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Last 2.5.x Linux Kernel Released
Kourino writes "Today on LKML,
Linus released 2.5.75, which he said will be "the last 2.5.x kernel from me", and that he and Andrew Morton are going to start a 2.6-pre series soon. While this certainly does mean things could get interesting soon, don't hold your breath about seeing the actual 2.6 for a while; there are still many areas that need work. This essentially means that the development branch is going into maintenance mode, and new features probably won't get in after this point. Changes of note in 2.5.75 include a merge of the anticipatory scheduler from Andrew Morton's -mm tree and updates from several architectures."
Maintenance mode? No, 2.2 is in maintenance mode.
2.4 isn't even in "maintenance" mode yet - it is _the_ stable tree, and its getting new things added to it with each release (slowly, and after being tested in other trees, and RCs). Just recently new ACPI for example.
2.5 is going into "stabalisation" mode, to get it ready enough for 2.6.0 that it won't piss too many people off who try it. 2.5 has been a good cycle and 2.6.0 will be quite stable, but it needs to go through a few 2.6 point releases during which more and more people will start testing it.
Then _2.4_ will go into "maintenance" mode.
I must say that the anticipatory scheduler is the most noticeable improvement from the 2.4 kernel. I'm glad it is going in the official tree. It's been rock solid(for me anyway) for months.
Wort Wort Wort!
Those of you who want to use the closed NVidia drivers with 2.5 can find the necessary patches here
2.5.71 also introduced a new native mode driver for synaptics touchpads. You'll need to download the X11 driver and I saw it mentioned that the cvs version of GPM has support if you use that as well.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Linux definition: On most hardware platforms, a jiffy is 10 milliseconds in duration.
In other Engineering and science diciplines there are other definitions of "jiffy".
In English, it means "a short amount of time" as in "I'll do it in a jiffy".
No more large changes are going to take place... just bug fixes, driver updates, etc. Today Linus said he would reject the HUGE (40k+ lines) ARM merge excepting stuff that only touched the ARM specific source (ie, arch/arm) even though ARM doesn't currently compile. The only thing he says must be working out of the box for 2.6.0 final is x86 and he doesn't care if other architectures are broken on release if fixing them destabilizes what's already there.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
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Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel -
Japanese
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Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
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Japanese
The Open Source Development Lab's Japanese facility was kind enough to provide the Japanese translations.I am looking for translations into other languages for all my Linux Quality Database articles - there are other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, and more will be posted from time to time.
They are all under the GNU Free Documentation License, but for reasons explained in Which License for Free Documentation? I am planning to change the license soon to another one.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
There is only really module-init-tools, rather than modutils.
The main reason for this change is that there is now a kernel level module loader. This is for various changes, so that drivers will be handled in exactly the same manner whether they are loaded as a module, or included in the main kernel image. This makes a number of problems in driver writing, and a bunch of idiosyncrities just go away. For example, you should be able to load multiple copies of a driver, compiled into the main kernel. Previously, you had to use them as modules to work that trick. This is important in situations like three identical soundcards.
I believe that is the only required (significant and normally needed) chage to userland tools. Other tools will benefit from updating, to support new features, but that's always the case, and not required. Note that the kernel aught to boot without it - just be less useful if you use modules.
It's worth noting that the sound infrasturcture changed from OSS, to primerly ALSA. OSS is still in, but marked DEPRECATED, so at some point over 2.6, you aught to expect to shift to ALSA sound. It aught to be painless - ALSA supports OSS emulation, so you can phase apps through that. I can't think of any other userland level changes for 2.5 (at least, that impact on your average commodity PC desktop / server - If your're using LVM / md stuff, I think that there might be a shift in there).
One fun change is that you shouldn't need to use ide-scsi emulation to drive CD burners anymore (though that'll require updating userland tools). That's a really useful one, particulary for newcomers [0].
[0] Windows actually also does the 'pretend it's a SCSI device' trick too - but hides it a lot better.
Well, some of the nice things are:
o New i/o scheduler, which seems to improve a lot of people's desktop performance;
o Better scheduler performance under loads with lots of processes;
o Rewritten scheduling and threading code, which, coupled with Ulich Drepper's NTPL library, greatly improves threading performance;
o ALSA for sound, and AGP 3 support;
o Faster and cleaner framebuffer support;
o Faster CD recording that doesn't need ide-scsi;
o Upgrades for NFS (v4), NTFS, and HFS+, as well as merges of JFS and XFS;
o System-level in-kernel profiling support;
o CPU Frequence scaling
o IPSec
More information can be found in Dave Jones' list of things to expect in 2.6. Personally, I think it's great to see features that benefit both big and small systems.
The Feature Freeze did indeed occur in 2002. This is something different, I think referred to as the Code Freeze.
AFAIUI, no major features have been accepted since the Feature Freeze, and from now on, nothing that will majorly alter the code will be accepted. Only bugfixes.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You don't actually need a make dep with the 2.5 kernels. So, we dont actually need no make depend!
Um, rip open your favourite cd burning package. Poke around it till you find the ASPI dll's. Nero includes it's own ASPI managers - others might use Windows own ones, so you might have to break a debugger or similar (hurtin' for ldd there) over them to spot it.
c f.carleton.ca/~aa571/aspi.htm
ASPI is a SCSI interface standard. It stands for SCSI Programing Interface - it's designed so that ASPI complient hardware can all use a single driver, for a specific type of device. If it's using the ASPI code, then it's working a SCSI device - at least in emulation.
A couple of links, to back up that cd burners use ASPI in windows:
http://aspi.radified.com/
http://www.n
NEW XCONFIG!!
You can see the screenshot here.
:wq
2.5 is a development kernel. It would be STUPID to run production systems on it... Many production systems still run on 2.2 kernels and have been up for years.
Linus is 'giving up' on 2.5 because he wants to make that branch of the source tree stable. Not because it's a flaming lump of shit.
Then again, I've probably just been trolled. But FYI for those people who believe him.
The only compatiblity package needed is the new modutils, and they are already in unstable.
apt-get install module-init-tools
Download new kernel, configure, compile, install and reboot, and try do it all with kernel-package....
Worked perfectly for me (TM), but you may have to do some tweeking if you want some other stuff (like nvidia-drivers).