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Linus Says Pre-2.6 is Coming
gomoX writes "As seen on C|Net , Linus has announced that the pre-2.6 series will be starting in early July. Despite not having been able to meet the release goal for 2.6 in June 2003, the next stable version is not as far away as you may think. You can take your guess based on the fact there was a 9 month period between first test version of 2.4 and the official release of 2.4.0 on January 2001."
No you can't. Linus has always maintained that a kernel will be released "when it's done". Why would he change now?
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
In fact, 2.5 isn't that bad right now... certainly, it would be crazy to use it on a production system unless you really know what you're doing[1], but it's quite usable, and the scheduling has really improved.
;)
[1] in which case you probably wouldn't use it on said production system...
So what's the easiest way to use new versions, use something like Gentoo or Linux From Scratch? Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
(of course, a beta version of Linux is probably more stable than a release version of Windows, but I can actually do something with Linux if/when it blows up in my face.)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Because OS X doesn't run on my PC.
So what hot new features can we expect from the new 2.6 Kernel
Even the regular Gentoo kernel has a lot of extra patches in it, including the O(1) Scheduler, and Low-latency scheduling; works great for me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I truly believe the time for linux has come. It has always been stable and powerful (as all you slashdotters already know), but now it is really as easy to use as Windows....I tried Mandrake 7.2 but gave up after 1 month for various reasons. Now I have Mandrake 9.1, and I was very pleasantly surprised how polished it was... and easy to use! It is now my primary OS at home. MS, eat your heart out!
I am using a rock solid 2.5.70 since its released and its performs just great! And having Morton and Torvalds at OSDL is a good thing (tm) :)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Your "Overt Sauce" model is clearly breaked ! Windows has been way beyond 2.6 (3.1 to be exact) since what ? 11 years ?
KernelTrap is running a story on an interview Alan Cox gave at LinuxUser & Developer Expo 2003 in Birmingham, U.K. A summary of Alan's talk is also available.
Will this be simply a kernel upgrade and I'm running 2.6? Or... will I have to wait for a distro to release their 2.6 version?
"To deny our own impulses, is to deny the very thing that makes us human." - Mouse
not to be nitpicky or anything, but technically, shouldn't future versions of linux be referred to as GNU/SCO?
SP4 does nothing else but fix bugs. Kernel 2.6 adds quite alot of new features so its not really that much of a valid comparsion.
Please, Please, Please don't compare the two. Being an Windows administrator (a minor devil in some pantheons?), I wouldn't wish SP4 equivalent instability generating changes/autoupdate problems upon anyone.
Ok, I give up, why you?
Mod me down as troll if you like, but none of these sounds like anything I should have been waiting for.
Microsoft deserves to be raked over the coals, and the government IS out to get you.
That doesn't mean that the editors aren't lazy and slower than sloths, though.
-- Darl McBride
What they don't get in timeliness they make up for in volume (dupes).
hotpluggable CPU sounds a hoot! I've always wanted to try that.
My question is this:
There was some hesitancy, upon the official release of kernel 2.4, based upon some bugs etc...
I'm wondering, does the kernel - generally speaking - get more and more stable. For example, will the first release of 2.6 be more stable than the first release of 2.4. I realise that there are new additions to the kernel, and with that new problems will probably emerge. However, comparatively speaking, does it make sense that the kernel's evolution will lean towards stability with each release in the cycle, or will it generally be unnoticable?
Just curious.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I have absolutly nothing to add of a technical nature to this story, so I will delude you with a rambling trip down memory lane (comprised completly of anecdotes from 2.2).
;)
My first taste of linux was phatLinux on my brand new p2-400 (128MB of pc 100 ram I liked). 3 months later I had built a sub 400 dollar computer to play around with and bought (yes paid money for) Linux Mandrake 6.5 from Wal-Mart. From there I began learning about this kernel thing (and my joys when I found make menuconfig and make xconfig, have you ever tried make config? ewww...) Well that went fine and fun, I added options, made modules all the fun stuff you do, but it was still in the same 2.2 vein that came with mandrake. Then 2.4.0 final was relased and I compiled and installed my first new kernel. Everything was new and faster. DevFS was a godsend, the ppp and bsd compression routines made my modem fast (or somthing I went from 2.5 kb/s downloads to 5-6 kb/s after recompiling). Since then I have also come to love dri, premptive and low latency patches, and all these other backported goodies. I am waiting on 2.6 final before I play with any of the new features (I didn't play with 2.3 or 2.5). Ok I am done. And I didn't even mention Gentoo... oh wait... damn.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Me neither, but the new scheduler is nice, POSIX ACLs look sweet and ALSA included in the main kernel release, and the cryptoapi. Plus all the incremental upgrades to drivers etc.
The Windows kernel hasn't changed significantly since the NT4 -> Win2K change. The biggest improvement in the XP kernel was pre-faulting the pages of large processes. Meanwhile, in 2.6, the block I/O layer, VM layer, scheduler, and sound system are brand new. And the whole kernel was made preemptible! Shortly after 2.6, ReiserFS 4 (which looks very promising from initial benchmarks) will be released. In all, 2.4 -> 2.6 will be like NT4 -> XP!
PS> Before anyone bitches about rewrites being a bad thing, look at things this way. Such extensive changes are necessary for the continually growing range of systems Linux is expected to run on. 2.0 and 2.2 were greatfor single CPU servers, or SMP machines with only a few processors. 2.4 is very usable for heavy-duty machines with many more processors. 2.6 (along with the changes that help interactivity) will make an excellent kernel for desktop machines and workstations. In 2.8, the focus will be on optimizing the core algorithms to run on large-scale NUMA machines.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Kernel is as stable as the rocky mountains. Been compiling Mozilla non-stop in gcc for the last 3 hours with no problems.
It'll be nice when it finally comes out, because I'll be able to point people doing audio work to Linux. Right now I have to say "well, Linux is better than Windows for this, but only if you apply the low-latency, pre-emptible kernel, and variable HZ (with HZ set to 1000) patches," which is a bit more involved than most people who are just doing audio work want to deal with. Once 2.6.x comes out I can just point them to the stock kernel.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You know what's even more sad?
There's NO SUCH WORD AS PREIMMINENT. I wrote that in lettering that you'd be most likely to understand, by the way.
Here's the definition of "imminent:"
About to occur; impending: in imminent danger.
Now..what is preimminent, exactly? Before it's about to occur? Just slightly behind when it..almost happens? And how can -any- site be a "preimminent" Linux news site? Do you expect Slashdot to post news that's just about to possibly happen?
Maybe you should go back to sniffing glue and crapflooding. Seems to be what you invalids do best.
I don't think an OS X release equates to a Darwin release, and OS X of course doesn't run on Intel hardware.
"You, sir, are an asshat." - Unknown slashbot
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Jesus. The guy offers some historical perspective and you gotta be all surly... Deep breaths, man.
It's so good that they skipped version 4-94 and went straight to version 95! Then another major leap. They skipped with version 96-1999 and went on to version 2000! Whew, you won't see Linus doing that!
Well, the nanosecond patch is critical for make on fast computers, since it uses filesystem timestamps. If you're running gentoo on a brand new desktop it might be a good idea.
The fbdev patch reduces the size of the framebuffer, so if you like framebuffered consoles, it will reduce your kernel size.
If you have multiple processors, the Shared page table patch will help reduce page table sizes, and thereby improve performance, marginally. More RAM = more file cache / less disk paging; shared data -> higher cache coherency = faster kernel performance in memory mapping.
Additionally there seems to have been some mucking around with tweaking the adaptive scheduler so X gets more time when it needs it. The performance metrics have been kind of squishy, but the general consensus is that X and related 'interactive' processes are more responsive.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I played around a bit with .71-.73, but the big thing that got me was that my mouse speed in gnome was sped up by about 10x over 2.4. I had to set the accel down to the lowest setting in gnome to make it usable, compared to about the 25-50% setting with 2.4. Of course, there is no similar setting for GDM.
I'm guessing this is due to the new keyboard/mouse modules, but who knows. Hopefully this is one of the things that will get shaken out when 2.5 and 2.6 become more mainstream and the KDE/GNOME folks set things up to work nicer with the devel kernels.
I know I have been trolled, hence the quote. YFI
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Don't forget merger of larger projects into the kernel, namely:
CryptoAPI
IPsec
ALSA
XFS
No more patching the kernel/building module packages for those features!
Also, improved latency with (O)1 Scheduler and other I/O performance tweaks will be native to the kernel.
Finally, 2.6 - and at last support for my Zaurus should make it into the systems at work where 'recompiling the kernel' is a dirty word.
As long as Red Hat build it in to their stock kernel that is.
Beep beep.
There's a lot of complaining about code-freezes for the kernel not being code-freezes. People gripe about major changes being introduced in the last days of the development version.
I think the problem is the standard explanation of 'even kernels are production, odd kernels are development.' Whether he says so or not, it's clear that branching to an even version does not mean that it's a production kernel...branching to an even version begins the code freeze. Up until they call it 2.6, there's going to be large changes to the codebase. Once Linus calls it 2.6, everyone knows they can't put in major changes, but basic bug-fixes only. Therefore, it's never until a few months (or a year) after the even series starts that it's really a production kernel.
Software development managers would hate this...lots of kernel developers hate this...but love him or leave him, that's how Linus works.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's wondering if Reiser 4 will go into the stock 2.6! So: does anyone know?
I know this is kind of off the topic but could someone tell me if Slashdot has message boards, or just these comments. I'm trying to find some answer for some random question I have regarding a carreer in technology and some question on my network here at home. Maybe I'm blind but I can't seem to find any message boards on the site to ask my questions. If Slashdot doesn't have any message boards then could someone recommend some message boards where true techs hang out? Thanks
What about that? Will we be finaly able to switch kernels without a reboot?
:D
I could google for it, but hearing peoples' comments about these things is much more interesting...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
(of course, a beta version of Linux is probably more stable than a release version of Windows
I'm posting this anonymously because I'd be ashamed to have my name tied to defending Windows. Your comment is definitely true for versions of Windows up through ME. But I've been running XP on a Sony Vaio for the past fourteen months, and I have never had to reboot. In fact, I don't even know if XP has a blue screen of death, cuz if it does I've sure never seen it. Despite its thousand liabilities and the fact that Windows helps fund a scummy corporation, I don't think that XP can be criticized for instability.
where do you get 20 (!!!) developers donating their free time on nautilus?
What's the name of the new filtering tool that will "obsolete" iptables?
preeminent or pre-eminent ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-m-nnt) adj. Superior to or notable above all others; outstanding.
Not gonna comment on parent poster's spelling skills, but you, sir, are in dire need of a dictionary.
If you don't even know to use Google, I would suggest you avoid a career in technology.
Or, you could just post your questions anyway...
Dig that slogan! Steal that slogan! I'am a HP-UX admin (also know Solaris quite well) and I admit it now - LINUX REALLY IS THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING!!! I have no fear, I think it's actually exciting! Nobody knows where we're going!
t my mouse speed in gnome was sped up by about 10x over 2.4
great news! 900% speedup from Linux kernel 2.4 to 2.5.75
...Mac OS X won't run on Intel hardware. That could be one possible reason.
On my own systems, I noticed a huge improvement in both support and responsiveness when transitioning from 2.2.x to 2.4.0-2.4.10...after 2.4.13, I noticed even further improvement in responsiveness. However, I can deadlock any and all 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels very easily--run VMWare and try to access a CD-ROM drive. This happens on two wildly different systems and both when using ide-scsi emulation for my cdrecorder and when not using it.
I hope that 2.6.x will yield further improvements, and I'm keeping optimistic on that one. BTW, my prediction is May 22, 2004 for a definite 2.6.0.
I'll second that, I did a test install on a workstation at work, and it now suffers much more random crashes.
;)
Guess my work box needed a copy of Linux on it anyway though
I've downloaded Knoppix and I've not been able to get the networking working on my Asus A7N8X deluxe MB. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.
I'm hoping when they upgrade the kernal in the knoppix distro I can finally use mozilla etc. on the net and can see how things work.
Really? Where did you get that kernel? It is not on kernel.org yet.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
thats insane!
Does nobody even know how their system works anymore? xset people! xset!!
Win9x = 9x kernel
WinXP = NT kernel
Almost completely different beast.
Plus, what's to say this bug isn't simply a problem with vmware?
When all freedom is outlawed only the outlaws have freedom
These vaporware announcements must stop. Already since Linus announced this I have noticed a drop-off in downloads of the 2.4 kernel.
:)
These anti-competitive practices need to be stopped. A kernel-lead developer such as Linus should have to compete on the same level as everyone else for his kernel to get used.
With the windows kernel change, there was also a significant change from Win9x to XP
True, but you can't include 9x in your argument.
The Windows XP kernel is based off of the Windows NT4 kernel.
The Win98 kernel (also the basis of the ME kernel) is based off of the Win95 kernel.
Think of it this way, 2.6 is based (very loosely, albeit) on the 2.4 kernel, (2.2 kernel, etc.. to Linux-0.x).
Your comparison of the W2K kernel to the W98 kernel is like comparing the Linux kernel to the SCO kernel.
No matter how much FUD SCO publishes toward the contrary, the Linux kernel does not use the same codebase of their Unix(tm) kernel.
I merely use SCO as a reference because that's all everyone talks about, and almost everyone wanes incessantly about how Linux is not SCO, so I figured you could understand it this way.
To fend off the flames, s/"SCO"/"AT&T"|"Solaris"/
I was really impressed by the mouse responsiveness of 2.5.67 for one very specific application: RTCW (Return To Castle Wolfenstein). :-)
The new scheduler is a killer or at least allowed me to become a better one
nor has it meen mentioned on lkml
pat
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
do you mean in ten more years Linux might DIE ??!
Of course, Apple fanboys like you are the reason why people don't buy Macs. They're turned off by fanboys like you, and those Mac kooks that go on Mac cruises and shit. You're only hurting the cause man.
Brought to you by the goatse public education center.
;-) lol
So what do you do for a living. Marketing?
Well not so insane in a 8 way multiproc machine, where one of the processors dies.
I know this is off-topic, but bite me, I need to get this off my chest.
The frat boys are starting to piss me off. You know who I'm talking about. The "Linux sucks, MS is the way to go" frat boys. Typical frat boy mentality; anything with an alternative air is for losers and hippies; those that are with it run what everyone else runs.
Their arguments would have made sense, two or three years ago. But Linux and associated software has matured, and is ready for the desktop. But the frat boys whine, "oh, it's so hard to install a printer." "Oh, my modem wasn't recognized". "Oh, I've got work to do now, I can't wait for Linux to get there." "OS hippies." Bunch of closeted, repressed homos.
Yeah, Linux can be tough sometimes, but the payoff is great. No more viruses. No more MS. No more BSOD's. No more nancy boy OS. Actual security. A real OS. It's worth it, frat boys, but you won't know that until everyone else runs it, and then you'll get it. Until then, you'll run what everyone else in your idiotic, unthinking clique runs, get viruses and worms, re-install every 6 months, and cast scorn on the open source 'hippies'.
Fuckwits. They pissed me off when I was in school, and they piss me off now. Go back to your sales reports and your power ties, and let those who get it help change the computing world for the better without your infantile mockery.
Is the framebuffer stuff fixed yet? Last time I liked (around 2.5.6x or so) it was very badly broken.
See my journal, I write things there
This may sound a bit wacked but here it goes. For a lot of uses I'd like to not mount a file system but instead access the block device from a single user level process via custom syscalls any sugestions on how to do this in 2.6 plus what is the best file system to use. I tend towards ext3 but a simple BSD filesystem may be a better answer. If you don't mount the root file system then a embedded linux is hack proof.
Heck, its open source I can put the kernel version number at what ever level I want to.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Kernel is as stable as the rocky mountains. Been compiling Mozilla non-stop in gcc for the last 3 hours with no problems.
A whole 3 hours? Wow, must be ready for release!
Reminds me of Microsoft's crazy uptimes of "three, six months."
From what I heard, Linus Torvalds himself didn't initialy enjoy the patch submission of another developer which caused prioritization improvments to X server and Input Devices (Keyboard, Mouse). You are talking about that patch. To my remembrance, Linus said, somewhere along the lines of, "Windows NT did this...bad...verry bad...We are supposed to entreat all applications/devices equaly, not priority in such of others...bend over, Ralph#~Jim#~Miguel, I'm spanking you today...ok, you can have the patch included. No hard feelings?"
This improvment you speak of is some sort of modification to allow automatic renice(1). In the past, using a Dual Pentium Pro UltraWide SCSI graphics workstation, I had a problem with keyboard and mouse keys becoming stuck in the software state as well as audio playback skipping. Perhaps this patch is what makes the lame determination upon what peice of software needs priority over other software; that still doesn't help the system dig itself out of a whole when every peice of software wants highest priority or whatnot. This code, honestly, is a Bad Thing(TM) != Good Thing(TM).
(1)renice, give priority to applications. System level application "nice" with numerical parameter and string parameter; -20 being lowest priority, 0 being normal priority, +20 being highest priority; followed by the name of the daemon or thread or application that will have its priority changed.
SP4 does nothing else but fix bugs.
Yup. We fixed a bug by applying it on our SQL server at work. It rebooted randomly 4 times the next day.
Really.
In 2.8, the focus will be on optimizing the core algorithms to run on large-scale NUMA machines.
I am shocked for you to imply that the stable series, 2.8 being an even-numbered codetree, would still need to be optimized for NUMA machines. Beta is for the odd-series codetree. It would be a Silver Herring for the optimizing of NUMA machine algorithms in the 2.7 series, with production-quality releases being placed on the 2.8 series.
I never!
Yes you did!
Spank me, I'm naughty.
No, you have been forgiven of your spanking.
That explains why my ass is soar.
Exactly, you have beforehand-given a spanking. Gosh I love how English words suck.
Also, I am Patricia's real father.
You are not Patricia's father. Patricia's father is in heaven. Truth is sovereign.
Holy Bible, Mathew 23:9,
King James Version
And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven
Fact : *BSD is dying
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo De Raadt states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Yeah, slashdot really should have tags so people can spot the joke ... :)
Oh my god, you elitist baby.
Oh yes, so bloated. You people obsessed with slimness are the same ones who complain about some superfluous app not being included by said "slim" distro.
Grow up and learn how to do rpm -e
Anything like um, release notes for this branch?
Been compiling Mozilla non-stop in gcc for the last 3 hours with no problems..... ./configure has just about finished! And who said you needed the latest hardware?
on my 486. Oh look -
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Is that the 'locate' database updating itself? On Debian I think that happens by default every 24 hours, at some time in the middle of the night. Basically builds a list of all the files on your hard drive, so you can do "locate blah" and quickly find where files are without searching the hard drive each time.
/dev/hda" (or whatever your hard drive is). If it says off, do "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" to turn it on.
Another possibility might be to check if DMA is on; sometimes the kernel won't turn it on, depending on your config and hardware. Try "hdparm -d
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Umm, no the nanosecond patch is not critical for make on fast computers. Sometimes a file might get rebuild when it shouldn't. Thats all.
Shared page tables are not in 2.5, nor are they likely to be in 2.6. It has nothing to do with multiple CPU machines.
I thought SCO told us that Linux was the Commie OS?
Don't tell me they're lying about that too?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Afterall Linux is open source, meaning anyone can hack the Linux kernal & create their own Linux 2.6.
So why doesn't that happen? & what gives Linus & co the authority to determine the next Linux revisions? I'm not saying he shouldn't, I just wondering why it happens this way when AFICS open source should means its a free for all.
Well crap...just this morning I updated to 2.4. Now I can't feel all cool anymore.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
Um, I think that his comparion stands because the W2K kernel is somewhat of a hybrid of both the w98 and the NT kernels. It was more of provening ground for before (full) Win9x compatablity could be intergated. This of course does not making very good for server/home use.
What happened to devfsd and lvm? I know they were talking about replacing lvm, and I was wondering if the new code is in place?
Also, I read somewhere that the developers were unhappy about devfsd, since 'nobody was using it'. I'm using it, so I'm hoping they don't remove it.
Je ne parle pas francais.
If updatedb (the program updating the locate database) only makes your hard drive for 5-10 seconds as the grandparent post said then you must have a bloody fast machine or a bloody small hard drive.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
-20 is the highest priority, 19 the lowest. ( try nice --help next time before posting )
slashdot really should have <humour> tags
You know... at first I read that as a <rumour> tag.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I've been hearing though other channels that the IDE layer rewrite improves the IDE subsystem to the point where SCSI emulation won't be needed to drive an IDE CD burner. Can anyone confirm or deny this? If so, this will probably become my main reason to switch to 2.6 (although there are quite a few secondary ones too). Thanks linux team (and IDE rewrite folks)!
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Win2K and XP do in fact have their own special BSOD's, they're just hidden behind what I've come to call pseudostability. Right click "my computer",properties, Advanced tab, click "startup and recovery..." and note that the default setting for 2K and XP is to reboot on bluescreening, a behavior slightly better than doing nothing, but not nearly as nice as preventing it to begin with.
You are correct in assuming you don't need ide-scsi to emulate a SCSI host for burning cdroms in 2.6, but it has nothing at all to do with the IDE rewrite.
2.6 has support for queueing "generic scsi" commands through the block layer, using the same mechanism and transport as the regular read/write file system requests. So we can overload the sg (scsi generic) SG_IO and provide the same functionality for non-scsi attached devices (such as atapi burners). With a recent cdrecord, you can give the device with -dev=/dev/hdc for instance.
Additionally, cd burning is now zero copy. The user space data buffer is mapped directly into the kernel for the dma operations. DMA is supported on a 4-byte boundary, where 2.4 and previous has required sector alignment (512 bytes) for any atapi dma operations.
>Hotplug CPU Removal Support.
I know Linux is wonderful but running without a cpu?
SP4 went onto our 2k workstations fine, but wrecked our metaframe box.
Off Linus?
Wow, you can deadlock the kernel by inserting random code into the kernel ( vmware binary kernel modules)? Thats amazing!!
As soon as you mess with binary kernel modules you can not expect Linux to guarantee stability, the modules could do anything they like. Really.
Is that the 'locate' database updating itself?
Normally, cron updatedb is heavily niced (19 on my box). So performance shouldn't suffer too much, except perhaps for I/O-heavy work. But locking up? No.
They improved the speed of quake by 10x you wouldn't be complaining would you, eh?
Talk about Microsoft fanboys. Your old cheap mouse is now 10x better and all you can do is complain.
I for one will save about $10M a year buying cheaper mice and using linux's new feature to make them quick.
When DMA is off, hard drive accesses can block, especially with a stock 2.4.x (non-preemptible, non-low-latency-patched) kernel. In some brief measurements I did, running updatedb could cause blocks of up to 500ms, which leads to some pretty crappy interactive performance until it finishes.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You can't really compare 98 and NT as far as the kernel goes. This is because the Windows 98 is hardly a kernel at all. From a technical standpoint, it's just horrible, and they abandoned it for a reason. NT is thankfully, completely different.
If any 98 code appears in the Win2k kernel, it must have been rewritten HEAVILY.
That's like saying, "who likes to eat apples when we have oranges?"
It's like to say:
Your watch is 10 times faster now - enjoy!
BTW, if you're willing to break the terms of the VMWare license, you can see the source code for the VMWare kernel modules. This is how VMWare 2.x kernel module patches were made available on the net for those users using kernels newer than 2.4.6.
There are very, very, very few kernels with which the precompiled "stock" modules that ship in the VMWare RPM work properly. When one of these kernels is not found, vmware-config.pl runs through compiling the modules, and if you care to catch it quick enough, the module source appears in /tmp. The perl script also quite frequently forgets to delete the source. Have at it.
It's teh O(1) secheduler, cnut!!!1!!1!?/??!?/