Slashdot Mirror
Kernel Summit Wrapup
Jonathan Corbet at LWN has posted a terrific summary of the first Day of the Ottawa Kernel Summit, and you should expect the second day soon. In it he relates the greatest hits of the first day's talks, including the AMD Hammer Port, Block I/O, Modules, and more. For mp3s or oggs of this event, check out the Kernel Summit MP3 Repository on SourceForge. The big news is the desire to feature freeze 2.5 within 4 or 5 months. Halloween. I've posted a very small gallery of the group pictures from the summit on my site.
I just saw the link on... Slashdot. Gee, these little side boxes are helpful sometimes. ;)
Well, I know ext3 is great for ease of upgrade and backward compatibility with ext2. You can convert the root filesystem to ext3 without remounting read-only. Also, any ext3 filesystem can be mounted as ext2.
IIRC, it's also more "middle of the road" that reiserfs. What I mean by this is that (performance-wise), it supposedly eliminates the extreme cases. So, you get sligly worse handling of many small files, but eliminate some of the possible ultra-slow cases when dealing with large files.
Monday is a horrible way to spend 1/7 of your life.
"Your mouse has moved. Windows must be restarted for the changes to take effect. Reboot now? [OK]"
Watching karma fall through the floor for supporting Microsoft...
I have Windows 2000 on one of my systems, and this rebooting-after-everything is not nearly as much of a problem as it once was. Yes, after installing critical updates, the system does need to be rebooted, and some software still requests reboots on installation (which I typically ignore). But gone are the days where changing an IP address or other network settings would require a reboot. That's one of the big things Microsoft tried to do w/ W2K, cut down the number of trivial things that required reboots.
(Disclaimer: the system I'm typing this on is a Linux box that hasn't been rebooted in almost six months)
For those of you who might be wondering, the small PC that Alan Cox is shown as using in the photo is an IBM PC110. ;)
It's a full x86 PC, not a PocketPC or PDA - and what's really amazing is it was put on the market in 1995.
I own three of the things... in 2000, the last stocks were sold for ridiculously low prices (compared to the price when it was originally sold, anyway), and I happened to have some cash in my pocket. At least they're small enough to not annoy my wife
Anybody wanting to buy one should be able to find one on ebay fairly cheaply.
Broken binary compatability is considered by Linus to be a feature, not a bug. Essentially the kernel developers are unwilling to be constrained in their maniuplation of kernel internals by people who don't want to provide source.
The arguments around this have been hashed out time and time again on the l-k mailing list.
XFS is quick when working with large files. I do a lot of audio work and the difference with ext2 is very noticeable. Since I haven't used ReiserFS I cannot make a comparison between XFS and it, but XFS is a big improvement over ext2, especially on large drives.
Other XFS features (although I can't say how well they work since I haven't tested them) include ACLs and the possibility to reserve a partition for "realtime" use, i.e. to provide a guaranteed minimum data rate.
The biggest XFS drawback as far as I can see is that it is not a standard part of the kernel. Whenever a new kernel appears you need to wait for a patch against that kernel version and apply it. This can lead to conflicts if you track multiple patches.
For most uses I imagine any of the 4 mentioned filesystems would suffice. Having tried only XFS, I can say that it is a definite improvement over ext2 though.
Neither does a binary one. Point is that whether something is open source or not, there should be a solution.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
The reality right now is that the vast majority of drivers do provide source, so everything works pretty well. Requiring backwards binary compatibility for the modules interface would hurt everybody (because it creates cruft and a maintenance headache) and benefit only a few short-sighted companies
Remember that the general attitude towards binary-only modules is "we'll tolerate it, but if it breaks you keep both pieces". Nobody is demanding source, they just want to minimize the damage of closed-source code in the kernel. There's no reason everybody should suffer because of a few companies.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
When will the ability to run a .class file from a command line be part of the kernel?
Since at least version 2.2. See BINFMT_JAVA (obsolete) and BINFMT_MISC when compiling your kernel.
What about them? For a start, NVidia's decision to release their drivers only as binary certainly shouldn't affect the design of the kernel. But to carry on, how often do you actually update lm_sensors? I run it too, but since it reports the values for all sensors installed on my system, I can't really imagine a reason why I'd want to upgrade it.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client