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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!
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.
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.