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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."
What about Reiser4?
Just name it 2.6 - everyone will flock to it because 2.even means that it must be a stable release, never mind it's the first release.
:)
Bitching will ensue, and the bugs will get fixed even quicker. Why mess around with all the pre-2.6 stuff, when this is obviously the fastest way to get it all working
Will the 2.6 "stable" kernel series actually be stable?
The 2.4 series had this public cloud of wierd problems hanging over it its entire existence. It seems like 2.4 never really seemed "trustworthy", they kept making huge and highly experimental changes and 2.4 seemed just kind of like a work in progress for its entire run. Will 2.6.0 be totally safe to download and run and install in a production environment, or is that going to be kind of a "well thats still sort of experimental be careful"? And if the latter, why the heck aren't they staying in 2.5 until it's ready for production.
Am I just too paranoid, or do you know what i mean?
-- anonymous and terrified
the anticipatory scheduler, because I haven't been expecting them to do that yet.
"Linux 2.5.x? Pssh. That's old! I run linux 9.0!"
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The SNARE folks say they are working to get C2-style auditing capability in the kernel, since the old hooks were broken/fixed in 2.4.21. This is a big feature that is keeping Linux from being a "serious" player in "secure" environments, such as certain government-controlled areas.
So why would they set the feature freeze for Halloween if new features wont be allowed in after mid July?? Or does the feature freeze have nothing to do with features being added? I'm highly confused.
...if released in the near future as stable. I did play around with the 2.5.69 build and I must say it's somehow feels faster.
:)
However, the new module handling procedures in the 2.5.x series makes some of my frequently used apps to behave strangely (iptables for example)... even with module-init-tools.
Ah well... as long as there's progress
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
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.
you're not an anticipatory scheduler.
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.
Sounds like it's about time to try out 2.5.
Is there a "the mile long list of things to update before trying to boot 2.5.x" list?
I remember the "fun" of updating 2.2...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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".
I have a feeling I am going to be modded as a troll but I have karma to burn.
I use to be a big fan of linux but the latest 2.4x came with a bad vm in the so called stable release branch and I heard of dismal uptimes for smp systems with 4 or more processors. Infact Debian still uses the 2.2 kernel by default because of the bugs sorrounding 2.4
I am no longer in IT but if I was I would be more in favor of FreeBSD. I heard 5.0 is alot more scalable then the 4.x branch.
Anyway its reputation for those who are not Linux fanatics on slashdot will be better. Linux 2.0 was rock solid. However the quality has gone down hill recently. Yes Linux 2.4 can scale quite well but in real world uses filesystem corruptions, xinet freezing, and kernel panics happen on smp hardware.
Since Linus now wors at OSDL he can now test these features on high end hardware. Linux is stable on pc class hardware but that is all most kernel hackers have to test the kernel.
http://saveie6.com/
Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox made a joint press release today. In an effort to save time, Linux 2.5.75 will be renamed 2.6.75, to reflect how mature they assume the code is. "We don't feel like bothering with all that 'pre-' crap, so we thought we'd save some time and just jump right into 2.6" reasonned Torvalds. Alan Cox elaborated that "when MS Windows went frm 3.11 staight to 95, they really left us behind. Now that they're at 2003, we've really got to get our shit together to catch up".
-
Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel -
Japanese
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Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
-
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.
You kids and your new fangled "2.5". Back in my day, the kernel was 0.1, and the only supported boot device was a piece of toast. And we liked it better that way! Stable, unstable? Kids these days are so ungrateful. Back in my day, when linux crashed, not only did it erase your hardrive, but it put you into seizures! But it built character, and that's the way we liked it!
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Yeah, FreeBSD 5 being more scalable than 4 isn't saying much, its still probably below 2.4. No troll, look at the archives - some guy couldn't run 3 SETIs and 1 ssh session on his 4 processor box without them grinding each other to crap on kernel locks... and SETI only enters the kernel a couple of times every 5 seconds or so!! FreeBSD 5 is also having stability problems. FreeBSD isn't a bad OS, but come on, FreeBSD 5 isn't ready yet my good chap.
Your next paragraph about filesystem corruption, etc is misinformed, but if you like, show me some postings of problems: I can't prove its stable by making you read through months of archives to find few problems, but you can show me it has problems by pointing to a few posts.
And yes, don't worry about the scalability of 2.5. IBM have been benchmarking it on 32 way POWER4s with 256GB memory, and 32 way x86 with 32GB memory for just about its entire life. SGI has been doing 64-way and higher IA64 global shared memory machines... etc etc.
Oh, and debian uses 2.4 by default I think.
NEW scientific proof of Windows 2000's superiority over Windows 98!
We apply a highly sophisticated mathematical theorem named division to compute a ratio.
2000 / 98 == 20.4082
This is SCIENTIFIC PROOF that Windows 2000 is 20.4082 times faster, better, smaller, and stabler than Windows 98!
Order your copy today!
Actually yes, it "runs Linux." While it's nothing unique to 2.5, there is user-mode-linux. For 2.5, there is Kexec. It's interesting that at least one co-lo service is hosted on a UML configuration (see the isp-colo list).
Brings new light to "Yes, it runs Linux."
Here's a good pointer: Dave's "post-Halloween" doc.
Today LKML confirmed that linux is dying.
Linus was quoted as saying this will be "the last kernel".
This announcement, of course, has the same high validity as the claim that *BSD is dying.
I protested the release of 2.4, saying its inclusion in distros would cause users to unknowingly run a poor quality kernel, but Linus said the reason he wanted it released was so that it would get more widespread testing.
The "stable" branch of the kernel is perhaps misnamed. Linus gets to release a new kernel whenever he wants, and I imagine he does some testing, but I don't think he puts a stable release through any kind of rigourous qualification, I think it's more like when the complaints about his pre- versions die down a little.
I know it's common for Linus to release stable kernels that are actually quite broken on some non-x86 architectures. People who run Linux on PowerPC use a branch that's extensively patched from Linus' releases.
Both the 2.4 and 2.2 kernels went through a number of releases before they were really usable. I think the reason 2.2 became reliable was that it was smaller and simpler, and fewer people were working on it.
I'm pretty sure a good part of the reason behind the establishment of the Open Source Development Lab and their hiring of prominent kernel developers like Linus and Andrew Morton is to make sure that 2.6 actually does turn out to be enterprise quality. IBM is a big backer of OSDL, and I don't think they want the billion dollar investment in Linux in general to go to waste.
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.
A jiffy is the kernel scheduler quantum. The kernel wakes up once every jiffy to update internal state and reschedule processes, basically. There's a constant called HZ that determines how long a jiffy is; on x86 HZ used to be 100, so a jiffy was 1 / 100 seconds. HZ is now 1000 on most architectures.
perhaps "schedulatory anticipator"
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I host a bunch of VPSs based on Jeff Dike's UML (User Mode Linux) project.
One (of the many) cool things UML allows is for you to try out new kernels without having to dedicate a real box to it. Even if you're only dedicating the box to it between kernel swap reboots. Especially if you're not sure if the new kernel will corrupt your precious partitions.
The UML 'host' server can continue to run whatever stable 2.4 kernel you need (in my case 2.4.21).
You SSH from your 'host' server into your hosted UML kernel. Play around, test reliability, fiddle with new features, regression test your apps.
So anyway, I'm off to grab the new kernel and have a play. Maybe even see if there are any crazies out there who want hosting with the 2.5/2.6-pre kernel.
- Peter
RimuHosting - Linux VPS Hosting
o Faster CD recording that doesn't need ide-scsi;
It's about goddamn motherfucking time. God the IDE CD running SCSI emulation is the biggest piece of shit I've seen on Linux. I have a box that has run rh 7.2 and now runs rh 9 and the only thing that locks this box up is anything out of the ordinary having to do with the CD-r (such as the pathetic piece of SHIT that GNOME calls CD player software - who made this crap the default desktop in RH? [And yes, I know I can run KDE (in fact I use the CD player kscd from that environment) but having heard how RH mucked around with KDE to 'unify' it with gnome, I'm leery of that]). Last night, that junk locked my machine so solid I couldn't login over the network, the Xserver froze (except for the mouse) and I had to hardware-reset it, fsck all the filesystems on reboot [even though I'm using ext3] and then it spent all fucking night resyncing the raid mirrors.
I love Linux, I've been a fantic about it since 1999, but that ide-scsi was terrible fucking hack.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Well, technically---
Windows 98 is Windows 4.1 (4.0 was 95)
Windows ME was Windows 4.9....
Windows 2000 was NT 5.0
XP is Windows NT 5.1
Server 2003 is 6.0
Longhorn is ?????
This means that Microsoft is doing WHAT with version numbering???
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If the Amd world view of how to achieve 32 bit without emu on a 64 bit platform are to fly then the adoption of AMD by the server world is essential for Linux in the future. Blindly following the Intel/MS lead may lead to kaos. The same as blindly imitating Microsofts functions by reverse engineering, is for programmers.
The office desktop lock of MS is not the route that Linux should take, the applied advanced scientific computing and clustering is the best route. When a great scientific workstation can be had for the price of a Linux install on a 64 bit AMD system the business computing world will finally start to wake up and take notice.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
whimper snapper... In my days Linux version number was 1/0 and the only boot device was toast crumbs. We had to line them up burnt/crisp/crisp/crisp/burnt in order to get it to boot and we were happy. Soon after that Linus migrated to bagels and thigs got a little more stable.
Zoid.com
NEW XCONFIG!!
x t
Check out: http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.t
Now, when someone does make xconfig it uses the qt libraries. There is also a make gconfig for all you gnome people. While I like the advancement, it's annoying that even at the deepest level, the kenel, people are forced to repeat functuality for different libraries. While I love the choice, it is just annoying that we so much redundency for these libraries. It seems that programmers are programming more for the libraries than they are for the users. Unfortunitly, I can't think of a way to solve this.
However, it does suck for anyone who uses another window manager and doesn't have/want qt or gnome. I guess they have to live with ncurses.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Try Gentoo You'll have to compile the 2.5-kernel yourself, but the distro will prep the system for you, among other things ;)
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Though we're bordering on offtopic here, because this discussion isn't as closely related to the kernel as it could be, I'm fairly convinced needs no focus as you imply.
First of all, the Linux kernel is and will be the most important readily available high performance computing platform. I cannot imagine a design decision with more than temporary character that will slow down the kernel. Through constant improvement it will lead on all 64bit platforms, Dec Alpha, PowerPC, IA-64 and x86-64. We all know, in the long run, open source isn't beatable in improvement. The kernel is already far on the right side of that curve.
Now, should Linux developers at large focus on scientific computing, or the desktop, on both? Actually this is a "no-question". The development force of open source will always distribute itself along its own best interests, not because of what anybody told them. Till now the technical gurus of programming turned the core of the GNU/Linux OS in what it is, but the evergrowing developer community is attracting more and more apps developers (they are simply more readily available). So while the kernel project is readily scaling to bigger and bigger feats, the app world will still aim for the desktop, the poweruser's desktop first. Simply because there are many people that want to provide apps and simply will do. This will not impair kernel development in any way, and anyhow those people have no different needs from the kernel as the scientists have: stable, efficient, robust.
Since the POSIX and other standards strongly decoupled OS internals from the apps developers (what's going on behind the scenes is no business of the apps developer) we have the power to do it both, in parallel, with no friction.
Well, there's several big differences that affect me that come from a kernel upgrade. The first lot is better hardware support. AGP3 means your top-end graphics card gets used to its full potential. Native ALSA support makes getting your soundcard up and running a whole lot easier. Better support for IDE burners makes it easier to get your burner running well, and faster, in linux without having to sort out SCSI emulation. The second chunk is scheduling algorithm improvements. What this means for me is, I can have a compile going in the background (using 100% cpu), xmms playing without skipping, xmule downloading things, and whatever I'm doing in the foreground, such as mozilla-firebird, isn't affected in the slightest. In fact, if I minimise the compile window, I can't even tell when it finishes any more, there's just no difference in responsiveness. And all of that achieved without having to use nice. This is something that has been recently improved substantially in the 2.4.20 series, and apparently 2.6 holds up under even heavier loads. In fact, the priority scheduling means that linux now responds better for me when i click stuff than windows does (you don't realise how often explorer sticks on the busy icon until you don't have to use it for a while)
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Does anyone know of a website or mailing list on which to find a good .config file for building 2.5.75? I'm not much of a kernel-hacker, and it would be very helpful for me (and I'm sure for a lot of other people too). Just something general that will produce a kernal that can boot and will run Gnome, Mozilla, and Java.
So there. All you weenies stuck at 10, I have no pity for you.
Infuriate left and right
Regardless, I've had an uptime of 214 days with Linux on a 2-CPU Pentium 4, with a stock RedHat 2.4.18 kernel. The reason it went down was because the computer had to be moved from one location to another ...
Yes, I've noticed instability on the stable kernel - but that happened mostly with my own kernel builds. That is why we have distros - let them heavily test, use their kernels *and* make your purchasing decisions based on their hardware compatibility lists. When you compile your own configs, there's clearly some risk that you're undertaking (compiling kernels isn't for aunt tillie - sorry Bruce)
Furthermore, don't make empty assumptions about what kernel hackers test their work on :). Trust me, RH & Suse *do* test on high-end hardware. Not to mention the gargantuan hardware that IBM ships with Linux as the OS.
The Raven
I use RH, but I stop using it at the ide-SCSI level. I use a locally compiled MPlayer CDRtools at the latest release level and XCDroast. Its a bit more fiddly to configure, but it works well on my older machines. I also have it on a true SCSI machine and again it works ok.
See my journal, I write things there
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.
Yes you are right on target as to why Linux is doing great things. Not releasing 2.6 stable too soon is one of them. The problem is that the business world does not appreciate the reasons why
My wife trains new users for an environment that is typical.
Their server is MS based because of the need to run MS office. The real power apps are served by a Linux server for the medical image data files. There in lies the problem, the office application lock of Microsoft.
The lack of a killer business app in Linux is the root cause of the delema. Sure there are great integrated office apps in Linux. But by and large you would need to pry the dead fingers of the average office computer user away from MS office addiction.
My point was that the world of scientific computing and real powerhouse apps would be the best chance for Linux in business till someone comes up with a new killer business application that is native to Linux. What might fill the Bill (pun intended) is an appliction that does all the necessary buisiness/computer chores but is easily customisable in house and scalable. Inventory data , linked to all departments, with or without cash register interface, and accounting software all linked, a kind of Swiss Army knife that is easy to secure and change. Hopefully this is the future of Linux in business.
When businesses see that using a powerhouse Linux server/workstation setup can make a difference to their bottom line their MS office/OS/server dependancy will quickly evaporate.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
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).
As for scaling past 4 CPU's, that was much more true before 2.4. While it's still not going to scale linearly to an infinite number of processers, improvements along the way in the 2.4 series and the o(1) scheduler have helped out quite a bit.
I do believe that much of the non-scaling of Linux past 4 CPU's is, to some extent, actually the fault of the hardware, as the great majority of multiprocesser hardware has bottlenecks that impeded linear scaling.
As a simple example, take a look at the dual P4 Xeons on the 533 MHz bus. Sounds spiffy, right? Well, you're splitting the 533 FSB and memory busses between both processers, giving each one an effective *266 MHz* when under load. Seeing as how even the slowest single-proc P4 has a 400 MHz FSB, you can see off of the bat that you're hitting bottlenecks!
Look at the AthlonMP series: Each processer has it's own independent bus! However, the only available motherboards have a single-channel, 266 MHz memory architecture. That gives each processer only 133 MHz effective memory bus under load. The simple addition of a dual-channel memory controller (like the one on the NForce boards) would give the AthlonMP's a real shot in the arm.
Now, it may seem like I'm just talking about low-end multiprocesser machines, but here's another example: Even on some of the higher-end machines, there are restrictive bottlenecks. By naming names, I'll only start a flame-war with the zeolots, but suffice it to say that there are $35,000 "high-end" servers that have *less* total memory bandwidth than that $3,000 dual P4 Xeon. That is pretty pathetic!
It's pretty easy to see why someone who didn't realize that could plop $35,000 on a 4-way, big-name machine that had less memory bandwidth than a $3,000 dual P4 machine, see that under load both of them performed similarly, and say "Well, Linux must not scale well."
To make matters worse, the kind of applications that are run on multi-CPU machines tend to be things like RDBMS', which do not lend themselves well to clustering. Here's the catch: Those types of applications tend to be the most memory-demanding. So, take a single P4 with a 533 MHz bus, and install your RDBMS on it. Take a dual P4 Xeon with a 533 MHz bus, and try the RDBMS. You're certainly not going to scale linearly, but that's because you still haven't improved the memory bandwidth.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Wow, they don't call you fanatic for nothing!
Well, I've never had any problems with ide-scsi. And I'm not paranoid about Red Hat's KDE patches doing -- whatever the hell you think it will do. Eat your children, maybe? Steal my refrigerator? Yeah. I mean. Calm down?
I steer clear of that whole GNOME/KDE thing. I do most everything from an xterm. CD burning software? cdrecord. CD playing software? cdplay. I use FVWM as my window manager and I don't run any gnome bits, other than the occasional application, run from the command line.
Also, if you hate red hat so much, why don't you switch?
I've been running a 2.4 kernel since the 2.4-test ones ( I think that's what they were called ) and I have never had any need to rush out and upgrade to the latest version. Sure ... when a newer version comes out I will upgrade for the heck of it, but seriously, if it wasn't for the ability to cat /proc/version, most Linux users wouldn't have a clue what minor or major version they were running.
So the vm stuff was ripped out half-way through. Did it cause any problems for end users? I didn't notice. If anyone is running a Linux box that is under so much load that they did notice, then maybe they should have upgraded their hardware. It gives me images of someone fanging their VW beetle down the road at 180km/h and complaining that the new suspension seems a little rougher than the old one.
I've read some examples of 'my sis motherboard craps out when I do this' or 'my oh-so-cheap raid controller doesn't like it when the kernel does this'. These are drivers people! They can't be considered a core part of the kernel. You can't brand a kernel unstable because someone's obscure, 5-year old POS hardware's drivers haven't been updated in years. Buy some real hardware. See above point. I challenge anyone with regular ( ie I can walk down to the local computer store and buy one because it's in production and regular use now ) hardware to tell me what problem they've had with any 2.4 kernel.
Funny thing is that most people bitching about the supposed instability of early 2.4 and 2.6 kernels most likely upgraded to them as soon as they came out ( just like me ) and bragged to all their Windows-using friends about how stable and fast etc their new kernel is. It's only on Slashdot where it's cool to whinge about how people can break kernel-x just by xxxxxx that they change their tune. And how many of the complainants actually submitted a bug report? MMMmmm?
My car still, by default, requires a check-up every now and then. That just screams stability.
0x or or snor perron?!