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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!"
What is it I have to do? Send loves and kisses?
Anytime they start work on a new point release it means great things for the Linux OS.
Linus isn't one to just slap another number on there, notice they are usuallly things like 2.4.25-10 and what not.
2.6 should bringbig changes in lots of the core system components. We could get a new way to handle SMP or a new filesystem. I personally can't wait to skim the change logs.
There isn't an ebuild yet, and I'm too lazy to do it the old way...
I know if I start downloading and compiling this kernel I am going to have a 'case of the Mondays' real quick.
Unique signatures are rare.
For us newbies here, what are the relevant differences in the new kernel? Better performance? New hardware support?
All I see is badness coming from this. If someone is good enough with unix to want to use the 2.6 kernel to develop software, odds are they already know how to download and install the kernel themselves. If, on the other hand, we have someone new to Linux see 2.6 and think "that must be better than that old 2.4 kernel POS", and proceed to choose that one, odds are is that the 2.6 kernel is going to result in a less-than-stable system, and is going to look badly upon linux in the future.
OK, yesterday I was testing 2.5.75. Helpfully, the computer locked up and gave me an opportunity to send a bug report. So far so good. Only that I was in X, I wasn't doing anything particularly interesting or demanding (was playing kbounce), the panic report (if there was one) probably went to tty1 and I have no idea why the computer locked up. How do you report a bug when you can't see what went wrong with the kernel?
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
And ive just compiled it. I was quite surprised I managed to get it to boot without it panicing. I'm even typing from the new kernel now. But there is a word of warning though. The layout of the /dev folder has been rearranged. As a result some of my programs have broke.
/dev/hda, /dev/hdb/, /dev/hdc now become /dev/discs/disc0, /dev/discs/disc1, /dev/discs/disc2. So you will need to edit /etc/fstab to reflect the changes.
For example.
Steve French:
o NTLMv2 password support and NTLMSSP signing part 1
o ntlmssp signing
o More NTLMv2
I don't understand - why is this in the kernel? No entiendo.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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).
No more SCSI-Emulation for burning CDs with this.
Should mention that the sound capture seems to cause the problem -- without sound, the capture is smooth under Linux, but adding either ALSA or OSS to the mix guarantees problems.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Downloaded, compiled and installed. Working since 4 hours on a Slackware-9.0-current, asus L8460K notebook (p3/1000, 256mb ram, i440bx, S3 savage/MX, ess allegro) and quite standard compilation options (acpi, alsa, pcmcia, usb, netfilter, no ipv6, preemptible kernel). Applied patch as seen on LKML (see here) for vfsmount.
Happy testing!
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
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!
I hope they added a few lines like "This is not SCO code" :-P
OK, So what if I'm a troll?!
You know, the firewire disk driver. Man that thing has never worked 100%.
Just try corrupting a large (mine was 90GB) partition on a firewire HD and then fschk it. Eventually it'll start getting timeout errors and all sorts of crap, and will eventually trash the filesystem even worse. Then you can't mount the drive at all.
I usually end up having to go to Windows because it's the only place that I can force a massively corrupted partition to mount (and it has better SBP2 support). From there I can copy everything that is still good off and reformat the drive.
This hasn't just happened once. More like 3 or 4 times (both EXT3 and Reiser partitions) over the last year or so.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
If I remember correctly there's a new Block IO (BIO) layer included too, which should enable IDE CD burning without the need for SCSI emulation. Should speed things up somewhat.
I'm not exactly sure if this is correct - I believe I heard it a the Linux Forum in Denmark back in march. The speaker was Jens Axboe, the current cdrom subsystem maintainer.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Actually devfsd does (see here). Most distros use DevFS + devfsd these days (notable exeption off the top of my head is RedHat).
Rich
Are there any distributions out there that are actually using devfs?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Two possibly dumb questions (but this is slashdot, after all). (1) Can you change the scheduler default timeslice (10 msec seems a bit long for a multi-GHz CPU). (2) does it do the right thing for hyperthreading? (for hyperthreading, the scheduler needs to understand that one of the CPUs is sorta crippled, so jobs should flop back & forth between both CPUs).
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Technical achivements aside, the most amusing thing about the 2.6 series of kernels is seeing all the large corporate entities with vested interests deal with the release schedule.
That is to say, there isn't one. I especially liked the quote from Torvalds I recently saw in a CNet news.com that basically said, "it'll be done when it's done - deal with it".
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Let's hope this supports USB 2.0 "Full Speed" or "High Speed", whichever is faster..
LINUX 2.6 KEY CHANGES
Faster, more predictable performance and new APIs are on tap
[Yay]
Desktop improvements
[Whatever that means]
Universal Serial Bus 2.0 and production Bluetooth support
[Yay]
Pre-emptible kernel with low-latency kernel patches for more user responsiveness and better multimedia performance, even under heavy loads
[Like Windows XP!]
Server improvements
[Whatever that means]
Updated I/O and memory subsystem for faster throughput and scalability
[Yeah, like blast processing]
Faster, more scalable process scheduler
[Pfft]
User-mode Linux to allow multiple system images running on the same box to aid server consolidation and application separation
[Sounds like the minutes of a business meeting]
Asynchronous I/O and completion events--a big improvement for Web servers and databases
[I'll take your word for it]
Support for disks larger than 2 terabytes and for SGI's XFS enterprise file system
[OK]
Faster, POSIX-compliant threading library
[Redundant]
and it still shows nothing on screen if i pass vga=normal during boot, and it took me several atempts before I relized that regular ps/2 keyboard can be left out or compiled as a module. well, this kind of changes were expected.
after i managed to get it working (booting, with keyboard, framebuffer console, et. all) surprise... no DRM on X.
happens that for some reason X doesn't detect working agp when a Radeon 8500LE in inserted in my kt266 based mobo. even with agpgart and radeon modules loaded.
so here's a few sugestions:
leave ps/2 kboard selected by default for x86 architectures, same for a way to display the console on text mode vga and check this radeon issue.
except those minor stuff, the new kernel is great. really fast for regular use.
What ? Me, worry ?
It will be nice to see some articles in the mainstream press showing that Linux is still marching on regardless of SCO's drum beating.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I know Slashdot isn't a support forum, but could someone point out a good tutorial for compiling and installing a new kernel? I'd like to give 2.6 a try, but I don't know where to begin.
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.
In the GNU tradition:
Linucs Is Not Using Code from SCO
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Re: Linux v2.6.0-test1
The whole thread is here Linux v2.6.0-test1
I thought 2.6 was suppose to have crashdump support? If not, that's to bad, because often that is what is required to fix problems in the real world. Often the technical person isn't the same person who is using the machine. There needs to be a way for the technical person to figure out what went wrong after the fact. OOP's are about as useful as the BSOD data. Plus, unless its a repeatable problem usually by the time the machine crashes its a little to late to run out and hook up a serial console.
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.
FWIW, 2.6 has ksymoops built in now. Not sure about a full-on debugger - I lost track of where that idea went. Last I checked, anyway (yesterday). The thing that will get most people (I bet) is needing to have the right config options enabled for the console and for kernel debugging.
C|N>K
Well, that's good - 2.6 is testing. That means that it will only be, what, like 4 or 5 years until Debian puts 2.6 in their stable tree? :P And yet, I still won't switch to something else. It's just too good (plus, I have the advantage of not necessarily needing to be 100% stable :).
Though honestly, much of MS software is also sold shrinkwrapped. This gives a latency between the final build, documentation print run, CD pressing, packaging and distribution that doesn't exist with something like the linux kernel. During this time development continues, which is why you can have patches for a game or application avaliable before said product is even in wide distribution.
And again honestly, I don't think you can argue that the linux stable series are released as "full quality" and don't need patches right away. History does not support such claims.
Indeed, Linus knows this; he sees the problem that the unstable series doesn't get tested well enough and that only slapping a 2.even.0 number on it increase the testing crosssection several orders of magnitude.
In conclusion, I think you should read "it'll be released when it's done" not mainly as an assurance of release quality, but as a short form for "it'll be released when I think we'll have a good enough chance of getting people to test this without getting too badly burned".
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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
"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."
;-)
That would be useful in getting these new kernels debuged quickly. The install should default to the latest stable release however, and should be very clear that the optional test kernels are infact not a final product release.
Otherwise we'll have made the same mistake as Microsoft - shipping incomplete products under the guise of a polished solution - and having our paying customers debug and test them for us.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It's not true, as the article claims, that making one process look like two doesn't buy you much. The reason is that cache misses are getting more and more expensive: without hyperthreading, a cache miss might cause the processor to wait a hundred cycles. With hyperthreading, we simply switch to the other process, and pay a far smaller cost.
Hyperthreading is the ability for a single processor to actually masquerade as two (or more) processors from the operating system perspective. What is absolutely the most amazing thing about this feature is that Linux was the first OS to bring the features to market, despite compatible processors being released by Intel almost a year ago.
I find this odd, since my FreeBSD kernel has had an option for enabling HyperThreading support in the kernel since 4.8 (option HTT). FreeBSD 4.8 was released on the fourth of april this year. Linux 2.6 is not out yet. I hardly think this is a first for Linux.
It does seem to be a common belief amongst Linux users that Linux and Windows are the only two operating systems in the world. Guys, there are other options out there. I hear even a little company called SCO has some kind of Linux-like OS...
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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.