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Linux v2.6 Begins Testing
xose quotes Linus from the kernel list: "the naming should be familiar - it's the same deal as with 2.4.0.
One difference is that while 2.4.0 took about 7 months from the pre1 to
the final release, I hope (and believe) that we have fewer issues facing
us in the current 2.6.0. But very obviously there are going to be a
few test-releases before the real thing.
The point of the test versions is to make more people realize that they
need testing and get some straggling developers realizing that it's too
late to worry about the next big feature. I'm hoping that Linux vendors
will start offering the test kernels as installation alternatives, and
do things like make upgrade internal machines, so that when the real
2.6.0 does happen, we're all set." You all know what to do ;) Update: 07/14 17:49 GMT by S : OverNeith writes "Joe Pranevich has done it again! He's written another summary document on what to expect in the new and upcoming 2.6 Kernel!"
The biggest change for normal users is the preempt patch, it will make your system very responsive to interactive tasks (ie a graphical desktop) also the new schedulers should help here.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
In a lot of development projects, including the linux kernel, the odd ended builds are developmental releases. So the question is not really "how long has it been since 2.5.0 and how long did that take?" , it's how long since 2.4.0 ...? I believe that question was answered in the summary, and AFAIK it was probably answered in the article (I did not RTFA).
You connect another computer to the serial port and use it as a console...
Or use multiple monitors, one for X, one for the console...
(with the serial solution you can automagicly log it and don't have to type anything from a screen)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
That's devfs. If you don't use that, they'll all be normal (hda, sdb, fd0, etc).
At least it wasn't mandatory as of 2.5.69 anyway.
Why isn't devfs the default now - it's been working fine for ages - for me anyway.
Get your own free personal location tracker
No more SCSI-Emulation for burning CDs with this.
You don't have to wait - pretty much all of big stuff has already happened in the 2.5 series. 2.6 is the next stable series, which (usually) means no big architectural changes. What's going on now is testing to ensure that the 2.5 series is stable enough to be considered for a release as "2.6.0".
This space intentionally left blank.
For example. /dev/hda, /dev/hdb/, /dev/hdc now become /dev/discs/disc0, /dev/discs/disc1, /dev/discs/disc2
That is called devfs, and as far as I know is an optional thing. At least it was in 2.4-series, and I really really doubt it isn't in 2.5 and will be in 2.6. So just skipp the CONFIG_DEVFS_FS and CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT and use your old nodes.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
And better USB support with easier way for writing drivers for various USB gadgets.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Last time I looked at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/ must-fix/ there were still some showstoppers. It seems like they were updated about a month ago, so I guess progress must have been made on them...
The biggest problem I have with the newer kernels is probably some ACPI/IRQ routing bug in my board. It's a common problem with the NForce2 chipset (APIC doesn't work, so you have to boot with pci=noacpi or acpi=off). It's not the biggest inconvenience, but it causes half of my unused USB slots not to work...
I must say the snappiness of 2.6 is great! I'm looking forward to beta-testing. AFTER I backed up my drive, of course!
The best reference I've found is Dave Jones' website..... Linux 2.5 core updates.
Actually devfsd does (see here). Most distros use DevFS + devfsd these days (notable exeption off the top of my head is RedHat).
Rich
Because devfs is exploitable, slow, and is being ditched by all of the Linux distribution manufacturers. As one former coworker of mine put it so well:
Seriously though, you need to look at the new work going on, udev, a userspace implementation of devfs.
That might also be because you are not using proper deinterlacing while encoding (if you're doing .avi mpeg4 or so) or while decoding (mpeg1, mpeg2).
Also, have you checked that you have big enough dma buffers for the capturing card? I think you need to give some arguments to lilo to reserve some memory for the card..
Mandrake
Actually, it *is*. It's in the portage tree under sys-kernel/development-sources development-sources-2.6.0_beta1.ebuild
My journal has hot
Tried another sound card or different addres/int? 2.6 should allow decent capture(on bt* cards), as others do too. But it wont be a silver bullet to your problems i'm afraid.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes, IPSEC is already in 2.5.xx, along with the NSA's SELINUX hooks, IBM's JFS filesystem, and SGI's XFS filesystem. Lots of VM and block I/O work, too.
C|N>K
khttpd, the kernel webserver, has been removed in 2.5.x/2.6. I'm guessing NTLM support is part of the new kernel crypto/security API.
Replying to point (2):
The scheduler in 2.6.xx is hyperthreading-aware.
It knows that switching a process from one hyperthread to another on the same cpu is less expensive than switching to another physical cpu (becaus both first- and second-level cache reside on-die), but it also tries to balance load on physical cpus.
While >=2.4.19 supported hypterthreading up to a certain point it happend that two processes were running on the same cpu while the other (physical) cpu was running idle. This does not happen with the new ht-aware scheduler.
Look here for a (compressed) version of the initial discussion.
-- Having problems sending big files over the net? Try out Efisto (http://efisto.org)
Haven't heard much about scheduler/hyperthreading interaction.
Should help though
http://gk.umtstrial.co.uk/~calum/2.5-kernel/
Might update it if I get a few hits.
Get your own free personal location tracker
DLed it last night, and built it. Looked fine - I like that the make xconfig is no longer really REALLY ugly, but xinerama seemed to confuse it (;
Anyway, I couldn't get the nvidia viddeo drivers to build for it, and it WAS 4am, so I'm back to 2.4.20, and maybe I'll play with it later. Hoping someone already did it and feels like posting. (:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
check out www.kernelnewbies.org
that has a bunch of that kind of stuff.
ashridah
devfs is also similar to what FreeBSD has had for years. Dynamic device files make sense, there is no way around it. Besides, your complients are the first I've heard of any issues. I've been using devfs for awhile (Gentoo's defaults to it on) and its nice not having to remember major/minor numbers for stuff like my iPod or my USB mouse.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
From post-halloween-2.5.txt:
- Older Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support For XFree86 4.0) has been removed. Upgrade to XFree86 4.1.0 or higher.
So, you need to upgrade to Xfree 4.1.0. I even saw Alan Cox mention that he needed Xfree 4.3.0 in some i810 testing.
Check
High-speed is the faster one. USB2 high-speed is supported (at least somewhat) in the 2.4 kernel - at least it works in 2.4.20+ for me. I have read that 2.6 should have much better support for high-speed though.
hey, i got a good site for you...
Here
and if i can find the good site...ill post it...
also try searching google and asking for help in iirc rooms...plus make sure you have a back-up kernel if compiling messes you up..
I personally can't wait to skim the change logs. ;-)
I think someone has already done this for you
Check that link for a complete and detailed list of "things to expect" in the next stable version, already merged in th 2.5 series.
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
Re: Linux v2.6.0-test1
The whole thread is here Linux v2.6.0-test1
They're using the new NTFS drivers. Check out:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
I think it requires the CK patch to change it. The patch also includes other low latency features which can be quite useful.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Well, assuming that's a legitimate question and you're not just being a smart-ass (hard to tell)...
I used rfstool.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
To test this issue out, run Sawfish, and bind a key like Ctrl-Alt-B to a black-background xterm. Launch X, and run Sawfish. Hit Ctrl-Alt-B once and see what happens. It's consistant here across about 6 machines, all different hardware.. a 3-4 second delay, then anywhere from none to 4 xterms will open up. On 2.4.anything, it opens the xterm instantly, and only opens one of them, not 3, not none.
The other issue is that there's some underlying change in the TCP stack/net drivers that cause rsync and anything running over ssh/ipsec to fail with weird dropped-socket errors from the applications using them. Again, on 2.4, it works flawlessly.
It's very annoying, and both of these are blockers for me and most of the machines I'd be running this on. It happens with anything that involves keyboard shortcuts; menu accels, launched applications, keybindings, everything.
Changing to the different schedulers does not help; deadline, as, or cfq. 2.5.68 worked perfectly, and didn't have these anomalies, but every single kernel since that time, has had it. I've diffed, and I can't tell which of the dozens of changes actually broke this.
If anyone has a solution, I'm all ears.
Well, it is better, but not wonderful. I also have a cheapish bttv style card, and have run both 2.4 and 2.5.* and 2.5 drops fewer frames but I still lose quite a few, though certainly not in regular intervals. This happens using virtually any encoder (nuv, mpeg4) at anything over 480x480 (and my cpu is only at about 50% from the capture/encoding when doing 640x480 which is my normal recording setting). you may want to try the triton1=1 and vsfx=1 insmod options mentioned in:
:)
Documentation/video4linux/bttv/README.quirks
or increase the number of buffers (I use gbuffers=32)
(the dma thing is a big deal too, so better check hdparm)
These made my capture more stable, though it didn't do too much about the dropped frames). Also, 2.5+ includes the new 0.9 bttv drivers which support V4L2 and seem overall to perform better.
Good luck. And if you want a kick-ass PVR, here is my plug for www.mythtv.org
Look for the kernel HOWTO in your distribution. Or online here
"Once the 2.6 series is out of its "testing versions" it is considered STABLE."
.0 kernels are released, many people view them as stable, so the testing base increases. This exposes a lot more bugs and problems. Usually it takes about 5 - 10 releases for it to "really" become stable. In fact, Linus admitted when he labelled 2.4 as officially blessed with the .0 that he did so more to increase the test base than he really thought it was a production-ready kernel.
This is not entirely true. First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be. Therefore, the test kernels have not seen as many strange hardware configurations nor the same usage loads. In fact, they probably haven't seen hardly _any_ true production loads.
When the
I think the problem is that many people (including me) don't take the time to run our own tests on new kernels as a matter of course, and so the actual stabilizing of the kernel is being moved further and further back into the release cycle.
One good thing though is that Linus is going to have a smaller role in the release cycle. Linus is much better at development than he is at making production releases, and kernels usually stabilize when he takes his hands off of them.
For example, Linus wants things to be totally technically pure - which is great, except that most people want a working kernel today. That's what release managers do. They make the nasty bug-fixes and trade-offs that are not good long-term but get the problem fixed today. Linus' view is (and should be) in the long-term, while a release manager needs to look at getting it working today.
Engineering and the Ultimate
meta-moderators, you know what to do...
Linus isn't one to just slap another number on there, notice they are usuallly things like 2.4.25-10
No.
That extra -10 is something that dicks like REDHAT add onto the stock kernel because they have patched it, tweaked it, or fucked with it so it's no longer a standard Linux kernel.
See Slackware or Debian for examples of proper kernel packaging.
holy sweet jesus, huge noticeable performance difference on my athlon 650, going to 2.6.0-test1 with the new scheduling algorithms and the preemptive kernel mod... much, much better performance under heavy loads than it was with 2.4.20
Use Total Commander (shareware) and ext2 plugin. This plugin can mount ReiserFS too (tested on my notebook with Mandrake 9.0 and Windows XP Home.
Ah, ok. You need to enable "Generic IDE Support" AND "PowerMac IDE Support". A .c file in generic ide support EXPORT_SYMBOLs the necessary constants :)
Let's see if it boots...
My other car is first.