New Kernel 2.4 Development Branch (-mjc)

Ivo writes: "kerneltrap is reporting: Michael Cohen announced to the lkml his intention to begin a new 2.4 development tree. The first release of his -mjc branch includes a number of performance enhancing patches, including Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch, Rick van Riel's reverse mapping patch and George Anzinger's real time scheduler patch. Michael says of this patch, "I feel that there's need for a rapidly developing '-ac [like]' tree, and so, here we go. Feel free to test it""

Comments

this sounds really cool but

[kraada]

but i'm afraid it will really confuse a lot of people out there . . . we have the 2.2 kernel tree, 2.4 kernel tree and 2.5 kernel tree already. now throwing in 2.4-mjc? yes extra performance enhancing stuff will be cool, but man are a lot of people going to be confused . . .

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Verteiron]

That's a question I had, as well... isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere? The appearance of one may prompt the appearance of others. It may not confuse us, but corporates looking at Linux may be stumped by the sudden availability of several different "versions" of the 2.4 kernel. And it's the exact sort of thing that Microsoft loves to make fun of Linux for (I recall a German magazine ad directed against Linux. It showed the same animal 4 times, but each time it had a different head. The gist of the ad was "Code forking is bad, Linux can be forked, so ignore the Win9x/WinNT thing and use Microsoft.").

I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here). Patches are just additions by independant groups, which is far more acceptable to the corporate mindset. I wouldn't make such a big deal of this, but this is a very delicate time for Linux. A lot of people are truly beginning to take it very seriously, and the one thing the Linux community needs to do is present a united front to the people inspecting it. Any indication, real or perceived, of internal turmoil will drive businesses (and individual users) away.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[NumberSyx]

I don't think there will be a problem, after all the AC branch has been around for a long time. I got from the report is this new branch will replace the AC branch now that Alan Cox has moved onto 2.5 development. Besides I see no reason to srop development on the 2.4 branch just because Linus opened 2.5, people are going to be using the 2.4 kernel for along time to come. So I say Why Not ?

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Synn]

I don't think an extra kernel source tree will really add much confusion. We'll always have the stable base 2.4 and the seat of your pants 2.5. MJC and AC will be something in between.

And MJC will live and die by how well it's mantained.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[(H)elix1]

Maybee I'm a bit of a n00b, but I thought the point of a 2.5 was for new development and experimental code. Bug fixes, stability, and tuning sound great in the 2.4.x series - I _USE_ that kernel series (usually a couple revs behind) for real development work, not just for play on a scratch box that can be fdisk'ed on a whim.

When the 2.5 stuff gets up to snuff, I'm sure we will see a 2.6 released (rebranded, perhaps). By moving stuff into dev that needs to be in dev, we might not have the LONG wait we like the 2.4 series did before it hit prime time.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[uchian]

That's a question I had, as well... isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere?

When most people think Linux, they think of the operating system as a whole, and on that level we already have many multiple branches and forks. Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, etc...

If I was to pick a big selling point for Linux, it would be based on price and customisability - this branch targets Linux on the workstation whilst the official branch is more aimed at servers, or at least that's how I understand it.

I agree with you to a certain extent that terminology is important. Perhaps it should be given a catchy unofficial slogan, like "Desktop optimised", or "Linux for Workstations", or some such thing.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[reynaert]

isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere? The appearance of one may prompt the appearance of others.

There are others. Lots of others. Always have been. Those branches are essential to the development of Linux, as Linus explains. It is important to note that all those branches are compatible: their implementation is different, but they all look the same from userland.

I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches.

The terminology is used very carefully. Patches and branches are two quite different things.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm afraid it will really confuse a lot of people out there

Well if you are dumb enough to get confused by that, you shouldn't be compiling a kernel in the first place....

Re:this sounds really cool but

[NumberSyx]

You are correct, the 2.5 kernel is the development kernel. The difference is the 2.5 kernel is targeted to eventually become 2.6 or possibly 3.0. This new branch -mjc is specificly for developing and testing new features/bug fixes for the 2.4.x kernel.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[sporty]

Well, I agree with you possibly. They need more time to become household names as well as good branding. After all, are you that confused that there's an OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSD/OS? It confused me at first, but it took 10 minutes of research to figure it all out. Not to mention one is at 3.0, another is at 4.4 (or is that 4.5) etc etc..

If there are different goals, not a bad choice for fragmenting.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[j-pimp]

If I was to pick a big selling point for Linux, it would be based on price and customisability - this branch targets Linux on the workstation whilst the official branch is more aimed at servers, or at least that's how I understand it.
Not exactly, but thats probally how it works out in practice. Production servers tend to require 5 9's of reliability. If the latest kernel patch that provides better page swapping or whatever isn't as throughly tested as the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel, its not going to be incorporated into your production servers. However, for your workstations, having to restart X to get rid of memory leaks once a month or so isn't that big a deal. For workstations people are mnore likely to use 2.4 kernels with patches.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

So? Good grief, people, get your priorities straight. Which is more important:

1. Making Linux as good as it can be, so that we enjoy our computers to the max
2. Making Linux look good to the kind of people who are influenced by Microsoft ads

Choose one.

It's nice to get the mainstream on board, of course, but only if it's done incidentally w/out sacrificing core values. Once you start selling out, then the initial reason for getting the mainstream on board -- or even the reason for working on Linux and using Linux yourself -- evaporates.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

For workstations people are mnore likely to use 2.4 kernels with patches.

Yes, people (read as: geeks) like us /.'ers will. Sure. I'm LITTERALY recompiling my kernel as I type this with the above mentioned patches. But that's not the issue. This is about the (L)users. People who don't or can't know this stuff. To say "people" (read as: general public) I think requires a bit of a disclaimer at the end (so to speak, I don't mean it litteraly). The public doesn't know or care about this stuff, they just want to have the stupid thing work when they press the power button. That's all they know or care to know about "computers".

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to what, figuratively recompiling your kernel as you type that?

Re:this sounds really cool but

[RedWizzard]

isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere?

No. None of the major distributions ship with a plain Linus or -ac kernel. They all apply different patches in order to pass their own test suites. And from the point of view of the vast majority of users the kernel doesn't matter anyway - it is the distribution as a whole that they see, and there are literally hundreds of different distributions. As far as corporations are concerned it's a good thing. It lets them choose the distribution and kernel patches that they feel is the best.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[pi_rules]

This is an excellent move to make. I'd prefer that it be accomplished with compile-time directives[*] rather than another series of kernels but it's still a great move.

This is -exactly- what MS does with their kernels. It's really a great move. Think Win2k pro, server, advanced server, and datacenter server versions. They have different kernels. Different schedules, different priorities. It's great. It scares some people but the thing to remember is that there are NO API CHANGES going on here. It doesen't matter if you're running the -ac tree, the Linus tree or this new one. The application doesn't even need to be recompiled to move kernels.

*Doing something like that would be a coding nightmare and things would be -really- ugly looking. The pre-empt patch touches alot of places in the kernel and I'd hate to see code with a bunch of #ifdef's splattered about. When I say it'd be nice I mean nice from a user point of view, not as a coder or somebody who cares about things working right.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[BRTB]

Slackware has always used an unpatched kernel and managed to keep its high stability level intact... (the Reiser patch in Slack8 being the only exception I can remember, and it was unnecessary unless you were using a Reiser FS)

Of course you may not think Slack's a major distro, but there are those who would beg to differ ;)

Re:this sounds really cool but

[j-pimp]

Well Redhat and SuSE, and I'm sure other distros tune there kernels and add patches to support the latests stuff such as firewire, USB, and journaling. Hell, even Slackware added Cox patches to its kernel. However, at least in the case of SuSE, an "official" SuSE version of 2.2.19 is included with alot of the neato 2.4 stuff back ported, all with a somewhat slower, but well tested VM. Redhats markets its latest x.2 distro for high availability apps because they have the most polish for a sacrafice of neato.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[jdavidb]

That's a question I had, as well... isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere?

Good question, and good points. For me, though, one of the big selling points of Linux is that there can be branches and forks. The "right to fork," to me, is what makes free software free and what makes free software better. (That's why I've decided the GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate is all wrong; just call Linux a fork of GNU.)

The thing is, we just have to learn to fork in a civilized manner and not give bad impressions to the outside world. It looks like this is an excellent example of a civilized fork (but I don't read lkml, so there may be same flaming over it; who knows). Along with you, I hope it doesn't give the wrong impression to the outside world.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[demon]

This isn't what MS does with their kernels. NT4 workstation, server, advanced server - all the same kernel, with a registry entry (and a watcher thread to prevent its change) to dictate personality. Same with 2K pro/server/advanced server - same kernel, just a registry entry and some extra bundled software to differentiate them. If you scour the 'net, you can actually find ways to hack the registry to "upgrade" NT workstation or Win2K Pro.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[psamuels]

This is -exactly- what MS does with their kernels. It's really a great move. Think Win2k pro, server, advanced server, and datacenter server versions. They have different kernels.

Is that so? (If so, good move.) NT4 didn't. NT Workstation and NT Server shared the same kernel - or kernels, actually, a UP kernel and an SMP kernel.

Considering the quite different instruction scheduling properties of the Pentium/Pentium-MMX from CPUs that came before and after it, the fact that MS doesn't ship kernels compiled to optimise for a given CPU must have hurt. I don't know if they have any other measures to compensate.

("Must have hurt", past tense, because they almost certainly no longer optimise for a Pentium, if they ever did. And subsequent Intel CPUs are much more "compatible" in the optimisation sense.)

Re:this sounds really cool but

[psamuels]

but i'm afraid it will really confuse a lot of people out there

Yes but confuse which people? If you aren't willing to keep up with the issues of 2.0.x vs 2.2.x vs 2.2.x-ac vs 2.4.x vs 2.4.x-ac vs 2.4.x-mjc vs 2.5.x vs 2.5.x-dj, you will probably do just fine running your vendor-installed kernel, which is yet another branch, generally.

Now I don't get confused about those eight major branches - but hey, what a coincidence, I'm the target audience for some of those branches.

Does anyone in the real world care about the two branches of HP-UX 11.00? That is, the standard release and the ccr builds? What, you say? You've never heard of 11.00-ccr? My point exactly. Most people don't need to know or care.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[scrytch]

I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here).

Spin. They are branches. Ask AC or Linus, they'll call 'em branches, and AC will tell you chapter and verse where he thinks Linus is a complete bonehead for doing or not doing x, y, or z and why it isn't that way in -ac. They're all binary compatible with each other, they're configuration differences, not architecture differences. What they're not are forks. LinuxPPC and ucLinux, to name a couple, are forks.

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Quinn]

Maybe he meant "litteraly" as in he was compiling his kernel in a very messy way, a la "litter." Just a guess, hope this helps.

Rock and roll forever!!!

Re:this sounds really cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be one of those who begs to differ. I love Slack and I'm not even one of them "I've been using Slackware since 1936" oldbies. I used Mandrake for the longest time but got plain fed up with it after $70 and 3 fresh installs couldn't get it working on my computer. So I downloaded a Slack ISO and couldn't be happier.

The kernel issue is one of the [many] reasons I like Slackware. If I want to upgrade my kernel, I don't have to uninstall several RPMs (which breaks dependencies) and then download a completely new tarball from kernel.org, I just get a patch and update the sources that were already installed on my machine.

To those who think that Slackware and Debian are for gurus only, I'd like to say that ease of use and user-friendliness do not always go hand in hand.

again.....

[Phosphor3k]

*twirls finger in air*

The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

Happy New Year Fans! I had chicken fingers with 911 hot sauce and the better part of a fifth of Johnny Walker Gold Label last night. I had the 'Ring of Fire' this morning. It took a good minute of pushing to get it going. It was about a foot long and I could not tell what color it was. They turn the lights off in 'non-essential' parts of the building during the weekends and holidays, so I pooped in the dark. There was an odd smell, kind of like dirt after I shit. Odd. It flushed easily, but the clean up was a mess. I must have used 1/4th of the roll. I rate this turd a 6.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the funniest post I've read on Slashdot in a week. Thanks TR, you don't know how appreciated your services are by /. readers.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[egg troll]

Did you use a 1/4 roll because no matter how much you wiped, your ass was still filthy? I had that happen to me last night. You know those joke candles that light back up after you blow them out? My ass felt like one of those because I'd wipe and yet there was just as much shit clinging to it as before I wiped.

Eventually I had to hire some Mexican day laborers to come help me out. It was a difficult job. Scaffolding was involved. But its clean now.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

Thanks for your kind comment. Enjoy the New Year!

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

That is what happened. Plus, I was trying to do it by the light of my Zippo.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[egg troll]

Be careful there, Mr. Turd Report! It sounds like your mighty sphincter can produce a lot of methane, a highly flamable gas. The Slashdot community would be a darker place if your joyful colon were to catch fire and you were unable to continue your much-needed work.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

I was kind of scared of that. But, i am willing to risk my life to bring the Turd Report to my loyal fans. I think Michael and Jamie would party in the street upon hearing word of my death, but fuck those guys.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[egg troll]

I think Michael and Jamie would party in the street upon hearing word of my death, but fuck those guys.

Oh, come on. You know Michael loves you!

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

One of them banned me for a few hours yesterday, so I think that is just their way of saying Happy New Year's. Jamie has stopped answering my emails.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[egg troll]

I suspect this is because they love you, but can never have you. You are the editors forbidden love and they do not have the maturity to deal with it. So they react in anger, the only way they know how.

Re:The Turd Report 01/01/2002

[The Turd Report]

...forbidden love...

Wow, I am going to have nightmares for weeks, now...

linux

[Anonymous Coward]

we don't give a shit.
when will slashdot stop being so linux centric.
any person that uses linux is a complete moron. we all know linux sucks. the users just try to deny it.
i am sick of the shit.

Re:linux

[Anonymous Coward]

mod that shit up!

modding it down just proves more that he is right (which he is anyways).

Re:linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot WILL NOT STOP being linux centric. It is and has always been a linuxy site. It is not YOUR site. it is CmdrTaco's site. He and the other /. "editors" can do whatever they want with it. If you don't like it, go to MSDN, or adequacy, for discussions that might be of more interest to you.

Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

You know, there was one point in my life, about 2 years ago, where I was new to Linux and hopeful. It was strange and different, and I was eager to learn its ins and outs.

Then I became cynical. Why? Because I experienced one of the few things worse than DLL hell: kernel version hell. My thoughts when this occured were as follows:

Hmmm... I wonder if I can run XFS without recompiling... Nope, looks like I'll have to upgrade the kernel. But wait! Do I use the -ac kernel with its new VM or do I use the main branch with the most "standard" stuff? Oh crap, looks like 2.4.whatever had a really bad bug by default, and they didn't fix it until 2.4.later. Shit, I don't have the time for this.

And so it goes. Just the other night I decided to dump Linux off my home machine all together and went with FreeBSD. No worrying about the latest kernel or what the best distro is, just have to stay with the most current "RELEASE" version if I want new features. If there are some bugs or (unlikely) security holes, then I just get all the patches for that version, install and recompile. And most importantly, no more retarded Linux VM. As soon as I fired up top, I noticed that while I was compiling something, it actually used *all* of my RAM and never had to swap to disk. That's right, none of this Linux shit about leaving 16MB free and going right to the swap space. Not to mention the moronic implementation of /proc that makes top consume resources by parsing /proc instead of using system calls like any good system would.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[entrox]

Sure, but what if you have a G400 and want 3D acceleration? Bad luck, it (currently) doesn't work without CVS XF86.
What if you want to hear something on your rear speakers with an emu10k1? Bad luck, it isn't supported.
In fact, the drivers for "desktop" hardware like soundcards, 3d accelerators and such are HORRIBLE in FreeBSD when comparing with Linux. FreeBSD may be the better server OS, but it surely is an inferior desktop OS.
So please stop with this "awww.. Linux is sooo shitty when compared to the almighty FreeBSD" crap.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

the reason linux takes a while to parse /proc for top is because everything in /proc is a file, which is 'the Unix way'. im sure top is a lot faster in *BSD since its a system (binary) call. if you want a solid release, just stick with RedHat 7.2 or Debian Potato. those distro's are well-tested

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[CodeRed]

I'm glad you like FreeBSD, but you essentially get that with any distribution as long as you stick with the kernel/apps they include.

Debian, for instance, lets you apt-get to what WORKS.

But hey, I don't need XFS when I have EXT3, and I didn't really need EXT3 to begin with, it's just nice to have.

FreeBSD is a distribution. It has a kernel and native apps. Thats essentially what you get with ANY Linux distrib. If you go off course with FreeBSD, you encounter the same problem that you do with Linux.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would use either as a true desktop? What the hell are you doing using a 3d accelerator and soundcard supporting rear speakers in Linux anyway?

Stop being a cheapskate and just shell out the $50 or so for a copy of Windows 98 SE and get it over with. I know that when I'm talking about OSes, I'm talking about the machine that I prefer to develop on; I don't care about crap like playing shitty 3D games in *nix.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

the reason linux takes a while to parse /proc for top is because everything in /proc is a file, which is 'the Unix way'.

Gee, I'd hate to see good design get in the way of tradition. And Linux is incredibly standards compliant. Take system-independent includes for example: in Linux, they are placed in include/linux. Why? Well, presumably so you can't make portable code that works on a non-Linux platform. But I'm sure you already knew that.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[entrox]

But of course: because it isn't supported in FreeBSD it OBVIOUSLY isn't needed and unimportant. Who in their right mind would use them anyway, right? Must be some Linux weenies who should use Windows anyway.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[erat]

Sure, the free sound drivers could be better (remember, though, that OSS from 4-Front is available for FreeBSD, so this isn't a monumental issue), 3D support isn't fantastic, and quality SMP support isn't going to hit FreeBSD until probably version 5.0.

Regardless, your comment about FreeBSD being an inferior desktop OS is simply, undeniably, completely wrong. The same open source and free software available for Linux (with VERY few exceptions) is available for FreeBSD. If you're a gamer then 3D and sound may be an issue for you, but call a spade a spade, "desktop box" != "game box". When I think of desktop machines, I think of productivity, machines that help you get lots of important stuff done easily and quickly. When I think of game machines I think of Playstation 2s. Sorry, but I would rather spend $300 on a PS2 than dedicate my $2,000 PC to gaming (the PS2 would probably run better anyway).

Yes, I am another Linux --> FreeBSD convert. My machine does run better with FreeBSD, Mozilla actually works efficiently even with debugging stuff compiled in, and I get LOTS less zombie processes and frozen apps, etc. now that I've switched over. And yes, my Linux machine at work runs the exact same software and window manager as my machine at home (except for Mozilla, of course).

Both OSes have their plusses and minuses. Linux is more ubiquitous, but I still think FreeBSD has eeked ahead in some areas. Not all -- Linux will be in the lead for quite some time, I'm sure -- but some.

Rather than poo poo FreeBSD based on game stuff, why not try it as an actual desktop OS?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

But hey, I don't need XFS when I have EXT3, and I didn't really need EXT3 to begin with, it's just nice to have.

Oh, you don't need it, it's just nice to have? Tell that to my boss. I do occasional consulting for a small law firm where I installed Debian as a fileserver for the Windows clients. Great idea, right? Wrong. Since the stupid office people just hit the "reset" button whenever they percieve that something's wrong (it isn't), then ext2 gets a little more fragmented and broken each time. Until it all came to a head this past week and ext2 was such a mess that everything on the system was unstable. Which meant I had to transfer EVERYTHING over to a spare Windows 98 machine while I sorted out the whole mess. You know what I would have had to do in FreeBSD? I would have had to just turn on Soft Updates. No screaming and pulling hair, just messing with a config file or two.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[the bluebrain]

I agree that it's confusing - but I believe that this issue is one of the strengths of open source. Or look at it this way: corporations are going to need People-Who-Know-What-They're-Doing-(TM) if they want to use open source *nix anyway, and such things as kernel forks don't have any impact on that.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[diamondc]

sorry, but if you dont have physical security, then you have NO security at all. someone could have just put a dos boot floppy and fdisk'ed anything on the hard drive.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

But of course: because it isn't supported in FreeBSD it OBVIOUSLY isn't needed and unimportant.

Let's try changing a couple of words there and see how it sounds:

But of course: because WinModems aren't supported in Linux they OBVIOUSLY aren't needed and unimportant.

This is exactly the kind of crap I got when I tried to get my modem to work under Linux. "Your hardware sucks! It's not Linux's fault! Go get some real hardware!"

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

You don't understand. This is a small lawfirm where everyone knows everyone. Someone isn't just going to go in a erase everything, even if they knew how to, there are about 6 or 7 people there whom I all know. They don't have a dedicated server room where they can keep everything locked up. I can't just tell them to not touch it, because as soon as I do, my client (the boss there, who thinks he knows a lot about computers) starts screaming about how he needs to be able to reboot it when it crashes. The most logical step is to keep them from doing any harm through trying to reboot it, and thus the journaled file system. But I suppose it's easy to hide behind some percieved fault of the user than it is to admit that Linux has its faults.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is a distribution - Wrong
It has a kernel and native apps - Right

FreeBSD is an entire OS. Linux is a kernel.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[entrox]

I've tried FreeBSD for 3 months. So I'm only talking about things, that I've personally encountered. I've emailed the drm-kmod maintainer regarding DRI support with a G400 and got the response, that you currently need CVS XF86. I've asked about the rear channel on -QUESTIONS, and got the response, that it isn't supported.
I wasn't bashing FreeBSD as a whole and just pointed out some flaws. There is enough stuff that FreeBSD got 'right', but after my experience with it, I find these "Linux is crap" unjustified.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

Or look at it this way: corporations are going to need People-Who-Know-What-They're-Doing-(TM) if they want to use open source *nix anyway

Hell, why not just have them all write an OS from scratch for every machine? That would be the best way, and the people would have to know what they're doing, right?

The point is, people would rather do something the easy way and save time. Especially in this case where you don't even lose anything in quality by switching.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Ami Ganguli]

Hmmm... I wonder if I can run XFS without recompiling... Nope, looks like I'll have to upgrade the kernel. But wait! Do I use the -ac kernel with its new VM or do I use the main branch with the most "standard" stuff? Oh crap, looks like 2.4.whatever had a really bad bug by default, and they didn't fix it until 2.4.later. Shit, I don't have the time for this.

I'm glad you're happy with BSD, but really you could have had the same thing by ignoring the various development trees and optional components and sticking with a distribution you like. The nice people at Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. will happily test everything for you and make sure it works. Each of the Linux distributions fulfills the same role for the end user as one of the BSDs.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[phaze3000]

Which meant I had to transfer EVERYTHING over to a spare Windows 98 machine while I sorted out the whole mess. You know what I would have had to do in FreeBSD? I would have had to just turn on Soft Updates. No screaming and pulling hair, just messing with a config file or two.

In FreeBSD, if the file system was dead you would have had to do exactly the same thing.

In Linux, to convert an ext2 partition to ext3 you only have to do tune2fs -j. If you're running a kernel that doesn't support ext3 you need to upgrade to a new one of course, but that's really nothing too major, an apt-get install will sort that out for you.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't use a winmodem under Windows, so I'm not inclined to care if it works on the OS I use.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Fweeky]

I think the development model behind the *BSD's is one of the major plus points over Linux.

Having a group of people control the direction the system takes, and able to commit to the CVS tree, comment on other changes etc, and having every change to the system for the past decade documented goes a long way towards a clean well balanced system, something having a single hacker deciding on everything doesn't provide.

The system of having -RELEASE, -STABLE and -CURRENT branches also makes for well defined areas where new bleeding edge stuff can be put in and tested far away from development systems (-CURRENT), but where changes can be (if possible) merged back into the stable-but-being-changed-carefully branch (-STABLE), and where users who want to stick to known good configs can just hold onto -RELEASE.

The Linux model, on the other hand, relies on two branches - release (even numbers) and development (odd), where the development branches tend to disappear completely when they're most needed (damn our new VM system sucks, quick, put a new one in!).

Maybe once Linux gains the maturity of the BSD's it will have a development model which is more, um, stable.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[JanneM]

Why of course, everything done in Linux is done first and foremost to spite BSD users and not for any other reason whatsoever. I thought everyone knew that already.

/Janne

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[the bluebrain]

All I'm saying is that if a corporation is going to use *nix, they're going to have to have people who know *nix to operate it - and for these *nixHacks a kernel fork will be a non-event: they should know what is necessary to run the required environment. There are plenty of forks *there*, but you don't have to use them. OTOH, they might also be just what you are looking for - best of both worlds.
As for the easy way and saving time/money: I agree, and that is really the problem, not so much the forks. There are plenty of MSCAs out there, but as for *nixHacks - how should HR go about separating the wheat from the chaff? How can they be sure that if their *nixAdmin leaves, they will be able to find a replacement?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[mike_sucks]

Your hardware sucks! It's not Linux's fault! Go get some real hardware!

Hey, I hate to have to point it out to you, but if you're using a Winmodem, you *are* using crap hardware. Honestly, they are pimples on the wart that is PC hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I'm using a PC (Athalon-based, so I don't feel too bad) to type this, my servers are 486's and up, and my sexxy IBM Thinkpad has an Linux-unsupported mini-pci winmodem. *I know* exactly how crap they are.

So please, deal with it. Be pragmatic; use what works for you. If you really need to use shite hardware, then be prepared to put up with the inevitable pain that comes along with it. Use the OS that best suits your needs, but don't bitch an moan about software that people write for free, when you're obviously not capable of doing anything about it, even if it was legally possible to support such festeringly putrid hardware.

Will someone please mod this post, and the parent down?

Geeze.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[damiam]

Which is why you should have used ext3.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[foobar104]

I'm glad you're happy with BSD, but really you could have had the same thing by ignoring the various development trees and optional components and sticking with a distribution you like.

This is, of course, crap.

Here's a real-world example. The story began early last year. I had a spare PC with USB at the office, so I thought I'd put a couple of Keyspan USB-Serial adapters on it, load Red Hat 7.1, and use it as a console server for our SGI Origins.

Standard Pentium III PC-- no unsupported parts in it. GeForce2 graphics card, but I had no intention of installing X anyway, so minimal support is all that's required. The Keyspan USA-49W serial adapter is, according to the source tree, to Red Hat, and to Keyspan, supported completely under Linux 2.4. I felt pretty safe.

I don't enjoy messing with Linux, but I do prefer XFS to EFS for several reasons, so I thought I'd try SGI's modified Red Hat 7.1 installer that supports XFS. It installed a 2.4.3 (I think) kernel, which wasn't too far behind at that time. I'd used that installer before, so I felt safe with that, too.

I installed the OS, then I put the Keyspans on. They didn't work. Why not? Despite the fact that the Keyspan driver had been installed as a module with the Red Hat default install, it had been compiled with no firmware in it. So I had to load the sources, load the compiler, and recompile the kernel modules to add Keyspan firmware support.

Then I installed the new module and found that one of my Keyspans was working, but not the other. Turns out whichever one was plugged in first worked, but the subsequent ones wouldn't. Driver problem.

Frustrated, I gave up for the weekend and didn't touch the system again for several months.

Earlier this fall, I happened upon a mention of this bug being fixed in the Keyspan driver. Cool. So I downloaded the latest Keyspan driver source and put it on my machine and rebuilt modules. Only the new Keyspan sources wouldn't even compile. I'm sorry that I don't remember the error, but it had to do with the layout of a struct. The 2.4.3 source tree had a different struct than the Keyspan driver expected.

(An aside: it has always been my understanding that minor version changes must not introduce incompatibilities. I mean, that's what 2.5 is for, right? To have a data structure that's laid out one way in 2.4.3 and another, incompatible way in 2.4.9 strikes me as just wrong. End of aside.)

By that time, I thought I understood my problem. I would dump Red Hat with XFS and install vanilla Red Hat 7.1, then install the latest kernel sources and compiler, then install the new Keyspan sources, then compile the module, then it'd work.

Well, it didn't quite work that way, either. What with one thing and another, I was unable to get a working kernel.

Again, I gave up for a few months.

Then SGI released their modified Red Hat 7.2 installer, with a 2.4.9 kernel, so I decided to try just one more time. Install Red Hat 7.2 with XFS, install the sources, install the compiler, install the new Keyspan sources, make the module.

Success.

So I got my system working the way I want it to work, and I'm now very happy with it. But it took me three long weekends, spaced out over several months, and three start-over-from-scratch attempts.

I'm frustrated that Red Hat decided to include the firmwareless version of the Keyspan driver, since it would have been so much simpler to just compile the firmware into the module so it would work out of the box. I'm disappointed that the person who maintains the Keyspan driver was unable to QA his work sufficiently to prevent the only-one-adapter bug from hitting the streets. And I'm mad that a driver module should compile cleanly only under 2.4.9 or later, but not earlier versions. That's not the right way to maintain an OS.

Sorry for the overlong post, but your contention that the distributions are out-of-the-box solutions is just plain wrong.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

Why would WinModems be considered shitty and G400's not? The price?

They both work fine for me under Windows and they are both unsupported in Linux. What's the difference again?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Zog]

This isn't meant to be a flame, but more of a wondering-if-you're-here-to-troll-or-not kind of thing, so please don't take this to heart or anything.

RTM. Seriously. The -ac trees and -mjc trees have their purpose well-documented. For example, if you search the lkml for 'Cohen', his post about the branch comes up, and (in it and a follow-up) he makes it clear what he's doing: bringing a bunch of patches together so you don't have to worry about all of that stuff and can just go to one place. He also states that he wants to keep his branch as close to the stable branch as possible.

About what to do when there's a bug - just save your config (.config - it's in the docs - you did read those, right?) and download/recompile while you're eating dinner or sleeping, copy the new one into place, add a couple of lines into lilo.conf, run lilo, and reboot. Simple as that.

If you're just looking for simplicity and not losing much time, don't upgrade to XFS or worry about which VM you want, but it seems like you want all the exotic new stuff to be already completed, stabilized, and integrated into the kernel. Without having to look at the different branches to see if they've already got it in place. Good luck, you'll need it.

Believe it or not, FreeBSD is also imperfect - it has bugs from time to time (which you said you didn't like about Linux), and (unlikely) security holes (which Linux has also). The fixing process is the same. As long as you just stuck with a stable branch and didn't go for the not-yet-accepted stuff.

And for the rest of the post, that fits the guidelines for troll pretty well (A does this thing better/a different way than B, so A is better than B, etc).

Anyway, please don't take any of this personally, I just get annoyed easily by a lot of stuff like this.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gone the other way. I started with FreeBSD, and eventually became disillusioned with the slow pace of development, and low quality of the releases.

Linux was like a breath of fresh air. If I stick with certain distro, I can enjoy stability (in the unchanging sense, not crashing), or I can opt to enjoy the faster paced improvements in other distros.

I used to be a FreeBSD fan, but Linux is now the boss... sorry to pee on the bonfire.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[SumDeusExMachina]

but it seems like you want all the exotic new stuff to be already completed, stabilized, and integrated into the kernel. Without having to look at the different branches to see if they've already got it in place. Good luck, you'll need it.

That's why I got rid of Linux. They couldn't get their act together and get this done. FreeBSD already has a great VM and SoftUpdates, stable and working in production systems. The devleopment process is clearly labeled by "-RELEASE" (meaning "it's safe to use in production systems and has been throughly reviewed"), "-STABLE" (meaning that it should work fine, but it is rapidly changing and there could always be bugs that pop up) and "-CURRENT" (meaning "Use at your own risk"). Linux doesn't have any "stable" branch of development. They claim to be stable on even numbers, and have development on odds, but this simply isn't the case. Every new release of 2.4 is constantly changing and they even dropped a new VM in in a stable branch. So what the hell is the difference between 2.4 and 2.5 again? At least BSD get's reviewed before they're willing to portray it as "stable", the kind of honesty you won't find in the Linux community. With Linux, you have people just dropping new stuff in all over the place, and it results in really stupid things like total file corruption in a 2.4 stable release.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Mark Bainter]

[snip] Just the other night I decided to dump Linux off my home machine all together and went with FreeBSD. [snip] I have absolutely no regrets.

Great! I'm glad you found an OS that makes you productive and happy. However, those things which you list do not make *BSD a better OS. They make it a different OS. *BSD appeals to a different type of user, imo. Ignoring the masses on both sides and looking at the core userbase that is. Some of us like having flexibility and choice, and we don't mind putting in the time to know all about our system. When that's the case little things like a lot of kernel versions just aren't a big deal.

Linux is not for everybody. Neither is *BSD. Each person has to decide for themselves which system fits their needs and then use it. All this OS bigotry is just ridiculous.

I'm all for proselytizing, and cheering the benefits. The problem (for me at least) comes in when people have this underlying tone of trying to declare one OS better than the other. Isn't it enough that you use it? (speaking generally here, not specifically to the previous poster) Or do you need the masses to agree with you before your choice can be validated?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[barneyfoo]

You're complaining that you have to upgrade the kernel to run XFS?

Uhm, excuse me, but what the fuck?

At least linux gives you the option of running with XFS, because last I checked that feature wasn't available in freebsd land. Next you'll be complaining that you can't have the NSA's enhanced security features without rebooting your 200 day uptimed computers. Sorry FreeBSDers, there are some things more important than uptime.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[mike_sucks]

Because winmodems *are* shitty, and comapred to ATIs or NVidias, G400 look pretty damm poor. ;)

In any case, the reason Winmodems "work fine" under Windows is because the manufacturers have released drivers for them. In almost every case, they will not release the specs for the hardware interface because they want to protect their IP (god knows why, they're only winmodems). Some manufacturers (Lucent, IBM[0]) have released Linux drivers for their weird-arse modems, and they also "work fine". Again, I'm talking from experience here[1].

Now, it so happens that, IIRC, G400s do work under Linux, and AFAIK, work as well as you can expect for a G400. FreeBSD support is under question here, but if support is in CVS, it will get released soon enough. Still, the fact that G400s work under Linux has nothing to do with vendor-supplied drivers, it's because people cared enough to write the driver for it. The reason you don't see this happening with Winmodems is because of the afore-mentioned suckage; people don't care about winmodems, so they're not going to bother writing drivers for them. It's much easier to buy a real modem in the first place.

So, if you really care about winmodems, please, feel free to write a driver (the Linux/BSD source is there, so is gcc and emacs).

Mike.

[0] - actually, IBM's mwaves are pretty good, they're diametrically(sp?) opposed to winmodems, but they're still sucky for being proprietry.
[1] - my old TP had a Lucent winmodem.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[ewieling]

Ah yes. FreeBSD, where they tell you to 'cvsup' and 'make world' to fix just about any problem that you encounter (yes, even the RELEASE version). And instead of the Linux 'kernel of the week' you get the 'FreeBSD cvs of the hour'. No thanks. FreeBSD just changes too fast for my taste.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I would rather spend $300 on a PS2 than dedicate my $2,000 PC to gaming (the PS2 would probably run better anyway).

I seriously doubt that.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to establish whether a named poster is a troll, an easy tip is to take a quick look through their posting history. In SumDeusExMachina's case, one will see that he/she/it mainly wades into /. discussions and posts trollish comments, and, in fact, often expresses inconsistent viewpoints in comments attached to different stories. Hence, one might conclude that he is, indeed, a troll.

Another tip is to look at the UID of the named poster - the higher the UID, the more likely it is he's an extant troll (although he may well simply be a /. newbie). If he actually has "troll" in his name he's more likely to be a pathetic crapflooder than a troll.

You can have the most fun hunting down astroturfing accounts - generally look for reasonable sounding posts that are damning anything that MS opposes (including, but not limited, to linux) with faint praise (I like xyz but...), and the tend to use "clever" email addresses/usernames so that they can identify eachother - such as giving an email of "influencers.org", or "fifther" (for fifth columnist), since they're trying to socially engineer and polarise opinions of the linux crowd (it's easier for MS to fight us if we're all concentrated on one issue, not when we're buzzing about like a swarm of bees arguing about 1000s of different things).

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

The devleopment process is clearly labeled by "-RELEASE" [snip] "-STABLE" [snip] "-CURRENT"

So basically, you want the developers to hold your hand and clearly label the releases for you. -shrug- Then you probably made a good choice. I sure as heck hope we don't see that kind of baloney in the linux tree. While I will agree that some of the stuff that went on in the 2.4 tree was absurd and should not have happened, it's a learning exp (hopefully) and we move on. Linux is a different culture than *BSD, and it sounds like *BSD's fits you better. So use it, and quit bellyaching about linux. Little that you have mentioned here is a problem for the core linux userbase, and those few good points you mentioned we can only hope the lesson has been learned moving forward.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Ranger Rick]

Just an FYI, depending on your thinkpad model, the mwave thinkpad modem is supported under linux. It worked fine on my 600E.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Vardamir]

Exactly what I was thinking.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[42forty-two42]

FYI: They rewrote the VM in 2.4.9.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[rtaylor]

To achieve 3d acceleration for the G400 on FreeBSD one needs to install XF86 from the ports tree (or the package -- as they're generated from the ports tree).

Next install the graphics/drm-kmod port.

Either reboot, or run:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/drm.sh start

then restart X (if its running, otherwise start it).

glgears should get several hundred fps on a G450. Total time from install to 3d support was around 3 minutes for me -- most of that shutting down and starting X (many many applications run by default for my configuration).

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Uerige]

The G400 has become unsupported? When was that. Pity, that, because I was quite happy with the hardware accelerated 3d graphics that I could enjoy since the release of XFree86v4.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Ami Ganguli]

I don't see how any of this is relavent. What you're complaining about is that:

• The packaged kernel doesn't have all the latest features and drivers.
• Some drivers have bugs.

This is of course true. That will be true of any system. Obviously you're going to give up something in the trade-off between "easy to use and stable" vs. "bleeding edge".

your contention that the distributions are out-of-the-box solutions is just plain wrong.

No it's not. Distributions are the out-of-the-box solution. Your problem is that you aren't satisfied with the out-of-the-box solution. Would you have faired better with one of the BSDs? Do they even have XFS?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[entrox]

I did that, but it locked up HARD. That's because the code from the ports drm-kmod and the ports xf86 had some mismatch. This should probably work with XF86 4.2.0. Take a look here. The maintainer confirmed it too.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[foobar104]

Obviously you're going to give up something in the trade-off between "easy to use and stable" vs. "bleeding edge".

If I were trying to do anything "bleeding-edge," I'd be the last to complain. As it is, I was trying to use supported (whatever that means in this context) hardware with a packaged distribution.

My point is simply that the distributions with which I have had experience (not all of them, by any stretch) are incomplete. They do not support, out of the box, everything they claim to support.

A counter-example is my QL2200 fibre channel adapters. Thanks to Red Hat, those suckers work as soon as you plug them in.

That level of functionality should be there for everything on the "supported" list. It doesn't appear to be.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[swright]

er, G400s are supported fine in Linux... (from the posts above it appears not in FreeBSD)

WindModems are shite because they do all the signal processing in software - so you take a CPU hit and a transfer rate hit. Much better to have a real modem (for like $5 more..) that does it in hardware, no bandwidth loss and no CPU wastage...

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[LunaticLeo]

DISCLAIMER: I do this cuz I like flamage. FreeBSD is a decent and valuable OS.

But I love to hear whining lamers from the *BSD world bitch about linux kernel short commings. Gee, couldn't get XFS running by inmod'ing the binary into a fresh kernel. Well XFS on FreeBSD will save the day? Ooops, no XFS on FreeBSD you say, well that solves your problem. Less features makes it much harder to screw up. No one fooled you, No one advertised otherwise; The misconception comes from rejects from the proprietary OS world where closed-source REQUIRES binary kernel driver compatability.

BTW, bitching about binary compatability of kernel modules, in a open source OS; PuhLeeaase! The linux kernel, of all open source kernels, doesn't give two shits about binary kernel module compatability.

no more retarded Linux VM

Oh lord of all mercy! Commetary from the below 100 crowd, Joy. Linux's VM did have serious suckage, news at 11. But these things become harder when you actually have FEATURES. Like fine grained locking of all the major sub-systems. FreeBSD 4.x is languishing in the BKL world of Linux 2.x. Wow what superior technology! Look at how SMP-ng in the upcoming FreeBSD 5.0 is lagging behind schedule. That is because it is HARD, not EASY. So yeah the FreeBSD VM is well balanced, but it's maintainer admits it's short commings, and BSD as a whole lags far behind Linux in many other areas (like your beloved XFS filesystem).

I'd like to state once more for the non-moron *BSD crowd, that the *BSDs are great and I hope competiion between *BSDs and Linux is as productive as the Gnome v. KDE competiion seems to have been.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[DGolden]

Sigh... Feeding trolls one more time....

Because winmodems are a fundamentally stupid idea, you idiot troll, and G400s aren't. Think about it: With a winmodem you're wasting 10% of your CPU time doing the modulation and demodulation - something a custom chip in a real modem can do. G400s are the OPPPOSITE IDEA - you're offloading 3D and display processing that would take CPU time onto a custom chipset.

In summary: G400 good, WinModem bad.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Howie]

Isn't it enough that you use it? (speaking generally here, not specifically to the previous poster) Or do you need the masses to agree with you before your choice can be validated?

Amen! This attitude characterises any number of 'religious wars' in the geek world: emacs vs vi, amiga vs st (going back a bit), mac vs pc.

I have favourites in each of those (pc, st, emacs), but I don't care if you like them or not - why does it matter?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[protonman]

...starts screaming about how he needs to be able to reboot it when it crashes.

Now you're being silly. What would you if your boss said he has to "kick the machine when it makes funny noises"? Would you plate the bloody machine with foam or something?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Ami Ganguli]

They do not support, out of the box, everything they claim to support.

Ok. I see what you're saying. Sounds like a quality issue with Red Hat. Certainly if it says on the box that it's supported then it should work.

What I was trying to say with my original post was that Linux distributions fill the same role as the *BSD distributions. They represent the safe, stable solution for the end user.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[kan]

Just two points:
a) there is a port for DRM kernel module in the
FreeBSD ports tree and last time I checked it worked just fine. WITH_MATROX_GXX_DRIVER was
working fine too. Together two will give fully
functional DRI for Matrox.
c) Sound card - blame Creative for their semi-
binary driver with lack of all and any documantation.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[foobar104]

What I was trying to say with my original post was that Linux distributions fill the same role as the *BSD distributions. They represent the safe, stable solution for the end user.

Okay, I'll buy that. I only wish in my case my choice of distribution and hardware had been safer and more stable.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, I don't suppose in your zealotry that you've ever examined the Debian release cycle?

stable, testing, unstable
-RELEASE, -STABLE, -CURRENT

Seems quite similar to me.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

The ST sucked compared to the Amiga!

The Amiga had a cool OS with an integrated GUI and CLI, preemptive multitasking, pluggable filesystem drivers, the ST had... TOS/GEM crap.

The Amiga had 4096 colour display... The ST had 16 colour display.

The Amiga had hardware graphics acceleration, DMA disk controller, extenal sync capability for video editing, the ST had... a piece-of-shit off-the-shelf graphics chip, and the CPU to do everything else.

The Amiga had proper function keys, the ST had wierd crappy plasticy buttons.

The amiga stored 880K on a floppy disk, the ST 720K. The amiga could read PC and ST disks, but not vice-versa.

About the only thing the ST had going for it was a built-in (and relatively crappy) MIDI interface - and a much better MIDI interface was a $30 external add-on cartridge for the Amiga. Amiga ProTracker and later OctaMED and Bars'n'Pipes kicked the ass of any ST sound tools.

Amiga had Lightwave, Imagine and Real3D for raytracing. ST had... a dodgy port of POVRay.

AMIGA RULEZ, ST DR00LZ !!!!!

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Billly Gates]

I like Freebsd technically and the more stable development model. But its a pain in the ass to setup and until version 4.5 shows up, java support sucks. I recently purchased FreeBSD 4.4 and it does its job fairly well but as I workstation I need to setup every menu item manually. Quite unacceptable when you have over a thousand apps installed. With Linux distro's the menu items under the window managers are already setup. After the install just start x and all your apps are there. Under WindowMaker you can select sample menu's and drag your distro's name into the main menu and voila. All your program menu's are there. Also I never installed the freebsd ports collection without an error causing the installation to pause. This means I can't do an unattended installation and that all the software I select will be installed. Its a painfully slow installation as a workstation OS. Also I need to select each package manually on the other cd's which is a huge pain in the ass when dealing with dependancies.

Linux has proven to be questionable as a server os thanks to the recent bugs found in all the patches. A year ago I would but my job on linux as a server OS but today I would not. But as a unix workstation I would have to pick linux untill Freebsd becomes more desktop friendly. Freebsd is great technically but its hampered by the elitists attitude by the developers who only think about server use.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Billly Gates]

Maybe its time you use a real distro.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Fweeky]

Since when was Debian == Linux? It packages the kernel, and probably manages some bugs related to it in it's sizable bug database, but it and it's release methadology are nothing to do with the kernel.

And yes, even behind my huge mask of zealotry that's so thick I can barely think about computers without screaming "USE FREEBSD!! LUNIX SUXX!!!1", I have used Debian, and found /testing to be quite good, even if they should have implimented it before hell finally froze over.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[lameluke]

Linus has made some comments relevant to this;
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=1 00 948142802025&w=2

Here's a tiny summary;
- competition keeps people honest.
- Different taste.
- Different goals.
- And imperfect patch retention.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[mike_sucks]

Yep, which is cool, but unfortunately I've got a T21. Even more unfortunately, it's got one of the 3Com/3Com mini-pci ethernet/modem cards, instead of one of the Intel/Lucent ones.

As much as I hate buying Intel hardware, I'll probably have to spring for the Intel/Lucent if I ever need a modem.

8(

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

"im sure top is a lot faster in *BSD since its a system (binary) call."

Its actually far worse than that. top (and ps, and about a billion other things) are SGID kmem. This is so they can mmap the kernel's address space into their own. This also means that there are far more points of vulnerability, since if you want to be able to list processes programmatically, you have to be able to read ALL of kernel memory.

Linux's way is clearly superior since it gives you finely grained access to this information using the standard unix permissions scheme. This way, non privledged programs can list all processes, and get their status and memory usage, but only privledged processes can do sensitive things like access a processes address space or open fd list.

I'll gladly take a small speed hit on an uncommon operation to greatly reduce the number of privledged binaries on my system. And don't give me any bullshit about how ps and top only have READ access to kernel memory. If you're so sure of that, how about giving me non-privledged access to your production freebsd boxes, and chmod a+r /dev/kmem and see how long it lasts.

Look, I like FreeBSD too, but this uninformed "FreeBSD good, Linux BAAAAHHHD" nonsense has got to go.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[defile]

You know what I would have had to do in FreeBSD? I would have had to just turn on Soft Updates. No screaming and pulling hair, just messing with a config file or two.

Messing with a config file or two!? Dear god man, while you're at it, why not build an atomic bomb out of household appliances?!

We don't all have the luxury of beaming our servers up to the Enteprise so Captain Kirk can reconfigure them. Fortunately, we do have Debian:

# apt-get install kernel-image-2.2.19-ext3
# tunefs -j [partition goes here]

Since the occasional Slashdot reader is humor impaired [not to claim that I'm funny], the moral of this story is that sys admin tasks are all relative, and difficult to measure fairly. FreeBSD rules, Linux rules, let's all hug and eat pudding.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

and comapred to ATIs or NVidias, G400 look pretty damm poor.

Hey mike_really_does_suck, as a Matrox owner, I'm going to have to correct you a bit -- A Matrox G400 is one of the best quality 2D cards ever made, not to mention the fact that it supports 2 monitors or TV out.

Maybe you wank yourself playing games 24x7, but most of us normal users are staring at an editor or a spreadsheet 90% of the time, and would rather not have blurry Nvidia OEM budget 2D damaging our eyes. (Well, some of the newer ones are supposedly better, but it's historically been crap). Not to mention, when Quake 3 released, the G400Max was arguably the fastest card available for it (about tied with a TNT2), so it's adequate for older games.

Furthermore, Matrox has some of the best Open Source support in the biz -- they release specs and support an open source XFree driver (modulo the binary macrovision crap). Anyway, it's not some semi-documented on-board POS like a winmodem, and should be a highly recommended card for someone building a Unix workstation.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

hate to break it to you but 3D != games for a lot of people. A lot of people need 3D graphics for their jobs.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a gamer then 3D and sound may be an issue for you, but call a spade a spade, "desktop box" != "game box". When I think of desktop machines, I think of productivity, machines that help you get lots of important stuff done easily and quickly.

For years most of the real technological advances in computer hardware were driven by the ever-increasing requirements of gaming. Do office applications use hardware accelerated graphices? No. 5.1 channel audio DSP? No. I'd also wager that the vast majority of home boxes see primarily gaming and multimedia use, so saying that gaming isn't real desktop use is more an expression of elitism than reality.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[ameoba]

WTF would you even bother going out of your way to add an advanced filesystem to a machine that was essentially being a dumb text terminal?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[MobyTurbo]

I bought FreeBSD Power Pack, because the package and ports scheme was better than RPMs, it had better memory management so it'd run OK on an old 486 with 16 megabytes of RAM, and was more True Unix(tm). Unfortunately, it wouldn't recognize my ancient double-speed CD-ROM drive. (Don't laugh.)

Recently I made a big system upgrade, to a new Pentium 4 system with USB everything. I installed Linux; I heard FreeBSD wouldn't install with a USB keyboard and this system doesn't have a PS/2 keyboard port.

FreeBSD is great stuff, but it doesn't have the PC hardware support that Linux does; there *are* advantages to having hundreds of hackers working on supporting any concievable device you could think of.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[foobar104]

WTF would you even bother going out of your way to add an advanced filesystem to a machine that was essentially being a dumb text terminal?

I'm an SGI guy. My life is easier if I only have to keep one set of filesystem commands in my head. Since the option was there, a better question would have been, "Why not use an advanced filesystem?"

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a G400... I bought it because it had the dual monitors and TV out. You're right, it is an awesome 2D card... beautiful quality, i've got a couple 17"'s here running 1152x864 at 85hz... cheap AOC monitors, but the picture is perfect. However, I won't be buying another Matrox card because the 3D sucks ass... It is "acceptable" in low resolutions, but good luck getting a decent frame rate in any game at over 800x600. And though I don't play games that often, I play them enough to want to have as high as resolution as possible, and it looks like Matrox isn't going to be able to handle that for a while. (Judging from the benchmarks of their most recent stuff)

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

all your points are true. but i still loved my 520stfm.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[psamuels]

Linux has proven to be questionable as a server os thanks to the recent bugs found in all the patches. A year ago I would but my job on linux as a server OS but today I would not.

Out of curiosity, what changed? The kernel you were so happy with a year ago - did it suddenly fail to work?

Or are you saying current kernels aren't as stable as the then-current kernels? If that's the case, just keep using those. I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about the stability of 2.2.16 - 2.2.20 - people complaining about kernel instability are generally referring to 2.4. The 2.2 series isn't dead yet!

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[psamuels]

Take system-independent includes for example: in Linux, they are placed in include/linux. Why? Well, presumably so you can't make portable code that works on a non-Linux platform.

Actually, that's system-dependent includes, and the reason is historical. Five years ago you had to #include<linux/*.h> for quite a few random things ... but that was five years ago.

The world changed - glibc 2.1 came out - and nowadays you should never include <linux/*.h> except for OS-dependent stuff like CD burner software. The reason the directory still exists is that other files in /usr/include make use of it - but that's an implementation detail which as a mere software developer you shouldn't have to worry about.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can run G400 3d acceleration on non-CVS XF86 -- you just need a newer release version than whatever you have. That was only true around...what was it, XFree86-4.0.3? I'm using RH's XFree86-4.1.0-3.src.rpm with 2.4.17-rc2 and it works fine on my G450.

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what's slackware? A rouge-rebel-rouge Unix distribution?

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[mike_sucks]

[snip: rant about why Matrox cards don't suck]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I used to 0wnz a Matrox card. FTR, only my Windows games machine and my Linux workstation (at work) has Nvidia cards. When the game box was put together, NVidia wa sthe only option, but if I was doing it again I'd probably use an ATI. NVidia's drivers are nothing other than a pain in the ass for both Linux and Win, I probably won't be buying too many more.

Still, you have to admit, NVidia ownz Matrox for games performance..

Re:Great, more fragmentation

[erat]

Out of all the folks I know with computers at home (that includes pretty much everyone I know except for some of my older relatives), probably 10% focus on gaming. The rest are using their computers in their home offices, or for Internet access, or for hobby/craft stuff, or even dinking around with programming (retirees mostly).

"Wager" all you want; my observation is you'd lose your bet. Most of the folks I know who have computers have digital sound cards and video adapters with >=32MB RAM, and all but about 10% of them do anything that requires even minimal video and/or sound. I view the inclusion of such hardware a tax much like many of you consider the inclusion of MS Windows a tax. Good luck downgrading, too. PC builders don't like that.

I guess you and I walk in different circles. C'est la vie. (Don't call me an elitist, though. Ever. I can oppose your opinion without being an elitist.)

2.4? 2.5?

[Bert64]

Isn`t 2.5 where the "fast paced" development is supposed to take place? anyway, i`m all for performance enhancing patches.. i run some fairly old hardware here for money saving purposes. The kpreempt patch seems to work well on x86, but it would be nice to see it ported to the alpha.. Is -mjc going to keep up with the performance related patches added to 2.5, and backport them?

Re:2.4? 2.5?

[GregWebb]

Re-read, wrong bit is fast :-)

2.5 is for bleeding edge development, pushing linux into the future. 2.4-mjc is a funny 2.4 which is focussing on improving system performance.

Not sure whether this is a good idea (heck, doesn't affect me much, using Win2K here...) but that's what's going on here :-)

Re:2.4? 2.5?

[Zog]

Is -mjc going to keep up with the performance related patches added to 2.5, and backport them?

Most of the performace patches (pre-emptible, etc) are just patches to the current kernels that the stable kernel's maintainer hasn't accepted, for one reason or another. Chances are, they will go straight into 2.5 so that they can be tested and improved upon.

The reason for -mjc is to allow people to use the performance patches without having to worry about conflicts between the patches, applying them, etc - it looks just like a normal kernel package, except with -mjc at the end.

The -ac series follows the same guidelines - it tends to have slightly fancier features, newer drivers, etc. Every once in a while, when the stable kernel's maintainer decides that the -ac series is stable enough, a lot of the patches that went into -ac are put into the stable series, to get all the new drivers in there.

I doubt that will happen the same way for -mjc, since the patches are more along the lines of getting every little bit of performance possible, instead of having a wide testing ground for new drivers, vm's, etc.

Re:2.4? 2.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, even Anonymous Coward has his own kernel series? This whole branching thing is getting way out of hand!

Real world impact?

[thing12]

So how much gain in performance (or apparent performance) should one expect after applying this combined patch? Are the performance gains only applicable under special circumstances? Are they focused more on desktop apps than server?

Re:Real world impact?

[NumberSyx]

Now this is the question of the day. I never used the AC kernel because I prefered to stick closer to stable tree, but I did add patches as I needed them. The VM stuff did wonders for me, but the PreEmpt patch made no noticable difference, probably because I use a dual processor system.

Of the included patches; Reverse Mapping patch #9, Preemptible Kernel Patch, Lock-Break Patch, CPU affinity /proc entry, Netdev-random, Software Suspend, Real Time Scheduler for Linux, IDE updates. Which ones can we expect to have an impact on preformance ? and which ones simply fix a long standing problem ?

Re:Real world impact?

[blakestah]

So how much gain in performance (or apparent performance) should one expect after applying this combined patch? Are the performance gains only applicable under special circumstances? Are they focused more on desktop apps than server?

I doubt you will see ANY performance enhancements with this patch - in fact, under most circumstances, performance will be worse.

The patch MOSTLY addresses a need to have shorter latency responses under linux. So the real benefit will be seen if you, say, run xmms, browse the web on a java intensive site, and do a make -j10 bzImage at the same time. On most machines this will cause xmms to stutter a little - either an audio skip or the text in the scrolling windows will stop and start. With the patch you can expect perfect xmms performance under broader circumstances.

This has the most significant implications for audio and video under linux - things that require short latencies to perform properly. This is questionably the most needed area of improvement for the linux kernel for desktop use.

However, if you time kernel compiles or run lmbench, you'll probably see slightly (but not hugely) worse results. You can expect that changes to address these issues will be incorporated in mainline kernels eventually, although not necessarily in the form that these patches take. Maybe - it will be interesting to see it sort out.

Re:Real world impact?

[psamuels]

but the PreEmpt patch made no noticable difference, probably because I use a dual processor system.

Agreed, SMP makes preempt a lot less necessary.

Of the included patches; Reverse Mapping patch #9, Preemptible Kernel Patch, Lock-Break Patch, CPU affinity /proc entry, Netdev-random, Software Suspend, Real Time Scheduler for Linux, IDE updates. Which ones can we expect to have an impact on preformance ? and which ones simply fix a long standing problem?

I'm not sure about all of them, but:

• Reverse Mapping: not sure if it helps VM performance by itself but it was designed to make it easier to perform certain VM-related optimisations.
• Preemptible: you know what this one does - for UP systems in particular, should give lower latency. Good especially for smoother interactive feel (eg. mouse movements) and multimedia (eg. no-skip sound playback). Small performance hit.
• Lock-Break: not sure what this is. I think it's about bug reporting - shouldn't be noticed in real life.
• CPU affinity /proc entry: lets you associate a specific job with a specific CPU. "If you don't know whether you need it or not, you don't." Used to override the scheduler when you think you're smarter than it.
• Netdev-random: collect entropy out of incoming network packet timings. Good especially for a headless, diskless server (like a floppy-based router) because most of the usual sources of entropy aren't present. Bad in that an external source can control your entropy input - considered a security risk by purists. Linus rejected this one because of objections on L-K by Ted Ts'o and others. You shouldn't need this on the desktop. Probably minimal performance impact.
• Software suspend: save memory and device state to disk before letting a laptop (or a desktop I suppose) go to sleep or shut down - then restore on wakeup / bootup. Probably no performance impact, just a new feature. As you'll know if you use this on Windows 98 or Win2k, reliability is a big problem with this sort of thing thanks to its extreme dependence on hardware behaving to spec on power management issues.
• Realtime Scheduler: allow a process to hog the CPU and have it basically any time it wants. Again, probably for multimedia purposes, or data collection, or other real-time tasks. I don't know the implementation details, or how hard the guarantees are.
• IDE updates: Andre Hedrick and Linus Torvalds, um, do not get along very well. It's not personal (or not only that), Linus doesn't like Andre's philosophy of development - Andre sits on the IDE standards board, and in Linus's opinion trusts the standards too blindly - whereas Linus comes from a background of assuming that hardware won't follow its specs so you have to dig in and figure out what it does not just what it says it does.
  This adds up to the sad fact that official 2.2 and 2.4 kernels are never even close to up-to-date w/r/t Hedrick's IDE work. New IDE drivers, random bug fixes, etc.

HTH.

Re:Real world impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lock break is about being able to break up then reassemble file[*] locks transparently. This means you don't lose time waiting for something to complete. In real life it only benefits a few situations though.

* everything is a file.

Re:Real world impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer Linus's approach over Andres. It's a here-and-now philosophy vs what's best for the future. It's similar in almost every way to coping with HTML errors or working around them. Coping is best - and it produces more stable code.

FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[sporty]

Nothing is wrong with fragmentation. It might be amusing and good to see 3 Linux's on the scene. Hope the reasons for splitting would be more.. friendly than not. After all, has anyone really criticized the existance of 5 BSDs? Net,Open,Free,BSD/OS and Darwin. At least binary compatability would remain, no?

Ok, so maybe I'm just being devil's advocate. :)

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because they started with different objectives. We have to remember that each BSD today started from the "former BSD", and if it continues this way, it's not impossible for us to see (soon, maybe) what happened to BSD happening to Linux. It even might be a good thing.

Binary compatibility is something you pointed expertly, but in kernel level they're all similar and they also share good characteristics in the userland.

Maybe Linus' leadership helped to keep Linux unique (in every aspect), but I'm pretty sure that not everybody is happy in this way of "keeping it rocking".

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[sporty]

Well, I mean compatability for just common executables in elf format. So no, kernel modules may not end up being compatable in the very end of things, but gcc would have to write the same ASM and hopefully the same glibc will stick about. So in the end, the only big difference is how memory is addressed, how task switching works, swapping.. all of those things that matter except in the binary code being read off of the disc.

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[rtaylor]

If you really wanted to get technical FreeBSD is heavily fragmented within for the purpose of code creation without toe stepping.

TrustedBSD, SMPng, and KSE stuff were all seperate BSDs (temporarily anyway).

Branching source for the purpose of better co-ordinating development without forcing others to wade through your broken source or wait on you is a good thing.

However, I'm not overly fond of Linux branching for development by indivials rather than for a specific project -- but thats just a labelling issue :)

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[sporty]

You are absolutely right.

I guess what it really comes down to is when the best of the best of all the branching is found, is it possible to remerge and is it in thebest interest to.

Hey, maybe the individuals may "lead the way" for certain projects in the end.

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[MikeBabcock]

The Devil understands the situation better than you do, and since you mentioned Darwin, read up on Linus' thoughts on how the Linux kernel evolves, it might help.

See, the -ac series was a testbed series of kernels, often used in practice, as patches to the mainline kernel. It was not a fork, and neither is this.

2.4.5-ac3, for example, would be Alan Cox's third patch release to Linus' 2.4.5. Now, Michael will be doing the same thing with Marcelo's kernels.

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[sporty]

Oh, I understand the role that -ac holds, but if anything, FreeBSD and -ac have similarities in that they are used more than OBsd and NetBSD for adding new features. I'd suspect that the non-branch more akin to NetBSD. Only difference between BSD's and Linux is that the -ac stuff gets put back into the "main branch".

It wouldn't be bad in the end if Linux did fork though.

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[FlowerPotAdmin]

It wouldn't be bad in the end if Linux did fork though.

Yeah, if that happened we might get something akin to the "desktop wars," and though we would make ourselves sick talking about it, that sort of thing might push good development even more.

Linux Fragmentation

[1stflight]

Wouldn't this be percieved as the "fragmenting" of Linux? I thought the newest stuff was to be included in the 2.5.x series ?

Re:Linux Fragmentation

[erat]

The whole idea of keeping things like the Linux kernel open is to allow things like fragmentation to happen. If you don't want to use the "-abc" kernels, they're easy to identify, so you shouldn't have any problem avoiding them.

Now, if someone made their own fork and named the files exactly the same as the "real" Linux kernel (i.e. not Alan Cox's, or any other non-Linus blessed kernel), then there would be problems. I'm not worried about this at all. In fact, I'm glad to see others who are either impatient with the slowness of Linus' team or are fed up with the petty bickering over crap like VMs pick up the ball and do things their way. And as always, if these one-off kernels have cool stuff, Linus and his merry men are free to harvest what they like and incorporate the stuff into their source tree.

One person's fragmentation is another person's diversification. This kind of fragmentation gave us multiple Linux distributions, embedded Linux innovations, and a host of other things that lots of folks are thankful to have.

news?

[orz]

Okay, someone applied some patches to 2.4 and named the result after himself. This is front pages slashdot news, why?

Re:news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo! This deserves some +moderation!

New kernel tree akin to ac tree.

[Zapman]

Read what the maintainer says on the slashdot article:

"I feel that there's need for a rapidly developing '-ac [like]' tree, and so, here we go." --Michael

The -ac tree has moved on to the 2.5 world. He feels the need that -ac filled in the 2.4 world is still there, so he's doing something about it. This really isn't any more fragmentation than there was beforehand.

The -ac tree existed as a 2.4 (and 2.2 before it, and 2.0 before that) testbed (sort of a development kernel in the stable kernel code) that saw a decent bit of testing from developers. People could submit patches to Alan, and they had a much better chance of getting included. After they'd been tested for a few versions, and cleaned up some, and whatnot, the patch would go to Linus for inclusion in 2.4. Michael is offering his services to do the same job now that -ac has moved on to 2.5.

good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[Anonymous Coward]

to put it simply... what do most desktop systems get used for??? games... games need performance...

everyone is used to the fact that with windows you have to reboot atleast once a day, and so Linux's stability isnt much of a "selling point" for desktop users...

Linux out performs Windows systems as it is, but with a special "high-performace" Linux kernel, it will help to bring Linux to the attention of not just desktop users, but also games companies, which will, in turn bring more users and gamers into our lovely community...

i say this is excelent... people are starting to realise that desktop users want performance... the desire for stability is lesser for desktop users than server admins.... and this will help to encourage them to try Linux...

Re:good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[Anonymous Coward]

games... games need performance...

No, games need developers, and linux doesn't have a game developer community to speak of, so you're hosed either way.

Re:good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[idiotnot]

The truth of your conclusions is based upon the truth of your underlying assumptions. Here, yours, AC, are wrong. I'd venture to say that most desktop systems are used for things *other* than games. Personally, I use mine probably 75% of the time on other activities (internet, business apps, music, pr0n, etc. etc).

For those activities, stability is important. There's nothing more annoying than Netscape locking up Win98 when I'm doing something as simple as sending an IM. Linux *never* does that.

As far as whether or not this series is a good idea, I don't know. For me, choosing to use the preemptable patch was simple; I play MP3's while compiling code. A better idea might be to distribute the patches with the latest kernel versions as part of the tarball, and let people decide whether or not they want to use them. If there's concern that a particular patch will lessen stability, put it in the documentation.

Re:good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux never does THAT but it does some other things like locking up whole system hard ( telnet won't work) just by opening menu ( combination of menus actually) in Motif based programs etc....
It is just as crappy as Win 95/98.

Re:good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux actually does have a reasonable number of game coders. It just lacks (a) many people willing to do art for free games (the Mac OS was much better off here) and (b) the *paying* players necessary to support a big commercial game-development industry.

BTW, I just got Alpha Centauri from TuxGames...it's pretty neat. Never played with the expansion pack. Actually, never played a truly working version before...I either ran it in WINE (which wasn't perfect, didn't play some sounds) or Window NT (which had some nasty DirectSound bug that Alpha Centauri turned up that made sounds "repeat").

Re:good to help introduce linux to desktops...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, I play MP3s while compiling code too. And my music doesn't break up. Real simple:

(a) Linux has nice levels for a reason. Use 'em. Run "xmms foo.mp3" or whatever, and then "nice -20 make". Voila.
(b) If there's really heavy disk contention, sorry. Linux disk scheduling isn't as badass as the process scheduling. My guess is that it's tweaked for some server setup that I don't use, because I *can* make mp3s stop playing by flooding the hd with other operations. Either way, you don't need these processes.

What you want these for is areas where you have extremely small buffers and need to context switch like mad, like two simultanous instances of quake or something. This doesn't really apply to mp3s, which can be prebuffered up the wazoo. I think the big application here is for soft realtime tasks where you want better latency.

Incidentally, redefinining HZ works pretty well (except for *something*...I think usleep() which not much stuff uses, but which needs to have you recompile glibc)...and exposes how much context switching slows down edge-flipping across desktops. I jacked HZ up to 1000, and edge flipping got quite a bit faster.

Turd Report named 2001 Troll of the Year

[Anonymous Coward]

I just saw this on BBC, the Turd Report was named the 2001 Troll of the Year! See it yourself, but I'll quickly include some of their comments: "... for his prolific and inspired posting...", "...we can say that the Turd Report speaks for us all.".

This certainly is another feather in his cap. Very impressive turd report, keep up the good work.

Organized chaos to became disorganized

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows Linux is the organized chaos. Anyway, this model of managing seems to be working pretty well. At least until now.
I think that, although it's always great to have many people working in parallel, it's not good to create more and more fragmentation (we already see this fragmentation in the dozens distributions out there). There'll be confusion and problems syncing the codes. Sometimes I think we're adopting an model that *WAS* great, but IMHO is not the best for the future of linux.

Rick van Riel

[Ctrl-Z]

... Rick van Riel's reverse mapping patch ...

I just thought I should mention that it should be Rik van Riel, not Rick.

Re:Turd Report named 2001 Troll of the Year

[The Turd Report]

Thanks! I will try my best to give the Slashdot readers what they want: good quality turd reporting.

Eating Out: Etiquette Do's and Don'ts

[Big_Ass_Spork]

Eating Out: Etiquette Do's and Don'ts

Q I have been invited to several holiday parties, many of them work-related and involving a sit-down meal. This may sound silly, but I'm a bit nervous since I don't really know the "proper" way to dine -- which fork to use first, where to put my napkin when I get up from the table. I don't want to embarrass myself. -dianer

A Dear dianer: I don't blame you for being slightly concerned; there is an unspoken prejudice against those who don't handle themselves well at the table. And with the holidays almost here, all of us will probably be doing more partying and dining than ever. So I've put together a table manners how-to list to help everyone make it through the holidays in the most mannerly manner. Consider it my pre-holiday gift.

Top 10 Dining Mistakes Corrected:

Misuse of silverware: Gripping your fork like a cello and your knife like a dagger are both major dining faux pas. You should also avoid resting silverware partly on the table and partly on the edge of the plate -- one slip and you have a mess. Instead, make sure that once you pick up a piece of silverware, it rests on your plate from that point on and never makes contact with the table again. Another thing to watch out for, when setting the table and while eating: The knife blade should always face in, never out. Lastly, refrain from making any gestures while holding your cutlery; no one wants their dining companion waving pointy objects around.

Misuse of your napkin: The napkin should be used to carefully dab the corners of your mouth. It is not a blotter or a flag. The napkin should be open and spread across your lap during the meal and not put back on the table until the meal is concluded, when you should place it next to your plate. If you leave the table temporarily, place your napkin on your chair, then push your chair back under the table while you're gone.

Leaving lipstick stains: It's bad form, especially at a business meal, to leave lipstick on a glass or cup. To prevent this, try powdering your lips before applying lipstick and (discreetly) blot your lips before drinking. If you don't have a tissue with you, make a quick detour to the powder room for one or use a cocktail napkin from the bar.

Not breaking bread: Buttering an entire slice of bread then cutting it with your knife is a breach of basic table manners. Instead, tear bread into bite-sized pieces and butter each piece right before you plan to eat it.

Seasoning food before tasting it: This sends the message that you don't trust the chef and may be taken as an insult by your boss or whoever chose the restaurant.

Poor posture: Food doesn't go down well when you sit slumped over. And, frankly, you're not as attractive to your dining partner when you do this, either. So sit straight up -- you'll actually feel more comfortable.

Eating too quickly: Whether you're at McDonald's or a fancy restaurant, it's bad for your digestion -- not to mention unattractive -- to gulp food. Since dining with others is a shared experience, dining partners should generally have the same number of courses and start and finish each at about the same pace.

Picking your teeth: If you must remove something trapped between your teeth, excuse yourself and visit the rest room to do so.

Talking with your mouth full: The corollary is chewing with your mouth open. If your mouth has food in it, keep it closed until you swallow. Take small bites, finish chewing, smile ... and then carry on your part of the conversation.

Putting accessories on the table: Simply stated, don't do it. This rule includes purses, briefcases, keys, gloves, hats, cell phones (which should be turned OFF) and anything else that is not part of the meal. Why? It's unsightly and unsanitary.

There are other dining mistakes you can make, of course. Just remember that good manners and courtesy can get you through most meals. One further note about dining: Sitting in a smoking section doesn't give a diner the license to light up between courses. Smoke affects your dining companions' taste buds and sense of aesthetics. If you do smoke, save the cigarettes for after the entire meal, and please, a plate is not an ashtray.

Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thing.

[Pengo]

I basically went through the same crap to get it working for my firewall. Recompiling kernel on freebsd was not any easier. If you use what works without having to mess with it.. it will be fine. One thing, if you like BSD you might want to try Debian. It's a bit older but everything seems to always work. I use it at work and we have finally standardized all our servers to debian in our server farm (14 machines). Anyway, freebsd is ok.. but I believe that the it being a better server than a linux machine is a myth. The reality is it's probably a little less tempting to mess with so it doesn't have to many problems generally.

Without solid java support FreeBSD is unfortunately disqualified as even an option for me.

good for you

[Ender Ryan]

So, since you were too stupid to keep up with Kernel development in Linux, and were also too stupid to realize that you can simply apt-get everything with Debian or download RPM's with RedHat, which is essentially what you would do with *BSD, you switched to FreeBSD...

Glad you let us all know, this is such valuable information.

Re:good for you

[SumDeusExMachina]

So, since you were too stupid to keep up with Kernel development in Linux

What's your problem? Mistake the popluarity of your favorite OS for the girth of your penis? Did it occur to you that maybe people who want to get things done don't have the time to dick around with all the myriad patches and bugs that appear in the chaotic Linux development process?

Glad to see that you result to being insulting rather than constructive.

Tofu Sex Aids

[Big_Ass_Spork]

Tofu Sex Aids

Discover the Wonders of Vegetarian Self Stimulation

Tofu has an organic quality resembling human flesh. I have heard girlfriends divulge its texture as that of the male member when cooked/warmed.

I envision a marketing push by blue chip Tofu Mulitnationals to promote their product in a range of edible sex aids - both for men and women.

The strap - on Tofunator with vibrating multispeed tip would be a hit with lesbian vegetarian extremists who despise 'meat' of both kinds.

Feral type men who often have trouble with penetration due to over-pierced willies can safely 'deforest the untouched valleys' of the silken Tofu vagina.

Also in this range is the 'Falafel-Fist' for the earth-conscious fetish environmentalist, the natural spray on pheromone for shy hippies - 'Chick-Pea Magnet' and of course the 'Lentilly Lace' vegan underwear range - gauranteed to show off those politically hursuit thighs.

Yet another branch

[Anonymous Coward]

....just another reason it will be hard to achieve standardization within the Linux community.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[SumDeusExMachina]

One thing, if you like BSD you might want to try Debian.

I'd like Debian too, except for a few things:

It uses the overly-complicated runlevel system for startup scripts so it's harder to write your own. It uses the Linux kernel, with all the horrible hacks and sorry VM. Most of the Debian people are Free Software zealots. Sorry, but I prefer not to be at the mercy of a bunch of RMS clones when it comes to what software I run. Plus it makes them real assholes.

As far as solid Java support, FreeBSD does support Java, as reported in this Slashdot article.

PalmOS -mj branch

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew it had to happen one day! First the PalmOS has the -mj branch, and now linux does, too. True, we have the -ac branch and palm doesn't, but I'm still waiting for the Palm -cs branch to be ported over to linux.

The thin end of the wedge...

[boltar]

Ok , so some guy doesn't like the kernel and thinks he can improve it even more. Worthy aspiration
but doesn't he realise that fragmentation in the kernel (never mind the distributions) is just going
to lead to incompatabilities, confusing and ultimately users deserting linux in droves?
Don't believe me? Well I for one have recently switched to FreeBSD as I just got sick and tired
of supposedly Linux applications only running on this or that distribution with this or that library. Lifes too short.
Linus needs to nip this in the bud before it just becomes a disaster.

Stay tuned...

[Anonymous Coward]

...as we return to our regularly scheduled progra... I mean FUD:

As The Kernel Forks

In today's episode, Linus offically "gives the fuck up" (as his Transmeta shares drop below the value of the paper they're printed on) and becomes distracted from his usual dilligent kernel maintenance by drinking numerous bottels of vodka, while he sits in a dark corner of his Silicon Vally house rocking back and forth in a drunken stooper wishing the Northen California winters were darker and longer like his Finland home.

Will Linus kill himself after realizing he's nothing but a cheap, used tool who was exploited by the cold machinery of capitalism to no visiable benifit of *anyone* (including himself), for the simple reason that the pre-IPO Transmeta Suits needed to create enough buzz that their backers would survive their 10 months stock sale blackout period?

Will Intel's insidious, vial plan to acquired Transmeta at fire-sale prices and have Linus *accidently* killed in a corporate jet crash succeed?

Or.... will the forces of the good and unrealistic be realized as the Oil Cartel jacks up prices while the EPA simultaniously clamps down on coal fired power generation facilities, sending the cost of electricity skyward, effectivly grounding the usual F500 IT spending modius operandi and forcing a re-tool of all desktops to Transmeta powered laptops with solar panels in the cubicals next to the windows, while, at the same time, bringing ENRON back to life?

...stay tuned to find out!

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[Pengo]

As far as solid Java support, FreeBSD does support Java, as reported in this Slashdot article.

In my experience, Java on BSD doesn't scale. It core dumps often under load and performance isn't that great compared to linux (especially with IBM JVM). Linux api layer is not a smart thing to use on a production box imho... especially when my sleeping habits are at risk.

I haven't seen any real influence from the Stalin er *cough* Stallman side to negate the good experiences with the software. Most of my debian boxes are headless and on a high speed connection. Their package manager is a dream. (yes, I personally like it better than the bsd ports system.. and after figuring out the horid dselect tool find it strangely simple).

I agree though, for all the stalman might do for the world... he is enough to make me want to disassociate myself with the linux community as a whole.

Anyway, I am glad that bsd works well for ya.. I have used it in the past and never really had any problems with it other than lack of java support. I do enjoy hacking around on my wifes g4 w/OSX and will probably put osx on a ibook we have sitting on the shelf seldom used.

Cheers... happy new year.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD has both native java and is one of the easiest systems for configuring nat/firewall.

Read the man pages - it's really not difficult.

It's funny because it's true!

[ringbarer]

Linux is dead. XP killed it. No-one shall mourn its loss.

hear, hear!

[xeeno]

Which one you choose is all about who you are, what you have, and what you plan to do with it.
If you are a beginning unix user and have no clue about hardware and software in general, you're probably better off choosing linux. That way you can use a friendly, brainless distribution, and chances are your hardware will be supported no matter how wierd it is.
If you are somewhat clueful, then you're probably better off with freebsd, *assuming* that you have fully supported hardware. This may not have been the case a few years ago when the desktop was still pretty primitive, but these days the desktop is just as good as linux and unlike linux freebsd comes with a ports tree, which is awesome.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[GroovBird]

Oh, and you're blaming BSD?

Give me one good OS where Java runs smoothly as baby ass skin.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[phaze3000]

Novell Netware

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[rtaylor]

ipnat, ipf, and various other tools of that nature have modules installed by default.

Looking forward to the day when kernel modules are a 'load on use' resource. That is, if you try to access /dev/snd it'll load sound drivers until it finds one that works and goes with it. devfs will do some of that, and the rc.conf options also do some of it (in 4.3 or so it does for ipnat).

echo 'ipnat_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

The above should load the ipnat kernel module and get you on your way at the next reboot.

NOTE: The above statement depends on ipfilter running, so:

echo 'ipfilter_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

may be required as well depending on current configuration.

Kernel tree..

[Anonymous Coward]

SO .. i'm curious as to what the major differences are between the different kernel trees. 1. Are they just added compatibility tweaks 2. more usability features - for us less inclined "LINUX" users.

This is a really bad idea

[wizkid]

The linux kernel already has 3 trees. Adding more trees will fragment the kernel development even more. The 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5 trees are enough. By adding more trees, kernel development will be slowed way to much. Lets concentrate on standardizing, not fragmenting the kernel. The different tracks for this new tree aughta be incorporated into the 2.5 tree. If anything works out to be a big improvement, then back-port it into the 2.4 tree.

Re:This is a really bad idea

[josepha48]

Not really. This is really no different than Redhat having their own kernel that they ship with their distribution. They include none standard patches. They were including ext3 before it became part of the default tree. They include lmsensors, and many other patches. SuSE does (or used to when I tried their distro) ship their own custom kernel.

So this is an official 'fork()' of the linux kernel. It really depends on how they do this. If they take the default kernel or current 2.4.x and add their patches and work with that they can actually send patches back to the main kernel which could make it into 2.5 / 2.6.

Oh and their are more tahn 3 kernel trees, 2.0.x (yes it is still used), 2.2.x, 2.4.x, 2.5.x and the -ac tree, which seems to have gone as Alan stepped aside (I could be wrong about this). There are also ALL sorts of projects out there that have patches to the kernel tree. So what?

The only issue arrises when things like glibc become effected or the kernel structures and people program for a particular tree. If that happens then their could be problems.

Re:This is a really bad idea

[psamuels]

By adding more trees, kernel development will be slowed way to much. Lets concentrate on standardizing, not fragmenting the kernel.

No offense, but are you saying this as a kernel developer, or as a bystander? The developers themselves don't seem hostile to multiple trees at all - they usually maintain their own tree anyway. And judging by how many people developed against 2.2-ac rather than 2.2-linus, I'd say they like working that way.

The drawback here is if MJC doesn't accept responsibility for merging patches upstream to Marcelo. Alan has always been very good about this.

The different tracks for this new tree aughta be incorporated into the 2.5 tree.

Some of the patches in -mjc are being considered for 2.5 - some are not - for technical reasons. A maintainer doesn't have to choose between supporting 2.4 and 2.5 - why not do both? And if you want to support only 2.5, let MJC do the backport to 2.4. Conversely, if you want to support only 2.4, let Dave Jones do the forward port.

Sounds like a good system to me.

RML needs your support!

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, let's get _all_ of RML's patches into the _main_ kernel. Show your support by visiting here and signing the petition!

RML NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT!

Re:RML needs your support!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice retarded moderation.

Excellent.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[mdray]

Without solid java support FreeBSD is unfortunately disqualified as even an option for me.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/23/031425 7&mode=nested

2.4-stable-experimental

[acumen]

It's more like a merge of experimental advanced kernel features, but much more faster and rapidly maintained than the dying FOLK project.

Basically it could be a good idea maintaining (read *actively* maintaining) more diverse ports of the kernel tree, though it's more coatic than just having a stable and development branches.

The problematic side of this stable-expermintal tree is locating the cause of crashes when instabilty strikes. When the patches are seperated, it's easier to isolate the cause.

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[nmos]

"* It uses the overly-complicated runlevel system for startup scripts so it's harder to write your own."

How hard is is to put your script in /etc/init.d and run "update-rc scriptname defaults runlevel"?

"* Most of the Debian people are Free Software zealots. Sorry, but I prefer not to be at the mercy of a bunch of RMS clones when it comes to what software I run. Plus it makes them real assholes."

This is just too stupid for words. You do know that Debian has a non-free section right? I'm grateful to the Debian folks for being such "zealots" because it means that I don't have to worry about licensing issues when I sell or modify a Debian based product.

yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another *linux branch. Big deal. I know
people who are still running 2.2! There really
is no need to keep on updating just to keep up
with the Jones.

So you want ONLY ONE BRANCH?

[Courageous]

It's funny. With all these naysayers who say they only want ONE branch, you have to begin to wonder what the benefits of open source are really supposed to be to them. The ability to grab source and create an improvement is the heart and soul of open source. If you don't like that, do yourself a favor and run windows. Or something.

C//

Re:So you want ONLY ONE BRANCH?

[VB]

Unless of course you happen to be looking for a kernel stable enough to run a milo-based Alpha, or something. Kernels in Linus' tree won't compile after 2.4.3; in Alan's tree after 2.4.9-ac1 they compile but don't boot my XL300. Granted it's pretty arcane hardware, but it still works and I want to use it for something. Wasting countless hours on deciding which and attempting to compile/boot umpteen kernels is not a good use of time. There's already production/development; Alan/Linus, and several other kernel tress. It's important that one of them remains stable and solid code.

The *real* question is:

[soupforare]

Will this new dev patch increase performance when playing Linux Quake on my 486DX/2??

Re:The *real* question is:

[CTho9305]

Probably not, but I'm sure aaquake / textmode quake2 might help your framerate a little ;)

Re:The *real* question is:

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, aaquake is slower than quake.

I'm not so sure this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is, at best, a toy operating system. At worst it is the kind of subversive force in America that Stalin only dreamed of creating.

There are "cells" reporting to unknown leaders that only go by names like "L33t_Kernal_Hax0r" that cannot be located - after all, "living in my momma's basement cause I have no real world skills to speak of" is not a true street address.

There is the Marxist concept of "give what you can, take what you need." Only, none of these people can give anything, excepting the few heroes of the revolution that have their own roach filled apartments and must give blow jobs in parks monthly to meet their rent. Yet, they all feel the need to take, take, take. MP3s? "We must have them! It is about freedom for the artists!!" Software? "We must have it for free! It will be good then!!" Movies? "Yes, we must have them for free!!!" Of course, the dirty secret all of these "give it to me free!!!" people are trying to hide is that they have no resources to actually acquire anything legitimate, due to their pathetic skill set and the fact that society has no use for them.

Society, in fact, had no use for them even during their formative years. That's why their lunch money was stolen. Darwin's law was trying to assert itself, but overprotectively indulgent parenting prevented such a thing from happening.

Re:I'm not so sure this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have resources...but I can not see paying $300 for winXP when it wont even load on my computer because I do not have IDE??!! Jeez! Redhat I got off an ftp and installed for nothing.....and this is wrong???

btw...did anyone tell microshit that some ppl have SCSI cd-roms?

I like linux because it works, it is flexible, I can modify it to my hearts content, and billy did not get one red cent from it. They can fragment it to hell and back and I still prefer it.

:)

Re:I'm not so sure this is a good thing

[vrmlknight]

"Redhat I got off an ftp and installed for nothing.... and billy did not get one red cent from it"

well neither did Redhat

Good news for embedded applications!!!

[PastaAnta]

Most ./ readers seem to think that it is all about Servers vs. The Desktop.

I can safely say: IT IS NOT!!!

For a great deal of embedded applications it is a necessity to have lower and deterministic latency. Therefore these patches will raise the acceptance of Linux as an alternative embedded OS.

I guess it will be a long time though before Linux itself will have REALLY low (microseconds) latencies and hard real time behaviour. Right now this can only be achieved with addons like RTAI or RTLinux.

The RTAI and RTLinux addons are really real time schedulers that run the Linux kernel as lowest priority thread. This gives an added complexity for the real time programmer. But maybe this "sandbox" approach is really a good thing and the way to go for hard real time, as it will be almost impossible to guarantee hard real time with a complex beast like the Linux kernel.

But for many applications the latency and quality of service you can get with the patched kernel will probably be enough - so keep up the good work!!! :-)

Re:Good news for embedded applications!!!

[greenrd]

Indeed. There was a good, technical article on how the preemptive kernel patch is good for embedded systems etc. in Dr. Dobbs Journal recently.

Try doom

[Billly Gates]

I personally like doom1 better then quake1 and I find the graphics better. Doom1 and Doom2 run fluidly on 486 systems with decent video cards. You would need the windows program Kali to play an internet game. I don't think there is a linux equilivant. Doom1 and Doom2 are freely available now and there is an active linuxdoom port believe it or not. Just don't download the really old one from idsoftware. ITs not compatible with any linux version above 1.1x. Try Tkdoom which is currently under active development and should run on modern linux kernels. It may eat up memory on your 486 though.

Re:Try doom

[Radnimax]

http://gtkali.sourceforge.net/ Kali is great and made for most popular os' http://kali.net

I'm tired of people complaining

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop complaining, start writing code if you think you can do better! And, a normal user shouldn't have to bother with the kernel, AC/Linus said that many times on the LKML

dumbass

[Ender Ryan]

The Linux development process is much, much different from *BSD, different but not worse or better. If you want to always have a stable kernel, use a distro and only use the updates specifically for that distro, which is equivalent to what you do when you use *BSD. Debian is an excellent distro, RedHat is pretty good, Slackware rocks(not for what you want, really), Mandrake is good, etc.

If you don't want to keep up with kernel development in Linux, you don't friggin have to, so STFU, you're full of shit.

note: My apparent hostility is not actually real, I'm only being halfway serious, so, no offense is intended.

Astroturf alert!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a microsoft employee whose only job is to troll public web sites and make outrageous claims in order to make it appear that that open source and free software are at war with each other when in fact the opposite is true.

article depts (somewhat OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL! There's a little "from the blah-blah-blah" dept" subtitle for each /. article. Here are the depts for 3 articles posted this morning (January 1st):

• from the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you dept.: World Technology Awards 2001
  
• from the make-jello-using-one-third-vodka dept.: Microfluidics: Miniature Chemistry Labs
  
• from the wild-cherry-jello-seems-to-be-the-best dept.: New Kernel 2.4 Development Branch (-mjc)
  

Re:article depts (somewhat OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

the blue jello is good too.

The reason why these patches are not in ...

[KidSock]

a stable Kernel is because the're not stable or they're not a performace enhancement. Robert Love's "preemptable kernel patch" will crash an SMP system with certain drivers. If you have a UP system or you know your hardware is kosher then you'll be OK. I don't think it's for production systems. It's more of a desktop performace enhancement. As for Rik's reverse mapping VM code, the last graphs from Safemode (it's a person), showed Andrea's VM still performed better. In fact, Rik's code still has problems on low memory systems (caused a lockup in one of Safemode's tests). But of course it's good to see these patches getting some visability. They might prove to be useful after some time.

Re:this sounds really cool but just call a fork a

[Anonymous Coward]

fork.

Avoid the rush!

[kubrick]

<SARCASM>Act now! Avoid the rush! You too can distribute a personalized Linux kernel -- with your OWN INITIALS tacked on to the end!</SARCASM>

What with the recently defunct (?) 2.4.x-ac, the new 2.4.y-mjc, the merged 2.5.z-dj, and also the 2.a.b-aa and others (not forgetting the 'official' kernel), this is getting a bit confusing!

For something like this (-mjc) I'd most likely find it easier to track the particular patches I need for my system, as someone else is unlikely to replicate my exact setup. It's the same reason I compile my kernel in the first place, instead of blindly accepting the distro default.

Is the likely usage of this branch worth the effort of maintaining it? I guess that's up to the maintainer to decide...

EVEN MORE UNDOCUMENTED COMPILE-TIME OPTIONS?

[fdisk3hs]

Would these be 'under the hood' updates, or are we going to have EVEN MORE UNDOCUMENTED COMPILE-TIME OPTIONS? I ordered OpenBSD to try it out because of the 6-month release cycle to escape the ./configure, download this, ./configure, etc. loop I keep getting stuck in.
ARG...

Re:Ugg, try installing ipnat on freebsd.. same thi

[ThatComputerGuy]

Java on Netware 5 is amazingly slow... It's make you wonder, "WTF were they thinking??"