Slashdot Mirror
Linus says 2.6 kernel will be out by June 2003
Xpilot writes "C|Net reports that Linus Torvalds predicts 2.6 will be out by June next year during a talk on his Geek Cruise. Linus called the next release '2.6', but knowing him that may be just a working title;)"
Update: 10/26 17:29 GMT by T : An anonymous reader adds "Rob Landley has published the latest list of features being considered for inclusion" in the new kernel; ... "the long and impressive list is available in more or less human readable form on Linux and Main."
Or did he just have one too many Margaritas on the Cruise :)
Rapid Nirvana
This will be March, 2004 in "Linux Years."
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
If they continue like that, we'll soon have 2.5.100 ... chicks dig fancy kernel numbers.
Life sucks.
Unless, of course, Linus decides that there must be a set time between when the features are frozen and when the firse betas hit the servers.
I'm getting fairly excited about this, even though I don't plan on using any of these new features. Does that mean I read /. too much? ;)
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
How about "Linux XP" -- eXtended Procrastination
For most users, Linux is around 8.0 anyway :-) Don't ask'em the difference between linux and the packaging around it a.k.a distribution..
have you been defaced today?
Nah. As with most open-source projects, there is this sickly fear of ones-place-rollover in the version number. That's why you have so many programs with a version number like 0.9999.9.9.9.9.9.4
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The cruise docked in Jamaica and everybody had a ball.
:).
We were told that just a few of the speakers would be presenting in Jamaica so 3 of us drove down to the pier to colect them.
Ha.
we neaded all 3 cars plus 2 busses to haul them to "the Ruins". We sat ESR and Linux on a panel with 4 other senior geaks and asked them some lame questions for an hour or so.
All the baby Linuses were there and Tove is realy cool. everybody seams to think the Coffee here is great (exact words: "The best I have ever tasted") so we will try to have a few bags ready for the next deligation.
PS: No the Geak Cruise dosn't normaly hold talks on land for the locals. However JaLUG asked nicely
Kevin Forge.
Jamaica Linux Users Group. JaLUG
Founding member.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
He never said that.
Nowhere in the article did he even imply anything like the last part of this quote (it's an all-new instruction set that the Transmeta Crusoe processors can't emulate). If you wanted to make a point you should have put this statement outside of the quote.
I can't understand why the parent was modded up.
-- kryps
something to the effect of "Now you can hold your breath until 2.6 is released"?
Because IA-64 requires a lot of work to support for mediocre results on an atrociously expensive platform that appears to be on a glide path to catastrophic failure. Those efforts could be more productively spent elsewhere.
Meanwhile, x86-64 is much simpler to support, the platform will be cost competitive with current top-of-the-line x86 systems, and you don't have to recompile all your programs if you don't want to. 4-way and 8-way multiprocessor systems ought to be semi-affordable too. In short, it's a far better philosophical and practical fit.
No.. this is just the kernel... and it is called linux
\m/
" I don't play RPGs, I have a JOB. I don't watch anime, I have a LIFE."
/. tells me otherwise.
The fact that you've posted 24 comments in the last 3 days on
Anyway, for the record, I play RPGs, I don't have a job, I watch lots of anime. According to you I "have no life". Why is it that I am blissfully happy then ?
graspee
I think he feels that way as well. Its just that he has learned that the corporate world likes release dates and the one he "gave" is in all likelyhood a resonable estimate. I see nothing in the GNU/Linux philosophy that states that you can't try to set a schedule and stick to it. Just because Redhat says "when its done" doesn't mean there isn't a giant whiteboard at their headquarters saying a certain date is "D-day".
Also this isn't some sort of sign of selling out, but I do think if anyone is to guesstimate when a release is likely, they talked to the right person. He is after all the final authority when it comes to releasing kernels.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
That's the best one-sentence indictment of the Inanium I've seen to date.
Intel's plan was to come up with a new, different architecture that no one could clone because Intel had patents on key parts. They did. But it wasn't a better, new, different architecture. It was worse. So it seems headed for the Intel niche processor department, along with the i860 and i960, both of which are quite reasonable RISC machines that nobody cared about.
AMD's 64-bit architecture is straightforward. It's IA-32 expanded to 64 bits, with a few more registers and some of the little-used stuff removed. That's not hard to support. With Linux support, that's likely to be the mainstream machine for cost-effective server farms for the next five years or so. Assuming AMD ships the thing soon.
All right, I'll bite.
That's why you run through the configuration utility before you compile the kernel. You don't need to branch the kernel source to limit features in the kernel. You just don't select them when you compile the kernel. Voila. Your kernel does not have those features. Do you think when Oscar Office Worker got that copy of Windows 2000 Workstation and Mitch MIS Admin got that copy of Windows 2000 Server, they came from different source repositories? I doubt it.
With that said, the kernel source is getting gigantic, and it would be nice if they released source bundles geared towards those who might be compiling in more desktop-oriented features and those who might be compiling for a server.
By far, it is not a desktop replacement, but when that isn't how you try and use it you are fine. Their cpu was not built to be a killer-super-fast-cpu (and it isn't). I bet if I sit you down on a computer powered by an 800mhz transmeta and a p4 2ghz, you won't even be able to tell the difference with "normal*" tasks.
It all comes down to how one plans on using the technology. Just because _you_ think it is unacceptably slow does not mean others think the same thing. I used to upgrade my PC all the time because it just wasn't fast enough. I stopped doing that around the 1ghz mark because now it is fast enough. To throw a good quote in here... "A blur is just a blur." (this quote was back when doing a 'dir' in dos scrolled by in a blur on a 486sx-33, and it looked the same on a pentium-233.)
*Normal being just checking mail, AIM (or your IM client of choice), Web browsing, Generic stuff like that. Of course this assumes that everything else is the same (HD speed, ram size etc).
bah, I'll just submit this now
That list is just the list of features that are not yet merged and thus need an imminent decision before the feature freeze next Thursday. It's also not especially long or impressive, since these are minor features and a much greater number of patches of that kind are already in. Of the stuff on that list, probably only IPSEC and one of the LVM replacements (needed since LVM1 has been removed) will impact most users, though the crash dumps would also be nice.
The significant changes in 2.6 will be the new block layer and attendant performance/scalability improvements, the new NPTL thread support, ALSA, and the XFS and JFS merges. See Guillaume Boissiere's list for more.
In this interview with Robert Love in July, he predicted 18 months before 2.6 gets released(that would make the release early in 2004).
I'm more inclined to go with Robert Love's estimate considering 2.4's late release.
I think I may need to revise that (although I did go on to say a year from then, which would be summer of 2003)... the kernel is remarkably stable at this point and if we can stick to the freeze and get enough testers, I really believe we can have a code freeze in early 2003 and a release not too long thereafter. Five or six months from now seems very doable.
And I really encourage testers. We need you. Part of the VM debacle in 2.4 was we just did not understand the corner-cases because there were not enough testers testing on enough different machines on enough different workloads. We need to know where catatrophic VM failures are, where areas of high latency exist, and in general where the bad behavior is. This kernel is remarkably better in all aspects than 2.4... it is very smooth. But it needs testers to ease us into a stable release.
Nope. In this lkml thread, Linus says: