
Troll Tuesday 2001.
--The Mess
Thank you kernel developers for all your hard work.
Did this patch make it into 2.5 yet? :)
http://www.grandmasherbs.com makes a dandy herbal laxative. You can even get a free sample by just giving them your new fake email address. I'm sure they're just great if you can ignore the crazy talk about "toxic bowel" and the reccomendation that you have 2-3 bowl movements per DAY... http://www.grandmasherbs.com/remedies/ProductDetai ls.cfm?Product=40 says that it's not habit forming - so those of you concerned about getting addicted to laxatives can reast easy.
Whatever decent coders were working on the kernel a couple of years ago (when people thought open source was going to be "big") have wised up and moved on to professional closed-source projects. Now the only ones still working on Linux are /. kernel-hacker wannabes and, well, you can see the results.
Okay, isn't the convention supposed to be that even-numbered middle-dot releases (2.2, 2.4...) were supposed to be stable with the experimental stuff in odd-numbered (2.1, 2.3...)? While 2.4 in general has many nice things about it, the whole thing feels too much like a "2.3" series for my taste. This umount error is just one more example.
I note that 2.4.x broke my system badly -- it decided (as supplied with both Mandrake 8.1 and RedHat 7.2) that my ATAPI CD-RW was a DMA device, regardless of what I told the BIOS. With ide-scsi loaded over it, mounting caused kernel panic. An extremely helpful person on comp.os.linux.development.system helped me debug it with hdparm. But even building a custom 2.4.13 kernel didn't "solve" the problem (meaning that I have to leave hdparm in place and not use devfs). The kernel README is way, way out of date too. I'd expect this kind of stuff on an odd-numbered series. Perhaps even-numbered kernels need a bit more of a testing stage before release.
Wouldn't it be strange if 2.5 became the more stable one? At this rate, it could happen.
Oh, wait, 2.2.whatever was the last stable kernel!
Glad I use AIX & Solaris at this job! Kernel upgrades on 150 servers is a pain in the ass.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This is one of the reasons I havent switched over to Linux full time lately ... And if I was a novice, I would be real hesitant to switch . It seems like everybody who uses linux has to join to Kernel of the week club. And it's not like these bugs are minor annoyances, some of them have been straight out pain-in-the-ass ones.
I used to run linux steadily a couple of years ago, but ever since I saw development type bugs showing up in 'Stable' releases, I got the hell out of there...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
You are quite right - and this doesn't get said often or loudly enough.
Me too guys. Thanks.
Having just joined the x86 camp, I wondered whether running 2.4.15 within User Mode Linux would have been helpful in this case. For that matter, how large is the actual user-base for UML?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Kick back, relax, take it easy, and run some automated burn-in tests for the kernel. Releasing code doesn't need to be a strain, or rushed. Remember, you're not doing it for "them". There is no "them", except in Sci-Fi, or paranoid extremist literature. Rushing is a self-inflicted injury. If you need to do self-harm, use a rubber razor-blade or something.
Many of the major shifts in the kernel have been the Right Thing To Do(tm), but those are the times you need to relax -MORE-, not less. Anyone with a penguin as a mascot understands cool. Cool is good. Cool is exactly what that penguin needs. Cool is what YOU need. You can't run at top gear, indefinitely, and expect to be even close to 100% of your ability.
As I recall, we went through something in excess of 120 pre-releases for one early kernel, and other early kernels often went through 20-30 pre-releases. (Oh, for the days of using a-z for the pre-release number! Sometimes the kernel fell off the end of z, and I think that was part of the incentive to switch to numbers.)
When Alan Cox maintained his series, he would often get into the tens, I suspect much for the same reason. A kernel is a complex thing, and the interactions can be hideously obscure. It takes a lot of testing and validating to work even just the worst of these glitches out.
If we reach 2.5.0-pre100, with the understanding that 2.5.1 will be solid enough to do new work, without forever struggling to figure out if a bug is in new code or a cold kipper from 2.4.x, nobody is going to complain. Well, nobody with any sense. The rest we can secretly smuggle into Afghanistan, where nobody'll care what they think.
I'd rather see 2.5.1 for Thanksgiving -NEXT- year, than be unable to do any serious development work for it. A solid foundation and a late, but perfect structure, is a billion times better than a sky-scraper made from twigs and built on straw, even if the sky-scraper is built on time.
You, like anybody, are undoubtably feeling all sorts of pressures - from work, to the family, to the economy, etc. Many of those pressures are bogus. Worrying about job security won't give Transmeta a greater profit. If it itches, scratch it (just be careful what you scratch in public), and if it doesn't, forget about it. You don't need to go creating problems. We have a Government to do that for us.
None of what I've written is new to you. Little, if any, is probably new to anybody. But it's all stuff we need to hear, from time to time. And when I see someone who is no idiot repeatedly making some very basic coding errors over a relatively short time, I think it's not unreasonable to think that there's a guy who is burning themselves out in the hamster wheel of life, and that that guy might benefit from kicking back & kicking the wheel over. Sometimes we go the furthest by making the least effort.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Would remounting the filesystems read-only help? Or would that also trigger the bug?
And, if your filesystems are reiserfs, do you need to worry too, or does this only affect the traditional filesystems.
Say no to software patents.
(for the humor impaired: it's just a joke on the oddness of even kernels with odd release numbers, like 2.4.11 and 2.4.15).
Last time I heard, they were working on Linux 2.5... ;-) Good idea to stay with .2 releases if you're using redhat though.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Alright. That's it!!! I'm sick of Apple's reckless behavior -- I finally have to agree that there's only one solution for all this!
there was also a nice slashdot article which links to
;)
IBM which explains in lengthy yet interesting details
what exactly ext3 is and how to implement it:
LINK,/a>
if you read the older articles as well, there is a bit about ReiserFS and devFS.
enjoy
Like I'm going to try this kernel! I used to grab kernel sources nearly right away, but with the latest releases, I'm going to wait until any serious bugs are found.
Cute. This makes no sense. If you were in charge of 150 servers and were to download and install each kernel release, for no other reason except that it's the newest, you should be taken out back and shot.
When a kernel version comes along that has some new feature you need or a bugfix that is relevant to you, you build a new kernel and install it on a test box. You run the machine through its paces, and when you are satisfied that it is stable and does what you need it to do, _then_ you roll it out to your 150 servers.
(after typing all this I realize I'm probably responding to a troll, thus the AC)
2.4.13 has been stable for me, and i'm not going to upgrade from it unless there is a bug/security problem that affects me.(or untill i start testing the 2.5.x series)
Shouldn't they also release a 2.5.1 to fix their little screw-up?
I tried Mandrake 8.0...didn't get passed the lilo
stage after all the compile, bzImage and so on
I tried with RH6.2 and failed utterly in getting
so many apps running properly with v2.4.13
i just give up. (Suspect it's the old libraries)
Finally, tried the latest slackware CDs and presto!
Works fantastically, but i must admit it's not
as easy with it's pkgtool instead of rpm
I don't know about other distros, care to share?
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
anyone have any compile problems with 2.4.15? after the entire kernel was done compiling and about to create the bzimage it dies with some bootsector 32 bit error messages.
Blah.
You know what? As Linus posted to LKML[1], it doesn't matter if there are a million pre releases, as long as it's a pre release, most people don't download it and run it on their hardware and workloads. Not to mention the fact that Linus doesn't like to maintain kernels and turns them over to other maintainers (Alan and Marcelo) for maintenance.
Hence, bugs don't turn up until after real releases are made.
Anyone who goes out and runs a shiny new kernel on a mission critical machine which was released 20 minutes ago is just asking for trouble. These kernels simply don't get the QA they need to be determined to be stable for a number of days after they're released.
If you want a QA tested kernel, go to RedHat, Suse or any of the other Linux distributions, shell out whatever they charge for bundling it up and use their kernel. When that kernel breaks, go whine to the distribution maintainers. (I've done this personally with RedHat, and found them to be very responsive to bug reports.)
Its either that, or fix it yourself, it's that simple. What, you want something for nothing? That's not how free software works.
Whining about the problem will not fix it. Going out and fixing it yourself, will.
1. See posts about Linus and maintaining stable kernels here and here.
init 1, sync then hit the reset button. Boot with your rescue floppy, (you have one right?) and force a fsck on your partitions. Note: The >/forcefsck will NOT work with reiserfsck. You must run reiserfsck manually.
Rich
ayottesoftware.com
The 2.4 series of kernels have been out for almost a year, which hardly makes them bleeding edge. There are plenty of things that make moving 2.4 compelling.
The last 8 or so kernel releases have been released largely in response to major bugs in crucial kernel areas like virtual memory management. Upgrading to fix these problems seems like a reasonable thing to do if you are crazy enough to run linux on production boxes that do anything besides run DNS, SMTP gateways or some similar purpose.
You can call me a troll if you wish, but the writing is on the wall. Linux is in serious trouble due to feature bloat and releasing too early. I for one am glad that the idea of Linux has motivated the Unix vendors to open up a bit, and has exposed some fresh blood to the advantages of Unix.
Unfortunately, the implementation of Linux is falling apart by trying to do too much.
After typing this I realized that I'm not talking to a troll, but a know-it-all 15 year old. So I'll post under my actual moniker.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you had waited for that on 2.0 vs 2.2, you still wouldn't get to upgrade. I think that it's 2.0.32 and 2.2.20 at the moment.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Visit their website today !!!
The varable Xloc has been renamed to xloc for ease of typing some future code.
And this will posted as a major section on slashdot because it is a new kernel version. Latly Slashdot has become more and more of the Linux Kernel of the week club. Is it really that nessary to post an article on the new kernel every time! Yea linux is great How about just posting when 2.6 is released or a message about a really cool feature in the new kernel version. Posting every kernel version is just like posting every bug fix the Microsoft does. I have posted articles in the past that were rejected that were far more interesting then a kernel release but it was rejected. I dont want to flame but is really anoying. And dont say if you dont like the article then dont read it. That is the same excuse that spammers use.
Try the instructions on this site for CD-RW drives.
Are you perfect?
Well, neither are they. They just do their best.
And it works fine. Rock solid.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
at
http://www.ramdown.com/war/kernel.html
Would it work to just have runlevel 6 sync as the last thing init does? There shouldn't be much disk activity after that.
My server
Actually 2.0.39. 2.2.39 won't happen for a long time, methinks.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
0) Make sure you have compiled and installed a patched kernel.
/dev/partiton
1) "shutdown now" or "init 1" as root to go single-user.
2) sync
3) umount all non-busy filesystems (usually only root is busy for most people).
4) sync
5) mount -n -o remount,ro /
(so now the root filesystem is read-only -- this step *is* important).
6) e2fsck -f
(once for each partition, starting with root [/] device, substitute e2fsck with reiserfsck, etc., as necessary -- force a check on each filesystem)
7) sync, hit reset
8) make sure not to ever boot into the buggy kernel again!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why compile the latest kernel when you can just type 'su -c "rm -Rf /"'?
;)
*Linux is dying!
This hopefully fixes the error that 2.4.15 had of corrupting filesystems on unmount.
And hopefully it does not introduce another serious one...
You guys beta test and let me know, OK? :P
-Legion
You're absolutely right. Linus and company should regularly make available tarballs and patches of the current progress, encouraging people to download them and to report any bugs before they put out tarballs and patches and expect people to download them!
er, wait...
(Now setting up integration boxes in a compile farm, that's a good idea!)
how to invest, a novice's guide
I have successfully compiled and installed the 2.4.13 kernel with the nvidia drivers. But as soon as I tried compiling and installing the nvidia drivers with 2.4.14 and up I now cannot shutdown linux without the screen going black and the system hanging. I have a Gigabyte GA7 - DXR motherboard. Is anyone else stuck with this problem?
You can get the patch here.
-Fialar
Am I stupid? No. There is no better test of a kernel than a real situation. There never will be. Real Life will always throw up situations that can never be anticipated in the laboratory.
What else do I do? I compile patches. Pre-releases, new releases, ANY releases. I bundle them together, release them on Sourceforge, and watch the counters fly. You say that nobody would run a pre-release? 400-800 people regularly say otherwise, whenever I upload a new FOLK patch. That is as "pre-" as you can get, yet hundreds of people actually use it!
I have used Linux since 0.1, the BSD's since William Jolitz first ported the Berkeley tapes to the Intel, and I can tell you this from first-hand experience -- the BSD releases are damn-near rock solid, BECAUSE the people behind them insist on extensive pre-release cycles. HOWEVER, Linux overtook the BSDs within 2 years of coming out, because Linux development was open.
What I am asking for is to re-merge the two approaches. It's as simple as that. Re-merge? Yes! As I said in the letter, early Linux kernels went through tens, sometimes hundreds, of development itterations, before a release was made.
"Nobody uses pre-release versions"? Methinks you and he have forgotten that ftp.funet.fi was saturated, every pre-release that was made.
Sure, Linus can't QA a complete kernel. I wasn't asking him to. I don't even believe in the entire QA philosophy. Stoccastic testing is comparable to throwing darts in a map, in an effort to find gold. You =MIGHT= be lucky, but the odds are that you will miss the bloody obvious many times more.
To really test a kernel requires exhaustive testing of EVERY function call, under EVERY possible entry condition & state, OR a formal proof, neither of which is terribly practical, whether you're an individual or a distribution manufacturer. Red Hat may be rich, compared to Joe Average, but they still can't afford the 10,000 Ph.D mathematicians they'd need to check a kernel rigorously, in any realistic time-frame.
So, how do you achieve a decent quality? Easy! You run the program in much more compact cycles. By compacting the software life-cycle, and running many many more itterations, you can produce (in much less time, and for much less money) a quality comparable to having a few gigantic life-cycles of enormous cost.
Linus know this. He isn't an idiot. If he has to change the versioning, so that there isn't a "pre-" label, but rather a sub-sub version, to get people to run the kernel, then that's what he should do. There is NO excuse for umount() bugs in a 2.ANYTHING kernel. Development, pre, or otherwise. That kind of bug should not exist, even in the darkest imagination, beyond version 0.1
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Just take a look at the 2.4.16 changelog. There really weren't that many changes to the kernel, and this bug is a fairly troublesome one. I would only sit on 2.4.15 if I had a UPS and I touched the /forcefsck file in root (you should do that now, anyway).
There really is no reason NOT to install the new kernel. You probably haven't racked up much uptime anyway, and not that uptime on 2.4.15 is really worth bragging rights anyway.
Personally, I upgraded when 2.4.16-pre1 came out. I also converted many of my partitions to ext3 (finally). I've been waiting for ext3 to be merged in with stable for a very long time!
Another improvement that wasn't detailed because of the famous "...merge with Alan..." messages in the ChangeLog was that most of LVM is up to date in the stable kernel now. LVM has been at the 1.0.1rc4 release for some time now, and not having to patch my kernel is pretty nice (although, the LVM crew made creating patches quite simple). If you haven't checked out LVM yet, do so. It's quite sweet!
assert(expired(knowledge));
"Linux kernel people...should at least do some rudimentary testing...if they want Linux to ever get anywhere...if Linux ever wants any sort of market respect"
And *why* exactly did this get +5 Insightful instead of -1, Troll? This is hardly objective criticism.
Now, I've got Red Hat 7.2 on my machine, running the 2.4.7-10 kernel that came with the distro. All my partitions are ext3, and that's why I need a pretty recent kernel. Since ext3 was accepted by Linus in his tree, I figured I should upgrade, and indeed, I rushed to upgrade to 2.5.0 (cool, eh!) the minute it was released. Well, I got my file systems down apparently undamaged.
So, when you're saying
I'm happy for any advice I can get! :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I'm not sure where you think I say Nobody uses pre-release versions, I said most.
If you run pre-release kernels on mission-critical servers, why are you complaining about the quality of the so-called release kernels? Obviously you know what you're doing and know enough to not trust a kernel until you can test it under your workload and hardware.
I can't argue with the fact that a full-regression test-suite for the kernel is a good idea. In fact, people are already working on it over at the Linux Test Project.
How about a slashdot variable is created called $KERNELMIRROR for each user, using the country from their user preferences. Then, submissions linking to kernel-latest.tar.bz2 (or kernel-patch.bz2) would be in the form ftp://${KERNELMIRROR}/pub/linux/v2.4/kernel-latest .tar.bz2
a r.bz2
:)
for example, for someone in Australia, $KERNELMIRROR would be au.kernel.org, meaning that the full link for 2.4.15 would be ftp://au.kernel.org/pub/linux/v2.4/linux-2.4.16.t
of course, ACs like me would throw this off
> (yes there is an open-source shim layer but it is just a shim layer) it is their
> responsibility to make it work with Linux.
You're right - string me up and shoot me. Garotte my family, and poop in my bed. How could I have been so filthy. Because I clearly meant that it was the kernel's responsibility. There was no leeway whatsoever that I might have just meant that the two didn't get along. I just meant that Linus had to get his finger out to fix bugs that stop vmware working.
Except, of course, that your poo probably doesn't work with my bed yet.
Now I wait a couple of days (reading Slashdot) before plugging a new kernel into my systems...
Idiot! You must NEVER EVER EVER rely on slashdot for anything..... ever
SLAP!
Please tell me that was sarcasm....... Pleeeeessseeee
Burma?
Whenever you download a kernel you should always bring a towel.
Some damn patch to VMWare somewhere
See subject.
Don't listen to the rumours pal. I have 56k and I cvsup everyday. The more frequently you do it, the less time it takes (to a point). Don't let cvsup scare away from freebsd. Also, you can use CTM, which is supposedly very bandwidth friendly.
Warning: with 2.4.11, 2.4.12, 2.4.14 and 2.4.15 Slashdot carried quite soon some kind of bug reports (don't remember about 2.4.13, sorry). Now there are over 290 comments and there's no "SERIOUS BUG" in them. Maybe 2.4.16 is a "good" kernel?
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
You should edit /etc/fstab to specify your ext3 partitions as type "auto" rather than ext3. That way, your /etc/fstab is now independent of whether you're running an ext3-enabled kernel, and fsck will know to do log replays (rather than a full fsck) -- however, this latter issue may have been resolved in your distribution, or in later versions of e2fsprogs.