Linux 3.0

An anonymous reader writes "In a post to the kernel mailing list, Rob Landley, sitting in for the floating Linus, cracks the whip over what will be in Linux 3.0. His orders are on Linux and main."

Comments

WhooHoo

[papasui]

Ready - Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons) http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/
This one specifically should significantly help Linux take off on more devices.

Why do i care?

[nurb432]

Not to sound like a troll, or flaming developers, but seriously, from a users standpoint, why do i care?

What i have now works great, give me concrete reasons i should worry about a new release.

Now as a developer i DO care.. I'm just looking at this from the stand point of a normal user ( my customers ) who hear the same stuff from M$ or apple.. 'new and improved, you must upgrade now'... And we used that as a selling point for Linux..

Re:Why do i care?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Absolutly. If what you have now works, then by all means, don't upgrade......with a caveat. As with any OS, after 3.0 or 2.6 whatever it's going to be called comes out, then bug fixes may not be done for that much longer to the 2.4 series. After a while, you will probably want to upgrade anyway especially if your company pays for support from Red Hat or whoever.

The upside with Linux is that with every new version, you usually don't have to upgrade hardware all that much or at least as much as say Windows.

My only complaint.....some installers now (Red Hat's and Mandrake's in particular) won't let you install on a low end machine ( I know there may be other versions, but I am talking about the default installer.....). By low end, I mean 486 and Pentium (No Bloody II, !!! or 4). Granted, this don't hurt many, because those in the know can just get Debian and install it.....but what makes Red Hat and Mandrake so certain that you can't get something to run on those machines? It seems, to me, that maybe if they had one low end image that let you just install it anyway and just deal with the circumstances afterwards would be a better thing to do. Like I said, for most, it doesn't matter. You can pick up Pentium II's (old machines) for peanuts now, so that guy can go and upgrade that decrepit Pentium 100. But my point is, why be like Microsoft and force ANY upgrade? At some point, you could drop that support, but there are alot of those machines laying around yet and they can serve a purpose before going to the landfill.

Is media automount in the kernel yet?

[Bonker]

Automount of removeable media like every other modern OS - Windows does it. MacOS does it. Even DOS 6.2 did it. Why doesn't Linux automount (please note that I did not say 'Autoplay') removeable media? (Note, I only use 2.4 kernels in servers. This may have changed recently, and I justed missed it, but...)

Reiser4

[KagatoLNX]

I *sooooo* hope the Hans gets off his butt and gets ReiserFS 4 in this one. If you follow the LKML closely (or just read the Kernel Traffic, http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html) then you may have heard he's sweating a bit on getting it in.

Reiser4 may just revolutionize the way the some people do stuff. I mean, next system I want to be able to do:

# cat /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
jim: x:100:100:jim:/home/jim:/bin/bash
# cat /etc/passwd/jim/uid
100
# echo /bin/ksh > /etc/passwd/jim/shell
# cat /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
jim: x:100:100:jim:/home/jim:/bin/ksh

All that *and* have transactional data commits with a very small performance hit!

(ReiserFS Trolls: Go ahead, bring it on!)

Re:Reiser4

[BJH]

He's going to submit it on the 27th. Linus gets back on the 27th, but probably won't actually start looking at pending patches until the 29th or 30th. I'd say it's got a 50-50 chance of getting in to the first 2.6-pre kernel, but an excellent chance of getting in before 2.6 is actually released (don't worry about the Halloween freeze - there hasn't been a major kernel release in living memory that didn't have some enormous chunk of code dropped into it at the last minute).

New console layer

[jaymzter]

I for one am totally psyched about re-writing the console sublayer. It's so aesthetically annoying to be running a multi-headed system, yet be reserved to only one head when on a tty. I think this has a high geek factor

obvious missing patches...

[Lumpy]

Many of you dont like it, but delivering Linux to the masses... the LPP (Linux Progress Patch) is highly important and need to be incorperated into the kernel so that it doesnt become a "left behind" item.

Yes, not seeing all the bootup messages is not highly important... but to a timid user that freaks when the computer beeps it is important. (I agree, people like that need to be kept away from technology... but these people here HAVE to work.)

Linux's acceptance on the desktop needs to have "eye-candy" like this that doesnt lower performance.

AOL???

[brunes69]

There are still 7 days till the end of Linus's cruise, but that's not much time to get guinea pigs to publicly pipe up with a hearty "AOL!" of support for your work...

I didn't think a hearty endorsement by AOL would be good news for anything!

DOS didn't have automount.

[Inoshiro]

DOS had stateless device access. Until you tried to look at a device, DOS would not touch the device (floppy drive, hd, or CDROM drive). But when you did change to the device, it would try and read in its base directory and bootsector.

Windows emulates its behaviour towards floppy disk drives, as you will find out very painfully if you click on the A: on a computer without a floppy drive (which, for me, is all of them), or without a disk in the drive.

Automount only works on hardware that gives feedback on when media is inserted (such as a CDROM drive). To prevent Badness (TM) in the blocklayer, the automount has traditionally been eschewed in favour of explicit mount. Why? Try removing a CD that's being read from in Win9x, and watch the blue-screen "Please insert CD labelled ..." as the kernel catches a block layer exception. This can be worked around by adding drive locks every time the drive is accessed, but it's generally considered to be a hairy problem best solved by having a smarter user.

Of course, many distributions include the (separate) automount patch anyways, and people who want this behaviour won't be rolling their own kernels any time soon.

Re:My most anticipated feature

[pcidevel]

I develop drivers for Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (for a PCI card that my company makes). I would love to see a Kernel dump for a particular problem I am trying to debug at the moment! :)

Of course, stupid mistakes in Solaris or HP-UX kills their kernel and results in waiting for the machine to reboot. Stupid mistakes in Linux results in a kernel panic with the output sent to the syslog (9 times out of 10 bad code doesn't kill the entire Kernel, so no waiting on the machine to restart), so I definately think that Linux has the upper hand as far as handling poor kernel space code.

Re:Why aren't Oopses dumped to swap?

[Sheetrock]

I can only guess, but two reasons this might be the case are that the swap doesn't necessarily have to reside in its own partition but can be in a file or simply unused on a system, or (more likely) that this prevents the possibility of obliterating the dump in the process of trying to view it. Also, the software apparently lets you do a 'crash dump' from a live system, which would be inconvenient to have overwrite swap...

This seems like the safest option, because it's isolated from the Linux system at any other point, but it would be nice to get the swap option as well for people who aren't interested in the fancy stuff unless something goes seriously wrong.

Re:3.0? bah

[Shanep]

And of those, the only decent ones are

98SE and 2000 (4.1.2222 and 5.0.2195).

Actually I agree with you. 95 is best left to die. 98 is decent.

What the hell are you guys smoking?! : )

Win2k is great, and NT4 OK, comparitively speaking. But ALL of the DOS based Windows suck severely. I've been supporting them all since 3.0, I'm amazed there is *anyone* who thinks 98 is at all decent.

XP is just incredible. Decent foundation with 95 stability and quirks. I fail to see how MS could possibly have made it so damn bad.

OT: multi-{headed,keyb} sys (Re:New console layer)

[alfaiomega]

It's so aesthetically annoying to be running a multi-headed system, yet be reserved to only one head when on a tty.

Will it be easily possible (or maybe it is now, then excuse my ignorance) to have e.g. a system with 4 monitors, 4 keyboards and 4 mice to act like a server and 4 diskless terminals, only cheaper? I suppose it'd be easier to have few text consoles then few X servers, but I have really no idea. It would be cool to have graphic cards with mouse and keyboard sockets in them, but I don't think there's such a thing, at least I've never found anything like that.