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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?
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.
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/
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.
And better USB support with easier way for writing drivers for various USB gadgets.
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?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
I hope they added a few lines like "This is not SCO code" :-P
OK, So what if I'm a troll?!
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
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]
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
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)
Yep, it's called mkreiserfs.
Get your own free personal location tracker
It's not the driver, it's just that Linux Kernel 2.4.x is not preemptible. In other words, the kernel system calls, like read and write, are made to be interruptable in 2.6.x. Basically, it adds some code that allows something else in the kernel to run if one thing is waiting, say, for some sort of input, which improves latency for short periods of time. Linux Journal, May 2002 edition explained this and they had a latency graph of a system playing music under a load. Without the preemptible patch, there were huge spikes in latency (basically audible as gaps in the music) but with the patch, there were minimal changes in the latency. Just today, I noticed something similar to what you talked about. I was ripping CD's and then encoding them as Ogg. Apparently, cdparanoia does system calls that have high latency and since they can't be interrupted, working in X is slow. However, since Ogg encoding is mostly userspace, X was much faster even though more of my processor was being used. Recently, Slashdot linked to an article outlining the changes in 2.6. People have also been making patches for 2.4 for a long while to improve latency, and I think there is a backport of the low latency patch to 2.4.
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
This quote may sound quite arrogant and that Linux isn't suited to the business world - but think about it for a minute - what he said was "We're going to do it our way, making sure it all works, rather than release it before testing properly". I'm glad someone has the sense to do this. How long was it before Microsoft Apps get patched? Something like hours after release? I'd prefer something stable (or as stable as possible) on release, and I thank Linus (and Alan, and Dave) for taking their time. I'm pretty sure we all can't wait until these new features come out - but I'd rather wait for them to become stable instead of risk my precious collection of... well... you catch my drift. =)
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.
The new anticipatory scheduler seems to make a much bigger difference than the preempt patch did in 2.4.
/. in Opera :)
My test box is a Duron 750 with 384M of RAM, running Apache 1.3, Tomcat 4.0 (with Sun 1.4 JVM), MySQL 4.0, X11 + Windowmaker, usually running Opera and Mozilla.
With 2.6.0-test1, I can run the load average up to 3.6 or so, and Mozilla is more responsive than it ever was on 2.4, even with a completely idle system. In fact, it's almost as responsive as the ancient Netscape 4.7 on this same system (compare Netscape 4.7 with any Mozilla 1.x release, if you don't know what I mean).
I'm doing all this junk at once:
- Recompiling the kernel in a `while true' loop
- Recompiling a 100,000 Java project in a `while true' loop
- Playing mp3s with mpg123
- Untarring a kernel tarball, then deleting it, in another loop
- Using Mozilla to hit locally-hosted Tomcat servlets, which make heavy use of the local MySQL server, which has pretty large tables (biggest 2 tables are 1.6G and 400M)
- Reading
I can't make the mp3s skip, and virtual desktop switching is instant. In 2.4, even with the preempt and lowlatency patches, either Mozilla or mpg123 will freeze up, and/or Tomcat/mysql will lag badly (of course, preempt/lowlat isn't supposed to help much with background server daemon processes anyway). 2.6.0-test1's performance under load also beats the 2.5.6x and 2.5.7x kernels I tried on this machine, though most of the 2.5's were an improvement over 2.4.
It helps that all this activity doesn't cause much swap usage (hovering right around 200Kb of swap used).
BTW, if you're already able to run recent 2.5 kernels, you should be able to just throw 2.6.0-test1 in and have it work (no need to upgrade anything you haven't already, to support 2.5).
Executive summary: I'm a happy camper... If you're able to do so, you should try out this kernel on a spare box & see how you like it.