Linux 2.6 Kernel Stability Freeze

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Creator Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.0-test7 Linux development kernel today and declared a "stability freeze". It has been made quite clear that from this point only "strictly necessary stuff" will be accepted, clearing the way for an official 2.6.0 release sooner than later... possibly at the end of this month."

Comments

This probably has nothing to do with it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Darl McBride was seen yesterday telling Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox that no, they cannot come in to see some undisclosed friends, no, they are not allowed on SCO computers anymore and they better get the hell out of the parking lot after the SCO employees leave the office tonight or Darl's calling the cops.

agggh

[Anonymous Coward]

First post! John Lennon would have been 63 tomorrow.

Re:agggh

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a fuck. He sucked. The beatles sucked.

I GOT A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!

[Anonymous Coward]

GO LINUX 2.6!

Re:I GOT A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Re:I GOT A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it ears first? That's gonna leave a mark.

Stability=Freeze?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Freeze?

Features?

[ovit]

What major new features can we expect? Hopefully it's loads faster.

Tony

Re:Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Integreated yoda dolls!

Re:Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I dunno, SCO registration form on the first boot-up?

Re:Features?

[Tribbin]

... and binaries only right from kernel.org ;-)

Re:Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I dunno, SCO registration form on the first boot-up?

I suppose that were the 200 lines of SCO code that SGI removed last month...

Re:Features?

[echodots]

cpu hotswapping! w00t

Time to upgrade!

[caluml]

Great! That means it's really stable now. I shall upgrade the fw at work to this tomorrow. DNS and mailserver as well.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Short Circuit]

Whoops! Hold on a second.

The stability freeze only means that no new features will be added. There are still lots of bugs to be worked out. Else we'd have a 2.6.0 release instead of a freeze.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[caluml]

Duh! Don't you know anything? Linus 2.6 is the most stable OS ever. A man at the pub told me, and he works in IT selling computers, and I believe him.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[RealAlaskan]

Great! That means it's really stable now.

BZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! It's a "stability freeze". That means that the stabilizers are frozen, and can't function. So, it will be unstable until they get the stabilizers repaired.

Sheesh. Goofy kids these days...

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Anonymous Coward]

A man at the pub told me, and he works in IT selling computers, and I believe him.

If he doesn't work for the Gartner Group then you're on the safe side!

Re:Time to upgrade!

[modme2]

he read that on teh intraweb

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you gonna let people whose machines are in less of a production role give it a whirl first?

I hope I'm not in any way a user of your company's machines. I don't like it when people risk their customers' experiences to try out new things. If 2.6.0 becomes are stable as we hope then by all means install it but I would advise a period of scrutiny to determine this first. Even Linus would insist you hang your head in shame for just accepting his offerings at face value.

Just remember: new != better

Re:Time to upgrade!

[DA-MAN]

Sounds to me like it's got a bad motivator

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad Linus drew the line on stability, because we should be working on more important stuff, like new features.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[faccenda]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! It's so stable that is freezing, it can't move anymore.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[q.kontinuum]

That means that the stabilizers are frozen, and can't function.

Bullshit, it means the stability of the kernel is really cool now ;-)

Re:Time to upgrade!

[ocelotbob]

Well, logically, a frozen system is a paragon of stability. Regardless of the network packet, regardless of the keyboard input, it retains the same usability, and the same functionality. In entropic terms, it's at its natural state, the lowest stable energy level. It is the act of booting that makes a system unstable, and the system's crashes and segfaults are the results of the machine working to return to this natural, stable state.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[msh104]

Also note: a few security flaws that are fixed in the 2.4 kernel are NOT yet fixed in 2.6, so even if it would already be rocker than rock solid. THAT is still a very good reason not to upgrade yet.

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Berzelius]

You haven't paying attention at physics class, even the so called 'stable' elements show a certain amount of 'decay'. p.s. I guess the fall-out here is the other OSs ;-)

Re:Time to upgrade!

[syzygy_001]

ACK! frozen stabilizers!!

Quick, Think like Geordi... Think Like Geordi...

I know!! Reverse the polarity!! that will fix it, that always fixes it!

Re:Time to upgrade!

[Anonymous Coward]

But what are you going to reverse the polarity of?
According to the 3rd "there is no such thing as too much lace and velvet" Doctor Who we need to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

All I have to say is

[Anonymous Coward]

Sub Zero wins. Stabality.

Re:All I have to say is

[Anonymous Coward]

That is fucking funny.

That's good

[ixt]

2.5 has been largely successful, and a lot of end users were able to compile it. 2.3? That's another story. I remember not being able to compile 2.3 once.

Good job to all the kernel hackers.

Re:That's good

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember not being able to compile 2.3 once.

Take it easy. It happens to all of us sometimes. It's no cause for shame. You are still some kind of man.

Re:That's good

[t0ny]

Linus was quoted as saying "How many fuckin' browsers do we NEED, anyway?!?!?!"

Re:That's good

[GrenDel Fuego]

As long as you didn't need IDE anyways.

IDE was unstable/scary for most of the early 2.5 series. I believe it around around 2.5.40 or so when the IDE system changes were removed and things became usable again.

Re:That's good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that happened to me once, but I was so drunk I could barely stand up. On my feet, I mean. Anyway, by the time I noticed what was (not)happening the girl was passed out, so it doesn't count.

Re:That's good

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFLMAO! Mod this up!

This month will certainly go down as

[Maskirovka]

The October of cool new toys:
Sony PSX
Panther (Mac OS 10.3)
2.6 kernal
Half LIfe 2
Ow! Ouch! Sorry!

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[sharkey]

The October of cool new toys:
2.6 kernal

Still waiting on a spellchecker, though.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Osty]

Sony PSX

Huh? An overpriced, underpowered, aging game system mated with weak PVR capabilities is a "cool toy"?

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

2.6 kernal... Still waiting on a spellchecker, though.

5 billion influential nanogermans can't err!

-- Tleilaxu Theorem (unproven)

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

Still waiting on a spellchecker, though.

Don't you know it. I can't count how many times I've fscked something up forgetting to add toad's skin or newt's eyes or mandrake root, or even done the whole thing under the wrong phase of the moon. If my computer had a spell checker it would make this whole magic thing *so* much easier!

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[gid]

heh, HL2 kinda came out tho, a beta copy got leaked tho from what I hear....

I also happen to have a leaked copy of Linux 2.6.0-test7!

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll find this odd, but spelling well is a discipline. It is by no means magic. Alot like getting your fat ass off the sofa you fat wicca worshipping bastard.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, HL2 kinda came out tho, a beta copy got leaked tho from what I hear....

Yeah.. and the sourcecode too.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[mccormick]

When will people get the idea that is does not matter what you hear as much as what you actually know for a fact (read about and verified, discovered, etc.)

And get the story straight too.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll find this odd, but spelling well is a discipline. It is by no means magic. Alot like getting your fat ass off the sofa you fat wicca worshipping bastard.

I hear that having a good vocabulary takes some discipline as well. Did you know that a lot of people think that 'alot' is one word?

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare that to the average linux nerd who brags about how his overaged, underpowered P2 still run things well....

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[gid]

Get what story straight?

A friend passed along a bittorrent link to me of a supposed hl2 beta, not the source, I've seen screenshots, so I'm pretty sure it's out there somewhere. But as I didn't actually try it first hand (I've got better things to do than dl a crappy hl2 beta), or talk to a trusted friend whom tried it first hand, I can't be 100% positive, so I put the disclaimer "from what I hear" on it.

I'd like to think I have a pretty good bullshit-o-meter, so I only pass along information that I'm pretty darn sure is correct.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[jjhlk]

What did you see screenshots of? Demos? There have been quite a few released.

Supposedly the hacker behind it said he also has the beta, but I haven't seen any evidence. The source is quite easy to get though. And I don't know much about bittorrent kiddies nowadays, but fake warez are released all the time over sharing networks.

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[jjhlk]

Just read a story about leaked beta screenshots though, and saw the torrent link myself. Two Cds worth..

Re:This month will certainly go down as

[gid]

Most of the screen shots were actually of HL2 running in a window on some guys desktop, I suppose those could have been faked as well, seems like an awful lot of trouble tho just to try and convince people that there was a leaked beta.

My Module

[blackmonday]

I wrote a speaker bracelet module. Alas, it's been rejected because I turned it in too late. It was really cool though.

Re:My Module

[MBCook]

What did it do?

They'll probably take it after the kernel is released though.

Re:My Module

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't read Slashdot that much.

Re:My Module

[Lxy]

It's OK. I got my truck candle module to compile against it and I can release a patch.

Re:My Module

[kayen_telva]

I am forking you speaker bracelet module to incorporate detection of the evil bit, and the ability to add beowulf nodes. God I love opensource

Re:My Module

[Anonymous Coward]

It does the same thing as the candle truck module and the intelligent slashdot moderator module (neither of which exist at present.)

Re:My Module

[rifter]

It does the same thing as the candle truck module and the intelligent slashdot moderator module (neither of which exist at present.)

Damn and here I had bought a candle truck full of speaker bracelets after googling for a manufacturer. I was thinking "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" I guess I should have asked, "Does it run Linux?"

I guess I will be stuck running NetBSD on them and sshing over WiFi to my wristwatch! :)

There had better be alot to put in...

[CrackedButter]

Mac OSX is at 10.3 now...thats 7.7 versions behind Apple... i would say keep going until they at least catch up THEN freeze the feature set.

Re:There had better be alot to put in...

[CrackedButter]

Unless you couldn't tell, it was meant to be a joke. Or has nobody got a sense of humour when it comes to Linux Kernels? Its all getting on ones knee's and bowing at the feet of Torvalds?

Re:There had better be alot to put in...

[mccormick]

And you accuse the rest of us for lacking a sense of humour?

Can you help me reinstall iLife on my iBook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that wee Macintosh users are k3wl Linux hackers, I feel comfortable in posting this request for help.

I downloaded the first 10.2.8 update and it fucked up my 233-MHz grape iBook and now I can't get iLife to work. Would somebody tell me how I can get it working again?

Also, even though I *AM* a k3wl Unix hacker now, could you explain it in terms of which icons to click on, instead of that icky command line interface?

Thanks,
"Tron"

Re:Can you help me reinstall iLife on my iBook?

[Gherald]

Do the internet a favor and click the "Shutdown" icon.

Re:Can you help me reinstall iLife on my iBook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that wee Macintosh users are k3wl Linux hackers, I feel comfortable in posting this request for help

Mac users *aren't* "cool Linux hackers" now. The Mac runs a flavor of BSD (which I think is pretty cool in itself!)

Re:Can you help me reinstall iLife on my iBook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Macintosh users are not 'k3wl Linux hackers'. Darwin is based on FreeBSD, which is not linux at all. Darwin, as it happens, is also not FreeBSD, since the apple people have gone and muddled it up. http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ is as close as you'll get. I'm better than you because I use linux. Neener.

Re:Can you help me reinstall iLife on my iBook?

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Stability freeze: In related news..

[adeyadey]

..Microsoft, after the latest virus attack, have declared an instability melt..

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

and this didnt get modded 'troll' why?

if flamed linux i'd get modded down like a mofo.

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU Lunix ruels and as soon as i can get enogh money from selling my crappy magic cards on eBay to move out of my mom's basement I'll prove it to the world by making my 486 into a router!!!!

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[gl4ss]

because it's partly funny, and got modded as so probably first.

theres a thin line between troll and funny.. and if something is modded funny it's much more likely that it will get modded funny instead of troll by the next guy modding as well.

though i'm pretty sure you wont bother to check back to actually read this answer since you're an ac.

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

if flamed linux i'd get modded down like a mofo.

Sure. And if the original comment was actually flaming Microsoft, you might have had a point. As it is, you just didn't get it.

Stay in school!

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[adeyadey]

So we can say

if (humour > troll + flamebait)
mod ++;
else
mod --;

Re:Stability freeze: In related news..

[tunabomber]

He he. Yeah... Hell will declare a stability freeze long before Microsoft does.

Reiser 4

[agrippa_cash]

So it looks like we'll have to wait a while longer for Reiser4, or were some of the Reiser4 implimentation problems due to the shifting kernel patches? Anyone? Anyone?

Re:Reiser 4

[caluml]

More importantly, is XFS in there by default? I haven't tried it since about 2.5.59. It's annoying when patches made for vanilla 2.4 don't apply on 2.4 + XFS. If the vanilla kernel came with XFS, those patches would be made against that, and would apply.

Re:Reiser 4

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/latest.html, XFS has been in since 2.5.36

Re:Reiser 4

[caluml]

Then the answer is yes. Reiserfs for lots of small files, XFS for lots of big files or its nice ACLs, and ext2 for that /boot partition. Ext3 over my dead slow body.

Re:Reiser 4

[Anonymous Coward]

Wise man. I have an entirely different setup, but I am the only user so it doesn't matter.

Here is something I think you will laugh at: I will soon be booting off a minix partition. I am not kidding here.

Re:Reiser 4

[Skeme]

Good question. It will appear in someone's (I believe AA's) tree in a couple months or weeks. From there it will stabilize and get added to 2.6. Here's the latest status update from Hans:

The filesystem is getting reasonably stable.
This weekend we hit a bug in space reservation, which we can't reproduce yet but probably isn't too hard to find by code inspection. There is some thought that the assertion not the space reservation is buggy, in any case we'll release a snapshot after it is fixed.

Our performance is generally wonderful and getting better.
It has the following weakpoints:

* We allocate a "jnode" per unformatted node in the filesystem. The traversing of these jnodes consumes more CPU than performing the memcpy from user space to kernel space when doing large writes. I don't yet really understand on an intuitive level why this is so, which is a reflection on my ignorance as it is consistent with stories I have heard from other implementors of filesystems who found that eliminating per page structures was an important part of optimizing large writes. We will fix this by creating a new structure called an extent-node that will exist on a per extent basis, and this will probably cure the problem. This will greatly simplify parts of our code for reasons I won't go into, and it will also take us 6 weeks to do it. I don't think users should wait for it, and so we will ship without it.

* Our dbench performance was poor, has improved due to coding changes, and we need to test and analyze again. Perhaps more fixes will be needed, we can't say yet.

* Our fsync performance is poor. We will pay attention to this next year, frankly, after we have fully implemented the transactions API. At that point we will say something like, if you care about fsync performance you should be using the transactions API and/or sponsoring us to tune for NVRAM, users will say back "but our legacy apps on hardware without NVRAM matter!", and we will grudgingly but effectively tune for this because we care about real users too.;-)

Nikita recently invented and implemented a clever bit of code that keeps track of the highest node in the tree that spans a directory, and then performs repeat lookups within the same directory starting from there rather than the root. This is a nice answer to those who keep asking me, wouldn't it be faster to have separate trees for each directory? Now I have better answer for them --- nice work Nikita. It also has the nice side effect of reducing spin lock contention on the root node for 4-way SMP.

I am hoping to move my laptop to SuSE 9.0 running reiser4 sometime this week, and I am hoping we will ask for more outside testers to help us find bugs at that time. While I have mentioned only the performance flaws in this email, our overall performance seems to leave little doubt that the filesystem as-is is far better than V3, and even though it will get much faster with another year or so of tuning, if now we are the fastest available on Linux, we should be shipping now (assuming we find no new bugs in the last round of internal testing).

Benchmarks can be found at www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html

As you can see in those benchmarks, in V4 tails IMPROVE performance due to saving IO transfer time. This is a great improvement over V3, and generally speaking V4 stomps all over V3 performance. It also scales better, has plugins, and improves semantics a little bit (big semantic improvements will be in the next major release not V4).
You'll also notice that we increased the size of the fileset to be more fair to ext3, and we tested some ext3 configurations Andrew Morton suggested testing.

--
Hans

Re:Reiser 4

[Anonymous Coward]

Crikey... You've got to be kidding.

You think Ext3 is slow and yet you stick with XFS? I've never seen a file system add so much bloat to a kernel. But that's not the worst of it, XFS chews CPU cycles like nothing else. It might be OK for a server with only a couple processes, but for general use XFS blows.

One of the reasons XFS is slightly faster is because it steals cycles from the rest of the kernel and processes. On a desktop machine it kills the interactiveness of the system.

Re:Reiser 4

[Dr.Ruud]

Nikita recently invented and implemented a clever bit of code that keeps track of the highest node in the tree that spans a directory, and then performs [...]

Do n ' t f o r g e t t o p a t e n t i t.

Not "possibly at the end of this month"

[JoeBuck]

Linus wrote: In other words, this should calm things down so that by the end of October we can look at the state of 2.6.0 without having a lot of noise from 'not strictly necessary' stuff."

That is, at the end of October he will "look at the state of 2.6.0". That's quite different from shipping it.

Re:Not "possibly at the end of this month"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite different from shipping it.

Not at some of the place where I've worked.

Who cares.

[BoomerSooner]

Mac OS is on 10.3, that's like 7.7 better. And no fair skipping like MS does. Windows 95 my ass, more like Windows 3.11b

Re:Who cares.

[Carnildo]

If you look at the internal version numbers, Microsoft considers Windows 95 to be Windows 4.0. Win98, 98SE and ME are all Windows 4.1.

On the NT side, Win2k is WinNT 5.0, while XP is WinNT 5.1.

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please!
Windows95 == Windows 4.0
Windows98 == Windows 4.1
Windows 2000 == WinNT 4.5
WindowsXP == WinNT 5.0

Re:Who cares.

[louzerr]

That's simply juvenile and stupid. Mind you, I just picked my self off the floor from laughing!

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its this Windows 2000 == WinNT 5.0 Windows XP == 5.1 Windows 2003 == I don't know, never done a "ver" from a command prompt. I'm betting it'll say 5.2

Re:Who cares.

[CrackedButter]

Before or after it was marked as flamebait?

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Where were you the last 429 times someone has made the sam stupid fucking jokes?

Re:Who cares.

[styrotech]

On the NT side, Win2k is WinNT 5.0, while XP is WinNT 5.1.

Or as I like to think it should've been:

NT 3.1 -> NT 1.0
NT 3.5 -> NT 1.1
NT 3.51 -> NT 1.1.1
NT 4.0 -> NT 2.0
NT 4.0 with option pack -> NT 2.1 (maybe?)
W2K -> NT 3.0
XP -> NT 3.1
etc

Re:Who cares.

[wfberg]

C:\Documents and Settings\Windows User>ver

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]

Fair enough to say it's really 3.1.2600 since they skipped right ahead to NT 3.1 when NT was first released.

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

You win a prize!

Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]

Re:Who cares.

[gordyf]

I don't think you can count XP as "win2k+0.1" because win2k was designed to be a workstation and server OS, whereas XP is useless as a server. Win2k was the latest server OS until very recently (with Win2k3 floating around.)

Just IMHO. And offtopic, of course. :)

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume that Windows Server 2003 is also NT 5.1, but I don't know anyone who uses it so I can't find out.

Re:Who cares.

[saskwach]

But visual studio 6 was the first to come out after 1...

Re:Who cares.

[styrotech]

OK then, NT 3.1 Professional or Home (XP) vs NT 3.1 Server (W2003) :)

Although 2003 has a 5.2 version number internally - even though both XP and W2003 are from 'Whistler'.

Bah, I don't like either of them - they rub me up the wrong way. Give me W2K (if it has to be Windows) or Debian (if it doesn't have to be Windows) instead.

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough to say it's really 3.1.2600

I knew it! When the middle digit is odd, it's an unstable development release!

Re:Who cares.

[Wildfire Darkstar]

My understanding is that since Windows NT is basically just Microsoft's OS/2 code from back when they picked up their toys and moved out of IBM's sandbox, that the numbering basically picked up from OS/2. Which still doesn't exactly explain the absence of a 3.0 release, nor is it a particularly honest and forthright way of numbering things, but, hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so what do you expect?

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget, Mac OS runs on the fastest hardware money can buy, has the slickest, most configurable and consistent GUI, has the best applications, and has a kick ass company standing behind it. Wow, it almost makes you cry (if you are a Linux user anyway) when you consider the pathetic state of Linux in comparison.

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sgi.com wipes the floor with your so-called 'fastest hardware money can buy'. hell, even a 2-way opteron 248 kicks apple's butt speed wise. so stuff it.

Re:Who cares.

[AlterSelf]

I honestly dont know.. but maybe someone can asnwer... was microsoft and ibm working on the os/2 3.0 code when microsoft split? If so.. they probably descided that their os should have the version 3.5, being that its 'better'. (In microsofts eyes, owned by microsoft means better.)

Either that, or they named it 3.5 because the non NT version of windows was 3.1 or so at the time?

Actually I think NT was supposed to replace windows back in those days.. but microsoft just couldnt get the market to bite (for whatever reason), and ended up... makeing do... (instability in NT? incompadible with most dos stuff?) They have been saying for years that NT was going to replace windows in the NT 4.0/Win 2000 days... guess we had to wait for XP =)

Re:Who cares.

[red floyd]

No, VS actually went through all the numbers (well, I don't know about 3)...

MSC5.1
MSC6.0
MSC/C++ 7.0
VC++ 1.0
VC++ 1.52
VC++ 2.0 (first 32 bit version)
VC++ 4
VC++ 5.0 (from VS 97)
VC++ 6 (from VS 6.0)
VC++ 7 (aka VC++.NET from VS.NET)
VC++ 7.1 (aka VC++.NET2003 from VS.NET 2003)

Re:Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that since Windows NT is basically just Microsoft's OS/2 code

Wrong. NT was developed completely independent of OS/2. David Cutler(who came from Digital and headed its VMS effort) headed up development.

There's an entire book on the beginning of NT development called "Showstopper".

Re:Who cares.

[Keeper]

It's NT 5.2.3790 where 3790 is the build number (which represents the delta [in days] from the date NT was first built to that particular build, if I remember correctly).

Re:Who cares.

[Professor Bluebird]

Well they wanted to keep the version numbers mostly the same as the "unstable" consumer versions of Windows (3.1, 95/4.0).

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shall we place bets on how long it takes the "stability freeze" to turn into a "stability slush" and then a "stability thaw"? My intuition and past experience tell me that the kernel still won't be out by the end of the year.

Put the CD you bought in your CD-ROM drive

[Anonymous Coward]

and type

D:\setup.exe

on the command line (assuming that your CD_ROM drive letter is D).

Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he an MCSE?
I wouldn't trust anyone else's opinions.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Better...a 3.51 MCSE

Re:Yes, but

[sharkey]

Is he an MCSE?

I was there. He said his name was Darl Mc-something, and he had a lot of his code in the Linux 26 thingy, and that's why it works.

Stability?

[Wooky_linuxer]

When the 2.4 series came out, it was much criticisd for not having anything near the stability of the old 2.2 series (I'd say it haven't catch up yet,but since I use it in a desktop machine 2.2 is not an option)... What can we wait from the brave new world the 2.6 kernel will bring?

Re:Stability?

[efti]

I've been using the 2.5 series since 2.5.66 or so. The main reasons I recommend 2.6 are:

• Greatly improved responsiveness under heavy load -- I no longer notice cpu-intensive tasks like a kernel recompile or the slocate database rebuild cron-job happening in the background. And X isn't even running with higher priority.
• Built-in ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) -- much improved audio, especially audio recording
• Improved ACPI power management and CPU frequency scaling (my main machine is a laptop)
• Software suspend (just like hybernate on Windows), again handy for laptop users, or those who like to sleep without listening to the whine of their super mega cooler CPU fan / vacuum cleaner attachment.
• Built-in IPSEC support. This is mostly useful for those who need to set up VPN tunnels. I imagine it is more efficient to handle IPSEC inside the TCP/IP stack itself

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I haven't used the built-in IPSEC yet, and software suspend still doesn't work properly on my laptop, but it's not far off. 2.6 will be a pretty sweet series.

Re:Stability?

[Overly Critical Guy]

More hypocrisy, like before. Linux can put out several filesystem corrupting kernel releases and major showstoppers as in the 2.4.x series, but if a user-transmitted e-mail virus makes the rounds, it's a "Microsoft hole."

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Return it for a refund.

Re:Stability?

[wfberg]

More hypocrisy, like before. Linux can put out several filesystem corrupting kernel releases and major showstoppers as in the 2.4.x series, but if a user-transmitted e-mail virus makes the rounds, it's a "Microsoft hole."

Linux doesn't put out Linux releases, Linux is Linux. And Linux is used in several distributions - you can get a five nines Linux distribution if you like. Bugridden open source software does get flack -- distributions don't incorporate a kernel they don't feel comfortable with (RedHat's kernels are heavily patched for instance), no-one will touch wuftpd with a 50 ft pole, people wil nag authors with patches, fork or start competing projects (qmail, postfix vs. sendmail) etc.

Speaking about qmail and open source software getting flack, ever read DJB's comments on BIND and sendmail? Or ANY holy war? (BSD vs. linux, EMACS vs. VI,.. )

User-transmitted e-mail virusses? That's called a trojan horse. Recent worms -- exploiting holes on Microsoft's e-mail client running on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft's browser -- depend on bugs and design in Microsoft's software and that's squarely their responsibility (e.g. why is RPC even listening to anything but localhost by default? If you needed it to listen to the entire internet, you'd know and could change the default).

Besides, those crappy kernels you mention haven't affected me one bit. Whereas I've spent quite some time getting people to install patches, firewalls, and remove those darned worms.

Some people may have a certain amount of unfounded (or at least, not founded in technical fact) animosity towards Microsoft, but let's face it, most mature open source software we rely on is much, much more secure, stable and well-designed than MS Outlook and its ilk. And that most certainly includes the Linux kernel. Comparing apples and oranges, maybe (the 2k/XP kernel isn't half bad either) but that doesn't mean that Microsoft should get away with crappy products that aren't kernels.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this some kind of a joke? Do you have any idea how many Micorsoft file system corruption bugs have been reported since 1991? Even worse, MS has only ever supported 3 (fat,ntfs,hpfs) i/o file systems to Linux's 19+ i/o fs's. You don't have anything to brag about there pal.

Re:Stability?

[LearnToSpell]

I'd agree with what you said except for the ACPI/APM and software suspend stuff, which are totally broken for many, many people right now. Some major overhauls happening, so we'll see if they get done for 2.6.

Re:Stability?

[Pharmboy]

When the 2.4 series came out, it was much criticisd for not having anything near the stability of the old 2.2 series (I'd say it haven't catch up yet,but since I use it in a desktop machine 2.2 is not an option)... What can we wait from the brave new world the 2.6 kernel will bring?

I would agree on the server side. RH upgraded 7.2 to a 2.4 kernel and yes I gained iptables (even tho ipchains was adequate) but I did lose some stability. I still only have to reboot every 6 months, but its usually due to some unexplained problem that I didn't have with 2.2.x

Yes, I would prefer 2.4+ on the desktop, but I am considering doing a serious downgrade on a few dedicated boxes I have (dns in particular) due to my faith in the ability to crank out a non modular 2.2 kernel that you can't crash. Actually, until 2.4, I hand built every kernel and never used ANY kernel modules, building everything directly in.

Re:Stability?

[Pharmboy]

Remember the 98a defrag corruptions?

Remember how Microsoft told us to never "Always trust content from Microsoft"?

Did you know that "Linux" is about 35MB of kernel source code only? Its not an operating system, its a freaking kernel. Mandrake, RedHat, SuSe and even Caldera are "Linux distributions". I installed several distributions in the 2.4 series, and at least a dozen different kernel releases, and never saw, experienced or heard about any file system corruption due to the kernel. Then again, most intellegent people don't load the freshest kernel on a production machine.

As a matter of fact, you don't change the kernel unless it has an errata that actually affects you, you need the new features, or you are foolish. At least with Linux, you have a choice of kernels. You show me a smart Linux admin, and I will show you someone using a kernel that is at least a couple versions back.

There are Linux viruses, btw. The difference is when a Linux box gets infected, it is designed with permissions that make it impossible to send it out to every other Linux box out there. Its by design.

Re:Stability?

[saskwach]

Okay, I'm probably being trolled, but I'll bite anyway:
When a new kernel release comes out, nobody forces you to use it. You don't see routers using the development kernel very often, now do you? The whole development cycle for open source software is vastly different from that of a proprietary system like Windows because the cycles are different lengths. I'll let you read about cathedrals and bazaars on your own time, but anyway, back to the issue. A kernel patch is something only a relatively savvy user who knows what they're doing will attempt. Windows worms, like lovsan, are not transmitted through any conscious action on the part of the box owner. In order to prevent them, the user has to be aware of what is going on security wise. Now, don't get me wrong on this, I read about the RPC hole that spawned lovsan and patched right away, as should most windows users, since there are auto updates...but an unstable kernel release that's called stable and sticks around for a few weeks is hardly comparable to a hole that existed, unnoticed, for about a decade. As far as your sig goes, do you see a site like that for Microsoft? Do you honestly believe their programmers are so much better that they have a significantly smaller error rate? A huge and open bug database in the open source world helps eliminate those bugs. I know, I know...troll, whatever, I'm sick of not ranting.

Re:Stability?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Look at all the twisting and turning you make to justify the double standard.

Face it. All the Linux users will freely ignore and disregard corrupting kernel releases. If Microsoft even dared do something like corrupting everyone's NTFS installations, they'd be eaten alive by hundreds of fanatical posts here.

User-transmitted e-mail virusses? That's called a trojan horse.

A trojan horse is a program that sits in waiting until a specified condition, dummy.

Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft's browser -- depend on bugs and design in Microsoft's software and that's squarely their responsibility (e.g. why is RPC even listening to anything but localhost by default? If you needed it to listen to the entire internet, you'd know and could change the default).

Sobig required the user to execute it. If they're executing an app, there's not much you can do.

But, of course, you'll perpetuate the double standard, because it's a "Microsoft hole," right?

Besides, those crappy kernels you mention haven't affected me one bit.

And those Windows problems have never, ever affected me.

Whereas I've spent quite some time getting people to install patches, firewalls, and remove those darned worms.

They should have already been patched. RPC was fixed a whole month before through Windows Update.

Some people may have a certain amount of unfounded (or at least, not founded in technical fact) animosity towards Microsoft, but let's face it, most mature open source software we rely on is much, much more secure, stable and well-designed than MS Outlook and its ilk.

It's all much, much less full of features, usable, or even efficient. Might I also mention taking a look at my sig and seeing that OSS is just as full of bugs as Microsoft? Need I mention the "Linux Most Attacked OS" article Slashdot posted that linked to a study showing Linux as the most breached server on the net? Need I mention ssh/ssl? Bind? Sendmail? I could go on and on...

Re:Stability?

[Overly Critical Guy]

I installed several distributions in the 2.4 series, and at least a dozen different kernel releases, and never saw, experienced or heard about any file system corruption due to the kernel. Then again, most intellegent people don't load the freshest kernel on a production machine.

Then you weren't paying attention. 2.4.x was a complete wreck, and everyone complained. I still remember the infamous Thanksgiving "turkey" kernel that randomly corrupted ext3 partitions.

The base definition of an operating system is the kernel running it, dummy. Linux is the system operating my devices and letting me operate my computer.

Windows also has permissions. Every single Windows network I've ever run or worked with operated the same way.

Another "GNU/Linux" weenie. Here's the part where someone mods me down instead of posting in disagreement.

Re:Stability?

[DA-MAN]

> Yes, I would prefer 2.4+ on the desktop, but I am considering doing a serious downgrade on a few dedicated boxes I have (dns in particular) due to my faith in the ability to crank out a non modular 2.2 kernel that you can't crash. Actually, until 2.4, I hand built every kernel and never used ANY kernel modules, building everything directly in.

Just remember that the OS is getting End of Lifed in December, at which time you will either have to go roll your own update/security patches or figure something out. I hear rpmfind may be keeping things going for EOL'd redhat, but not sure.....

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you weren't paying attention. 2.4.x was a complete wreck, and everyone complained. I still remember the infamous Thanksgiving "turkey" kernel that randomly corrupted ext3 partitions.

There was nothing 'random' about it, it only corrupted the filesystem if you did not sync your disks before you unmounted them. Which distributions like Debian have done in their shutdown/reboot scripts. Still it was quite a nasty bug. But you also have to remember not every machine, probably not even a majority of machines out there are running ext3. Diversity and choice in a kernel and in cases like this can be pretty neat at limiting the damage done by a borked kernel.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it. All the Linux users will freely ignore and disregard corrupting kernel releases. If Microsoft even dared do something like corrupting everyone's NTFS installations, they'd be eaten alive by hundreds of fanatical posts here.

We can ignore the kernel releases that have had major problems because the only people who run them are the developers and the geekiest of the geeky Linux users already. The problem is then fixed before anyone uses, (hopefully), the kernel on a production system. The big difference here is that Linux is just the kernel, if Redhat released a distro/OS that caused massive filesystem corruption and major problems then people would indeed be posting here flaming RH for not testing an operating system and allowing major flaws of that nature. A kernel release is quite a bit different than an entire OS, you have certain expectations when you purchase/run an OS. Compiling the latest kernel on your system should not come with the same expectation of quality that you would expect from a full fledged and tested OS. But as we have seen with Windows 98a those expectations are not always met.

And those Windows problems have never, ever affected me.

Well you must be living in a different world than me. The bandwidth that all of these worms are creating affects my servers every day. I drop thousands and thousands of packets targeting windows specific flaws every day. I have to filter out the "install this patch!" emails that are propagated by millions of idiot Windows users. Thousands of those emails. When the blaster worm shut down the part of the US govt that was reponsible for Visas it cost tax money out of my pocket to fix it. Same goes for all the other damage done by these worms and exploits, (regardless of platform), it's money out of my pocket.

Might I also mention taking a look at my sig and seeing that OSS is just as full of bugs as Microsoft? Need I mention the "Linux Most Attacked OS" article Slashdot posted that linked to a study showing Linux as the most breached server on the net? Need I mention ssh/ssl? Bind? Sendmail? I could go on and on...

You know that that article was a bunch of crap, people have been responding to that every time that you bring up the issue, the group who did the study has been repeatedly discredited. How do you define breached? Did it count all of the thousands of Windows servers that were breached with blaster, viruses, and the other various worms that make the rounds? As for the vulnerabilities in ssh/ssl, bind, sendmail... exactly how many million computers were taken down by exploits for those vulns? How much damage was done? What percentage of people had their boxes owned thanks to those exploits?

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instability.
I've been running the 2.5.* line for a number of months now, and I've had:

• A bad mouse that would panic the kernel. Recently fixed (kernel that is, the mouse is no more).
• An unexplained lockup.
• Files over 4 GB corrupted.

Re:Stability?

[Narchie Troll]

ext3 was an experimental feature at the time. If you do not wish to risk data, do not enable experimental features. It's as simple as that.

Re:Stability?

[John Courtland]

I have mod points, but won't use them because you are making an ass of yourself. It could be said that you are the weenie, and are just trying to start trouble for some odd reason.

First, in both posts I have looked at of yours, I noticed the use of the word "dummy". I doubt that either parties you are arguing with are dumb, let alone wrong in this instance. Calling someone a dummy because you made a mistake does not make your point any more valid.

Also, a kernel is not an operating system. Let's see you run just vmlinuz by itself. Or just load Kernel32.exe into RAM and see what happens. An operating system has a far broader reach than just the core (kernel) subroutines.

Next, I've seen Windows 2000 Adv Server corrupt it's permissions so badly that the only recourse was to reinstall the OS.

Finally, Windows 98SE had a similar bug where it shut down too quickly without allowing the heads to park and would ultimately self corrupt. I have a similar problem in Windows XP with my RAID system, I doubt I am wrong about why it happens.

Face it, you are defending an operating system, of all things, for reasons that aren't even valid, and getting all heated up for no good cause.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be the only one who thinks this kernel seems bloated/slow. I was previously using the 2.4 kernel with the CK patches (gaming-sources) and I could perform a Gentoo system update (emerge -u world) and still play Quake 3 arena at a decent frame rate. Now I'm using the 2.6.0-test6-mm4 sources and Quake 3 is unplayable when compiling ANYTHING. My USB mouse is WAY too choppy, and sound studders like crazy. Yes I did compile as a pre-emptible kernel.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

open source software does get flack

That would be flak, for Flugabwehrkanone.

Re:Stability?

[__past__]

Not that I would want to get associated with that other troll, but how exactly do you suppose that Unix permissions or "design" prevent viruses from spreading? Last I looked, I could connect to Linux boxes all over the net quite fine using my normal unprivileged user account, there's nothing that would malicious code from doing the same. A virus doesn't need to run as root to replicate or anything.

In fact, the classical Unix security model with ugw/rwx permissions and the omnipotent root is pretty poor (granted, it is better then no permissions or mostly unused ones). Which is why basically every Unix-like OS is busy implementing extensions to it, like capabilities, fine-grained ACLs, MAC etc. I don't know about any Linux distro or other Unix that uses them sensibly out of the box, however.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux != Apache. How many times do you have to be told?

Also, Apache != most-rooted-web_server. How many times do you have to be told?

Distro != Linux. How many times do you have to be told?

Go back to school. Learn some logic. Learn some critical thinking skills.

Quit wasting our time, you troll.

Re:Stability?

[broeman]

also by the side of IPSEC, cryptoapi/loop is shipped with the kernel, making it easier to encrypt your disks (eventhough it needs a newer util-linux, which has less options, like weird ways to choose different bits).

Re:Stability?

[LinuxGeek8]

I still remember the infamous Thanksgiving "turkey" kernel that randomly corrupted ext3 partitions.

Kernels from kernel.org are not made to be run by endusers. For that you want a distribution kernel. That's what the kernel team also says.
If you do choose to run a kernel from kernel.org, you are responsible yourself, and if you have problems, you should track patches yourself. It's also a good idea to do this in advance, or wait a week before booting a new released kernel.
Running a vanilla kernel with a bug like this is really a user error, you know....

Re:Stability?

[broeman]

I know you don't want to sound like a troll, but ignorance or misinformation typically create that image. I accept the fact that we need a better admin-system in *nices, since we only have root ... it should be allowed to be divided.

It is true that a virus doesn't need root-access to replicate itself on a network, but it need it to infect system-files, which windows cannot guard against. Like on a windows-machine, Linux users are also obligated to download a virus-scanner (eventhough I have never found any in the 7 years running a linux machine), which can be done for free (e.g. f-prot). Worms is another issue, and only a good firewall can protect against this (like on a windows machine).

Re:Stability?

[superchkn]

You're lucky you didn't start early enough to hit the test kernels that trashed the filesystems, but I think that was back in the 30s. I'm not sure because I didn't start testing until 2.5.69.

Well, it is a beta kernel, so things like that happen. I think the 4GB thing went on for a week. I've been pretty lucky though, I haven't had any panics, though I did with 2.4.18 (something about USB once).

Re:Stability?

[superchkn]

Face it. All the Linux users will freely ignore and disregard corrupting kernel releases.

Hmm, is that why they got fixed?

Seriously though, what you're failing to understand is that the things that caused those problems (such as ext3 corruption) as has been mentioned were "experimental" features. That's called beta. What that means is that only people who can afford to have their system hosed should be using it.

Let me explain that maybe in a way that you'll be more likely to understand. I have in my possesion a Windows 2003 RC2 CD. So, I install the CD and damn if I can't do a windows update! Or, when I try to start some of those services a message pops up that it isn't yet complete. Do I bitch about these features that aren't functional in the Beta as if this was software I spent $100 on? Why no, because I understand the concept of beta software.

Now when some new piece of hardware doesn't work with Linux, by all means complain...to the manufacturer of that device so they'll release the specs to the LKML. Or, if you have some other problem, post a friendly message to the LKML and offer whatever info the developers need to troubleshoot the problem (if it's the kernel of course). So basically, I pay $100 for my upgrade WinXP CD and it doesn't work worth a damn with my hardware and Microsoft isn't even interested in sticking some hard drive transfer mode controls in the control panel so I have decent performance. OTOH, if I have a problem with the Linux kernel (which I paid $80 for a distribution that came with every program I need), I can just find the developer site and they can help me fix it.

Granted there's some buggy open source software, but don't insult everyone's intelligence by claiming that there isn't any MS or other commercial software available that only sells because it looks good on the box. At least if I don't like the OSS version, I can just try another. Kinda hard to get your money back from the store after unpacking the software.

Re:Stability?

[Cee]

Finally, Windows 98SE had a similar bug where it shut down too quickly without allowing the heads to park and would ultimately self corrupt.

Wrong. It's not about head parking. It's about not being able to synchronize data not yet written to the disk before shutdown. It can lead to loss of data, but it won't wreck your harddisk.

Re:Stability?

[Cee]

In fact, the classical Unix security model with ugw/rwx permissions and the omnipotent root is pretty poor (granted, it is better then no permissions or mostly unused ones).

Why is the classig Unix security model poor? Why do we need something like ACL? I'm not trolling, just curious why it's so necessary.. It's simple and therefore people understand it.

Re:Stability?

[mystran]

Then you weren't paying attention. 2.4.x was a complete wreck, and everyone complained. I still remember the infamous Thanksgiving "turkey" kernel that randomly corrupted ext3 partitions.

I know good Unix admins and good Windows admins and neither of them puts fresh stuff on production machines.

The base definition of an operating system is the kernel running it, dummy. Linux is the system operating my devices and letting me operate my computer.

I'd say the based definition of operating system is an abstraction layer between user applications and the hardware. Kernel is one part of this, but so are libraries and basic utilities. You could even say that "the Linux kernel provides hardware abstractions and device drivers for the rest of the GNU/Linux operating system".

Windows also has permissions. Every single Windows network I've ever run or worked with operated the same way.

I agree here. The problem is not that there was no permissions. Both systems have equally bad permission framework (and on theoretic level I'd vote in favour of Windows if I'd have to). Users have too much permissions by default, permissions are too limited and fine-grained, and programs run with the full priviledges of the user running them.

The main problem however, is how these systems are run, and whether those permissions can be enforced reliably. First is question of management, second is question of code quality.

Another "GNU/Linux" weenie. Here's the part where someone mods me down instead of posting in disagreement.

This is a disagreement was posted from a GNU/Linux-workstation.

Re:Stability?

[__past__]

Simplicity is great (and IMHO the lack of it is the biggest reason why newer features don't get used), as long as you can still do what you need to.

The biggest problem right now is the root user, IMHO. You just need root privileges too often, and in classical Unix, you either are root, or you are not. There is, however, no reason why my MTA has to be able to change everybodys passwords, write to raw disks, load kernel modules or modify packet filter rules just because it has to listen on port 25. Capabilities fix just that: You can grant a process the capability to listen on a port < 1024 without neccessarily granting it anything else.

File system permissions are less critical, but cumbersome. Imagine a file that should be readable by the members of two groups, for example. No easy way in classical Unix except creating a new group with the members of them both, and you have to keep them in synch manually. It gets worse if you want to make sure that people don't accidentally (or with malicious intent, but that is a lost battle in most cases) don't leak things they may legitimatly work with to others who don't. Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) make this possible, but it is a lot of work to set up - basically, you define a context of users, objects (like files) and processes to work on them that is hopefully safe, and the system forbids anything else - you might be allowed to view a file in a browser, but not to copy it to another file with different permissions, for example.

As I said, things like Capabilities or MAC are becoming more common. There are, as usual, kernel patches for Linux, FreeBSD 5 has this kind of things, proprietary Unixes sometimes have special "Trusted" versions with these features.

For more insight about the Unix models, I suggest reading some of the papers written by the Eros project, or the Unix Haters Handbook, where some Multics people talk about that. Asking VMS veterans can also be enlightening.

Re:Stability?

[stpb]

Imagine a file that should be readable by the members of two groups, for example. No easy way in classical Unix except creating a new group with the members of them both, and you have to keep them in synch manually

It's possible to create a 3rd group and grant members of those 2 groups with `sg` and a group password (or a setuid wrapper like sudo). I doubt many people would do this, simply because the vast majority of *nix users don't seem to have heard of sg.

Re:Stability?

[Pharmboy]

Just remember that the OS is getting End of Lifed in December, at which time you will either have to go roll your own update/security patches or figure something out. I hear rpmfind may be keeping things going for EOL'd redhat, but not sure.....

This is why I would only go back for dedicated machines, its much easier to keep up with patches for a DNS only server, for instance. Kernel and bind. Even ssh is optional since I can sit in front of it. I am not sure what the success rate is for running rh9 with a 2.2 kernel in this environment is, but that may be an option, with no kernel updates.

Had to reboot a server today that just would not act right. Restarted all the services, all. Could not get into squirrelmail and some other services. It is a rackshack box running Ensim and 7.2 with a 2.4 kernel and had been up for 141 days. Remote booting from 1400 miles away is better than coffee to get your blood pumping first thing in the morning.

Re:Stability?

[AvitarX]

umm, 1400 miles away.

I don't need ssh.

Either you have really long ams, and good eyesight. Or you better keep ssh up to date. Even if you are more confident of 2.2.x

Re:Stability?

[DA-MAN]

Anyone know why ssh.com's ssh isn't being used more often in linux installations? As I understood the license it's free to use on free os's and it has the source code. Maybe not in the license we'd like, but it appears to be having a lot less problems than OpenSSH has. Maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to group the portable OpenSSH with bind/sendmail/wu-ftpd. Those last 3 are the most common DNS/mail/ftp server and are probably the buggiest.

Re:Stability?

[John Courtland]

Heads not parking, not flushing the write buffer, whatever... Same effect, and not allowing the heads to park won't wreck the disk, just the data under the head.

Re:Stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heads not parking, not flushing the write buffer, whatever... Same effect, and not allowing the heads to park won't wreck the disk, just the data under the head.

Well, head parking isn't an issue anymore - but it was in the 80'ies. Nowadays we don't really need to care about stuff like landing zones, disks usually park their heads automatically whenever the power is turned off.

Good Timing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is perfect timing. I'm going to hop to 2.6 for alsa, and I'm going to do LFS to surround it. I'm going to tweak the FHS some in order to make updating packages easier.

I can't wait till pf gets ported to linux.

Johnathan Feruken Conspiracy !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

To Whom It May Concern (other than myself):

Hi. I have been a huge fan of cereals of all kinds for my whole life. Sometimes I eat it for all three meals of the day, or live on it exclusively for weeks, or put it in my underpants to keep me feeling fresh (and also as an emergency back-up snack). I cereasly love it.

I am especially fond of a lot of your cereals like Boo Berry and Trix and Chex and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. My absolute favorite is Fruity Pebbles though, which I believe is a Post cereal. Maybe you guys should make something that tastes like Fruity Pebbles except manages not to have Fred Flintstone's ugly mug all over the box. Yabba Dabba Eww. Anyway, my point is that I like a lot of your cereals and so I am personally concerned with their condition. And, quite frankly, lately I've been a bit worried.

Let's start with my favorite cereal of yours - Boo Berry. I love Boo Berry... at least I think I do... actually, I know it used to be my favorite cereal but I haven't had any in years so I've kind of forgotten what it tastes like - because it's not in any stores! No stores in my area carry it. I checked on your website and apparently you still make it; you even offer it for sale. Unfortunately I can't justify buying it for the $6.74 for a twelve ounce box price. You do offer buying it in a case instead of a four pack, which would drop the price to $4.71 a box, but that is still unreasonable and would also require me to spend an entire week's pay on a large shipment of haunted cereal. My girlfriend would kill me (if I didn't overdose on blue food coloring first).

I think I have a solution to this dilemma. I know you can't force any businesses to carry your cereals and I know that you can't afford to sell them direct for less than $4.71 and still have money left over to pay for upkeep on Count Chocula's castle, hiring someone to build 400 mind-numbing advertisements disguised as crappy kids games for youruleschool.com, and keep your CEOs rolling in golden Kix. So here's what you should do - open up your own stores all across the country. You've already got one in Mall-of-America, now put one in every mall in America. Even if you don't sell much cereal (and you'd sell a lot, trust me) it would be great advertising. You can sell t-shirts with nifty slogans like "Frosted Wheaties: When You're Too Damn Lazy To Put Sugar On Your Own Wheaties!" or "Honey Nut Chex: It Rhymes With 'Funny Butt Sex' For A Reason!" and other stuff which is even more great advertising plus it makes money up front. I can see it now, picture a young child in the mall with its mother...

YOUNG CHILD: Mommy! Mommy! Look at all the pretty colored cereal!

MOTHER: Oh Honey, you know cereals like that are just a result of the global dentist/cereal/porn conspiracy, we've been through this a million times...

YOUNG CHILD: Awww...

MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT comes out of the store.

MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT: You know Ms. Averagemother, all of our cereals are fortified with titanium plating and deflector shi... er, essential vitamins and minerals; and they are a part of this complete breakfast.

MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT whips out a complete breakfast on a tray.

MOTHER: Well... I guess a few minutes couldn't hurt...

YOUNG CHILD: Gee, thanks mom!

YOUNG CHILD runs in followed slowly by MOTHER. Group of scantily clad dentists appears and drags MOTHER into back room. YOUNG CHILD transforms into a cartoon and spends eternity trying to steal Lucky's Charms and torturing the Trix Rabbit by hogging the cereal.

Now, on to my next suggestion. You need to do something about Cheerios. Really, they're awful. Yes they are good for my heart, but this is overshadowed by the fact that they taste like my butt.

On the other hand, a cereal that already tastes great is Lucky Charms.

2.6 seems unimportant for me

[MarcQuadra]

I've tried 2.6-testX and it doesn't seem to do all that much more for me than 2.4 does. I remember moving from 2.2 to 2.4 and there was a LOT more that I could use, USB and ReiserFS and quite a speedup. 2.6 seems to perform about the same as 2.4 on my boxes though.

Maybe I'll have to wait until I get a TCQ-enabled drive and see if that makes a difference.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[hey]

What about O(1) switching.
This should make the desktop smooother.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[Gherald]

> 2.6 seems to perform about the same as 2.4 on my boxes

Yes 2.4 and 2.6 are very similar, but 2.6 does have a couple advantages. Asside from the exta .2 you also get increased bragging rights, i.e. you get to laugh at people still using that backward 2.4.22 ;)

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[Tribbin]

Thats the pre-emptivability of the kernel that gets things smooth. Am I wrong?

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say USB, but I think most of those changes are being backported to 2.4...

The scheduler is much improved. It's much more reactive under load now.

And if by some miracle the power management stuff gets completed, that will be very nice...

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[superchkn]

That probably helps too, but had you tried say test4 and then applied Con's O1 patches, that's one hell of a difference.

With mozilla compiling in the background and vanilla test4, it's very hard to position my mouse pointer accurately on the screen while Mozilla is parsing a new page. Adding Con's patch fixes things to the point that if things didn't take longer to load, I wouldn't even notice that the compile was occurring.

This is on a pretty low-end system though ->K6-2 400 w/384MB

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[skaeight]

yeah I was going to say, because the other day on my Athlon XP 1700+ I was compiling something, watching a dvd, and I still didn't notice any slow down in resposniveness.

This is with the bare.i 2.4.21 kernel on Slackware 9.0, but slack feels more responsive to begin with than anyother distro I've ever used, including gentoo.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[molarmass192]

The two big ones for me are ACPI/APIC and IDE burner support. There are some other lesser features like UML and the new scheduler but most of these have equivalent patches for 2.4. APIC has been a significant problem ever since the > 2.4.18 releases, I pretty much have to boot noapic for now. I'm just waiting for the SuSE 9.0 Pro which I've preordered to get here and then I'm going straight for the 2.6 setup. Hopefully it'll be out of the box ready for 2.6 rather than the hack job (many things stopped working) I had to do to get 2.6 up on a SuSE 8.2 install.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[Overly Critical Guy]

Everyone says it should, but I saw no difference at all.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[shellbeach]

With mozilla compiling in the background and vanilla test4, it's very hard to position my mouse pointer accurately on the screen while Mozilla is parsing a new page.

Hmmm ... this is what "nice" is for.
In my .bashrc I have the alias:

alias make='nice -n 19 make'

And I can happily compile mozilla (or anything else) while doing whatever else I like (short of playing action games, since there will be occasional tiny lags, and if you're using 100% CPU all the time there's not much point compiling in the background, anyway) - for "normal" tasks such as programming, word processing and graphics manipulation you'll never notice any difference.

Likewise I encode divx files at nice -n 19. It never ceases to amaze me how many long time users don't realise you can run tasks at lower priorities ...

The patch you're talking about sounds impressive, but I can't really see why you'd need it for background compile jobs. And while I have a nice AthlonXP system now, until recently I was doing exactly the same things on a 500 MHz celeron and never had any problems.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[nsingapu]

I havent touched 2.6 with my desktop boxes, but for my (relatively cutting edge, broken bios) laptop its ideal.
Some months back when my laptop shipped ACPI would freeze on 4 or 5 vanilla and patched kernels I tried the exceptions being late 2.5 and ac series kernels.
Though the situation is better now I find 2.6 irons out some minor stuff with reiser performance(which I cannot duplicate on other hardware, and have yet to find information about, boot time was ~10 min largely due to checking reiser at boot), allows working acpi and b44 drivers (these have largly been backported), and perhaps most importantly has richer facilities as far as acpi sleep states, swswap, and powersaving feature in general go.
As far as snappier schedualing and the like this is icing on the cake but, to me atleast, not as mentionable as better support for my hardware.

Perhaps the an interesting aspect of the comparison of new features in 2.2->2.4 and 2.4->2.6 is reflective of and specific to linux on the desktop, with 2.4 catering to features lacking in desktops (usb, firewire) and 2.6 adding quite a bit of stuff specific to mobile use.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[superchkn]

It never ceases to amaze me how many long time users don't realise you can run tasks at lower priorities ...

Actually I know about nice... I was using it more to make a point about how much better the scheduler is with the Con's patches. It's a lot easier to start up a compile than it is to duplicate a repeatable situation across a range of machines where the patch makes a difference.

The patches were made to improve interactivety, which means the scheduler tries to guess what processes are interactive (i.e. important to the user), and what processes are CPU hogs (i.e. dnetc, gcc, etc). This allows one to run audio players (i.e. XMMS) without skipping even under a high load (say mozilla churning on some javascript). This is more a patch to help the behavior of tasks that are usually interactive but become cpu hogs and vice verse. So in the case of Mozilla, I don't want it to run niced, but I also want to be able to switch to another window, or type in another window when it hits something that takes a while to process and have my system be responsive. Or maybe even I want to change tabs in Mozilla, that doesn't work so well when my mouse is stuttering across the screen because Mozilla is hogging the cpu.

I haven't booted 2.4 in months so I can't directly compare 2.4 to 2.6, but I can compare the vanilla scheduler without Con's changes to the one containing them. I do know that versus 2.4, this also prevents the need for running X at -10 like some distributions do, which hence reduces the risk that X starts hogging the CPU for some reason and effectively takes down the machine. I can't say I've ever had that happen though ;-), but SuSE 8.0 doesn't run X at -10 anyhow.

The 2.4 scheduler is a much different beast than the one in 2.6, though I'm admittedly not clear on what all problems it allegedly solves. I've listed some, but there are other advantages of the changes, you'll need to search the LKML archives for more info.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[the_2nd_coming]

well, the old Scheduler is a liniar scheduler, O(n),

the more you throw at it, the more boged down it gets.

the new scheduler is a constant time scheduler, O(1), which means that it does not get boged down the same way the other scheduler did...obviousely, the more you throw at it, the more things will have to share the system, butit should not allow for freeze ups.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I've seen one really nice feature in 2.6. Well, for me and possibly 5 other people ;)

My USB memory stick finally works!

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[shellbeach]

I was using it more to make a point about how much better the scheduler is with the Con's patches.

Fair enough - I'm not disputing that the scheduler is not vastly improved, only that you didn't need those improvements to successfully compile stuff in the background ... The other examples you've given make more sense.

I was just ranting about how useful nice is, and yet how little use seems to be made of it ...

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[superchkn]

Yeah, I should have given a better example or qualified the context in which I was using compiling as an example.

Certainly it would make much more sense to use nice rather than change the kernel just for the case of compiling ;-)

I was just ranting about how useful nice is, and yet how little use seems to be made of it ...

That's probably more true now then ever as more and more people switch from non-*nix systems. Luckily the 2.6 kernel will help hide the error of their ways better than it has in the past...all without an ugly kludge that boosts the priority of the focused window process.

Re:2.6 seems unimportant for me

[Error27]

O(1) shouldn't have much effect on the desktop...

There were a number of scheduler improvements that make a difference. Con Kolivas did a lot of hard work balancing interactive vs batch jobs.

Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP has never crashed for me and does everything I want and need, why should I switch?

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't. It's for people that know how to use computers.

Re:Blah blah

[Bull999999]

" Windows XP has never crashed for me and does everything I want and need, why should I switch?" -AC Windows XP has never crashed for me and does everything I want and need, so why is MS trying to convince everyone to switch to XP?

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, first, increase your expectations ;-)

I've not had such luck with XP as it lumps most everything onto one IRQ and then stutters as 6 devices fight over the same IRQ. The MS provided NEC USB 2.0 PCI card driver likes to BSOD too. I expect the OS to be able to handle a machine stuffed full of cards (AGP, 4 PCI, 1 ISA).

I'll admit though that from test3 to test6, the 2.6 kernel no longer acknowledges my BIOS setting that's supposed to keep PCI cards off IRQ 5 (for my ISA soundblaster), but I can live without sound (not to mention this is a beta and my problem is logged). I can't live with an OS that constantly stutters about and crashes all the time, which is what XP does.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but wait until you turn the computer on!

Re:Blah blah

[Mike Hawk]

An interesting question. One could ask the same thing about Coca-Cola and Nike though. Clearly everyone has heard about all three of these products. I suppose the answer may be the same for all three and have nothing to do with operating systems, soft drinks or athletic shoes.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, maybe you should invest in some hardware that doesn't suck. If your hardware NEEDS that many IRQs you may want to consider using Win98SE. BTW i use that same NEC driver and since in installed XP have not had ONE SINGLE CRASH!!!

XP is stable if your hardware isn't the $49 special on eBay and you aren't a complete retard, which i guess nixes the author of the parent of this post out of the loop.

Hope you can make your lunix work good.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

You still haven't identified why XP won't work with $49 dollar specials hardware on ebay, whereas linux and/or freebsd work wonderfully on it.

What has cost got to do with it? There is plenty of expensive shitty hardware out there too.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Linux has lots of developers that will buy that $49 special and spend weeks of their life coding around the braindamage rather than just buying the $100 part that works properly.

Not a troll, truth -- The changelog indicates they have people working on EISA! For godsake, I even have an EISA box, and I think that's a profound waste of time.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, well there's no denying since it is built upon a VIA platform, throwing expensive hardware out will get nowhere.

Here's my cat /proc/interrupts under Linux 2.6.0-test4 (distribution is better with test6):

0: 181902735 XT-PIC timer
1: 131259 XT-PIC i8042
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 336866 XT-PIC ide4, ide5
7: 311 XT-PIC parport0
8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
9: 0 XT-PIC acpi
10: 21004082 XT-PIC ide2, ide3, ehci_hcd, ohci-hcd, eth0, radeon@PCI:1:0:0, km_ati (Radeon)
11: 41 XT-PIC ohci-hcd
14: 1 XT-PIC ide0

So, to satisfy you, let's go through this...
ide0 = VIA Primary IDE for IDE ZIP (no dma = no worries)
ide2 & ide3 = Maxtor Ultra133TX2 (i.e. Promise PDC20269)
ide4 & ide5 = Maxtor Ultra133TX2 (yet another)
ehci_hcd, ohci_hcd, & ohci-hcd = Belkin USB F5U219
eth0 = 3COM 900 Combo
radeon = ATI AIW 9000 Pro (this actually uses 2 IRQs, one for normal graphics, one for the tuner/video capture)
Not shown of course is my SB16 which takes IRQ5, usually which puts ide4 & ide5 on IRQ9

Windows uses things a bit different, IIRC it does things pretty much the same as kernel 2.6.0-test4 (but doesn't work well at all).
2.6.0-test6 does this:

0: 242690 XT-PIC timer
1: 313 XT-PIC i8042
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 70 XT-PIC ide4, ide5
7: 1 XT-PIC parport0
8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
9: 0 XT-PIC acpi
10: 47 XT-PIC ohci-hcd
11: 85 XT-PIC eth0, ohci-hcd
14: 1 XT-PIC ide0
15: 5780 XT-PIC ide2, ide3, ehci_hcd

Notice I didn't modprobe radeon so I'm not sure what IRQ it is on, but it's probably safe to assume it takes IRQ 11.

Anyway, when something uses the video card heavily, it knocks out the USB card and all the devices on it reset I guess (my APC UPS monitor says that the communication was lost, and my Mx700 receiver blinks the green like as if it was just plugged into the USB port). My Epson scanner and Brother printer/scanner seem fine. If I try to capture video, the mouse continually re-connects which makes it nearly impossible to manage the pointer's position. Same if I'm transferring a large file on the disk.

I also have problems with the Promise cards and my Maxtor 92048D8 drive which don't seem to get along in UDMA2 when writing. That's easy to fix in Linux either by doing nothing and letting Linux automatically put it in PIO 4, or by using hdparm to stick it in UDMA1 which works (this is a problem with the card/drive combination, not the result of a problem with the drive/cable/etc). In windows, on a write I'm greeted by a continual resetting of both ide interfaces on the card until windows has managed to transfer the file, which makes the 17MB in 2 minutes comment by that linux troll look quite realistic. The copy of Windows 2003 RC2 I have puts the drive into PIO 4 when the write fails, but XP does not do this. MS is not interested in solving it either, I used up one of my support requests trying to get them to fix it. Unless Promise adds the ability to set the transfer mode in their drivers, I'm stuck with high CPU usage and slow (0.25MB/sec) transfer rates under Windows XP. At least it isn't my boot drive, but I did partition an 18GB FAT32 partition for sharing files between Linux and XP with only 4GB on the newer Maxtor drive so I can't really install much on XP.

So yeah, XP works great if...

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, forgot to mention that XP nukes my net card so that I have to reboot to get it to work. Even then, I have to unplug the cable from the card for a while to get it working again even if I boot into Linux. That doesn't happen real often though, perhaps every 4 hours.

Meanwhile running a *beta* version of Linux:

~> uptime
19:46:36 up 2 days, 2:57, 1 user, load average: 0.50, 0.50, 0.70
~>

It'd be longer, but I needed to boot into windows to print to my Brother laser printer (damn their non-Adobe PS interpreter).

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, you need to turn on the computer for it to crash.

Re:Blah blah

[Madhackr]

same problem...fixed it by uninstalling intel application accelerator, weird shit.

Re:Blah blah

[Overly Critical Guy]

So you'd rather use an operating system that won't even use your sound card instead of assigning some IRQ values in Device Manager. Nice.

Re:Blah blah

[repetty]

"If your hardware NEEDS that many IRQs you may want to consider using Win98SE."

Actually, you should switch to Apple hardware.

IRQ-free since 1984.

--Richard

Re:Blah blah

[aled]

PCI 2.1 cards must be able to share IRQs. W98 had problems with IRQs and plug & play but from Windows 2000 share IRQs seems to work allright. The problem usually are bad written and old drivers. I had problems until upgraded most drivers.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyway, when something uses the video card heavily, it knocks out the USB card and all the devices on it reset I guess

welcome to the wonderfull world of VIA chipsets, probally a kt/kx133 if i may guess.. and i doubt changing irq's help fix that problem

here's a hint, dont buy a mainboard with a VIA chipset, they suck..

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*

Apple is NOT irq free!
It just manages them (a lot) better.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since we're being completely subjective. The PIII 850 I build out of a parted out ultrasound machine, with random ass motherboard with spots for the rom chips to boot off of and no documentation, to say nothing of all but impossible to find drivers, System Idle Process -> CPU Time => 1361:51:30.

Mind you, it actually ran okay without the properdrivers, just a little slow on the i/o.

Oh and I'll translate. 56 days, 17 hours. Wait, that's about when I moved into the new house!

Your uptime sure smoked my ass. Wait, it wasn't even close! But then we were being randomly subjective weren't we?

Re:Blah blah

[raodin]

And never tells you about it.. As it probably should be. I can see the source of confusion ;)

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, like I said, it's VIA hardware, so even top-quality hardware won't solve the problem. Still, it works fine in Linux...so shouldn't XP too?

No, K6-2 = MVP3
It's a shame it took me 3 years to figure out that the VIA IDE controller was randomly corrupting my data. Unfortunately this wasn't well documented or announced anywhere.

When I presented my conclusions to the LKML mailing list most people responded that they didn't have any problems. But 4 days of memtest86 and >12 hours of copying files and md5sum'ing them after each copy in every DMA mode/feature capability the hard drives support doesn't lead to any other conclusion. Luckily the chipset doesn't seem to be cursed with those busmaster problems. In Linux and windows though the VIA USB would make me re-connect my mouse (much like windows does now) all the time so I replaced it with the Belkin USB card.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of. I could run 2.4 which does work with my soundcard, but I prefer the 2.6 kernel since it supports writing to my CDRW without ide-scsi (and therefore with DMA).

Ah, before you jump in with "you could do that in Windows", I beg to differ. The particular LG drive I have, although quite recent, doesn't support UDMA. So on the Promise PDC20269 and subsequent windows drivers (including the latest driver and BIOS updates from Promise) it gets stuck in PIO mode 4. I probably needn't tell you how badly it burns CDs in that mode. It'd probably work fine for CDRWs, but with CDRs burning at a higher rate (> 12X) it slows the system to a crawl though it does have that superlink feature so at least it doesn't make coasters.

I've got a CD-changer and a CDR, plus I don't game much, so I can live without a sb16 which isn't known for its audio performance in the first place.

Oh, and I avoid XP because it likes to corrupt the registry when it does those beautiful BSODs. So I only use it when I have no other choice (i.e. vector graphics/Adobe Illustrator).

But basically, XP has just been a thorn in my side and I can't wait until I can ditch it for a Mac to use as my wife's graphics platform.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they're all 2.1 capable cards and it's enabled in the BIOS. And Linux shares them just fine, did I mention that?

I think the real problem is either the driver for the Belkin card (I'm using the version from SP1, so I'm sure it's WHQL approved), or the ATI Catlyst 3.7 drivers. I changed to the VIA 4.49s but that didn't make any difference so I uninstalled them. (If they don't have everything working for a VIA MVP3 by now, they never will.) So, it doesn't work so well and there aren't any newer drivers to try...

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if we're talking about all-time uptime, then I'll have to go with 84 days 5 hours in Linux (as configured today, with a 3dfx banshee rather than the radeon) versus 6 days in XP (which really was a miracle since that was with the onboard VIA IDE -- note this was with only 2 PCI slots filled and nearly no use). However, I was speaking about my current uptime, which I'm sorry to say that XP cannot meet on the same hardware because it will die with a BSOD first. So, let me translate that for you, it's called "relative" not "subjective".

But yeah, I'm impressed your computer stayed up so long. BTW, I seemed to miss the part where all the slots are filled. I hear that makes uptime a lot harder to achieve...

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

I changed to the VIA 4.49s

'Nuff said. Via boards are notorious for stability problems under XP (just see the microsoft.public.windowsxp.* n/groups). You don't have a Soundblaster Live, do you? That and Via is a losing combination..
Here's a nickel. Get yourself a proper chipset. Like anything with "Intel" written on it, for a start..

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP only crashed once on me. It hasn't had a place on my hard drive since.

Re:Blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you get your Nokia N-Gage yet Mike?

a lot of you have been waiting for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Woohoo. Lixnuts 2.6!

Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried it back in July 2003 (on a 3.2ghz Pentium4 Extreme Edition, with 4Gb of 800Mhz DDR ram, with 10K IDE drives, basically the fastest computer aimed at home users availbe at the time I bought it) it took 20 minutes to copy a 17Mb file from one folder to another. I checked, and yes, I did compile with -o9 and had DMA enabled, but it was still slow. That was back on Kernel 2.4.23! Can it copy it in less than 2 minutes now like Windows Server 2003 on the othyer partition of my computer?

Re:Is it faster?

[miketang16]

just for kicks... what filesystem might you have been using? Crazy idea... I know...

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahahaha! (I rest my case on the knowledge of those that use MS products)

Re:Is it faster?

[Bull999999]

What a troll. Even a out of box Red Hat 9 doesn't even come close to taking 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file on lesser systems.

Re:Is it faster?

[Tribbin]

The 2.4.23 was not out by then, it's not even out right now.

www.kernel.org

2.4.23-pre6 is the latest.

Get your facts straight

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

This dude is a troll who always talks about "17Mb file in 20 minutes", whether P4E or Mac SE...

Re:Is it faster?

[Reddog0176]

lets see... PIII 1.0ghz, 512mb PC133 RAM (stupid motherboard limits) 2x 5400rpm hd's.. kernel 2.4.20
Copying a 60mb pr0n file takes ~30 seconds between folders on the same physical drive, and ~45 across drives

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

with 2.4.22 and ReiserFS it takes me:

real 0m0.244s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.110s

to copy a 15 MB file across partitions (same physical drive). Takes me 24 seconds to copy it across network to another computer.

You are spinning your hard drives with your hand or what? Try harder!

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it copy it in less than 2 minutes now like Windows Server 2003 on the othyer partition of my computer?

That's really not saying much. Usually when a person says, "in under x minutes" they really mean, nearly. So from this we can deduce that this computer that you allegedly own transfers at about 0.14 MB/sec. Wow, I think my IDE ZIP can do better than that! Not to mention my P233MMX w/64MB and an ancient 1.0 GB Quantum Fireball running in MDMA2 on Linux 2.4.18 outperforms your computer running Windows 2003 with exceedingly more powerful hardware.

Damn, I'm staying away from that Microsoft bloat, holy hell!! ;-)

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

NFS over 56k I'm sure.

PS: Yes, unlike everyone else that posted in this thread I realize the original post is a regular cut/paste troll on Slash. To the rest of you, YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Re:Is it faster?

[gl4ss]

yes it's the goold 'ol "my new shining new mac is slow and dinky" troll.

Re:Is it faster?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Wow, this dork trolls Linux stuff too? I thought he just trolled BSD. I guess there is a new spirit of Linux/FreeBSD cooperation afterall!

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know that Windows does fake copying and actually copies in the background? It is really annoying on removable drives, and its dangerous.

Re:Is it faster?

[efti]

Don't you know that Windows does fake copying and actually copies in the background? It is really annoying on removable drives, and its dangerous.

That's called buffered I/O and is a standard feature of modern operating systems. Where it gets dangerous is that Windows doesn't force you to manually unmount removable disks before pulling them out, which can easily result in data loss. But that's what the little light is for next to those drives. If the light is on, don't take the disk out or you will lose data.

Oh, and always stop the hardware before removing USB or firewire storage devices as on Windows that's the only way to be sure that all the data has been written to them.

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny because copying across drives is almost always faster.

Think about it, the head doesn't have to seek back and forth between files.

SO, I believe you are a punk ass lier.

Re:Is it faster?

[saskwach]

The problem here is that floppies are only 1.44 Mb, and the time it takes you to swap floppies around doesn't really count since it's not actual computer speed time.
it was funnier in my head, honest

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that or he's got an old slow drive. Or, he could have them both on one cable like a moron...

Oh, and I think you mean "liar":

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Lier Li"er (limac"~er), n. From Lie.
One who lies down; one who rests or remains, as in
concealment.

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Liar Li"ar (limac"~er), n. OE. liere. See Lie to
falsify.
A person who knowingly utters falsehood; one who lies.

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

mmm... troll-tastic.

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

ls /tmp/file
-rw------- 1 root root 15728640 Oct 9 02:21 /tmp/file
time cp /tmp/file /data

real 0m0.098s
user 0,0.000s
sys 0m0.090s

ok ;P i cheated
i'm running two hardware raid5 arrays with 15k RPM u-320 scsi drives on a dual 2.8 p4 xeon with 4 gigs of DDR-ECC memory /tmp and /data are different partitions

Re:Is it faster?

[MBCook]

OK. I feel like feeding a troll. So what's wrong with this post?

• 3.2ghz P4EE - In July? It was only announced at the end of last month. Nice try.
• Fastest computer - No, that would be the G5. It's a super computer *rimshot*
• compiled with -o9 - That's the stupedist thing I've ever heard. My understanding is that 3=4=5=... for -o. On top of that, those optimisations can be "dangerous", so you shouldn't compile kernel code with more than -o2 or -o3.
• back on kernel 2.4.23 - As pointed out by another poster, 2.4.23 isn't out now, so you couldn't be "back in 2.4.23", especially in July.

You could at least try to a decent job of trolling. Why don't you stick to BSD is dead trolls or something simple. You're not ready to "graduate" to something this "complex".

Re:Is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to spin my hd's. I have a pair 12" technics hard drives.

Re:Is it faster?

[ncr53c8xx]

That's called buffered I/O and is a standard feature of modern operating systems. Where it gets dangerous is that Windows doesn't force you to manually unmount removable disks before pulling them out, which can easily result in data loss. But that's what the little light is for next to those drives. If the light is on, don't take the disk out or you will lose data.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help for network drives. And they put the lights of the networking cards on the back of the computer. Those bastards ...

Frozen Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

If we thaw it out will it still be alive, just like a cockroach?

Re:Frozen Kernel

[MGS Hartman]

lunix (sic) "stability freeze"? isn't that an oyxmoron?

Re:Frozen Kernel

[WindBourne]

isn't that an oyxmoron?

How true. It seems that Linux keeps getting more stable and faster just sitting there.

Poll: My annual income (USD) is

[stock]

heh, dirty f..kers : Poll: My annual income (USD) is ,
but one can only submit after registering your credentials^H^H^Hcardinfo :))

2 inches below is a FAT PAYPALL button........
geez what would BillG think of this ?

Robert

Re:BSOD module

[mabhatter654]

Does linux have a BSOD module in the kernel? It really should have one because Windows has one. How else will windows users know what's wrong with their computer.

comming soon...Random reboot module...just to keep up the Windows look and feel...

In pratice

[rf0]

I've been using 2.6.0-test4-mm4 daily without problems. No glitches. The 2.6.0 kernel has real improvments in the shape of Alsa being mainstream. Also the I/O schedular + interactivity is much better under load than the 2.4 kernel.

Of course however I won't be putting 2.6 into production use until at least 2.6.8 or there abouts to make sure there are no nasty surprises in there

Rus

Re:In pratice

[warp1]

>>> Of course however I won't be putting 2.6 into production use until at least 2.6.8 or there abouts to make sure there are no nasty surprises in there

This is true, I didn't use 2.4 till 2.4.8 or 9. Probably won't use 10.2 till 10.2.8 or 9. :)

So what's cool about 2.6

[Alien Conspiracy]

I'm still on kernel 2.2 with debian/stable. My servers have been running 2 years without a reboot.

Is there anything really cool in 2.6 to convince me to upgrade?

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find that 2.6 has the highest per-capita immigration in the world

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Alien Conspiracy]

No, I think that was Sweden :-)

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Pierre]

I can't even keep electricity that long.

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Alien Conspiracy]

Maybe you live in the US. Here in the UK I haven't had more than a brief glitch for years, which is easy handled by a big capacitor soldered accross the power supply. *much* cheaper than a UPS and 99% as effective if you have a decent power company.

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Alien Conspiracy]

Why the fuck was this modded down to a troll? Can't people even ask a simple question around here these days?

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[drfreak]

I don't think that's a troll either. The i/o has gotten really smooth and snappy. Other than that, it's certainly not a mandatory upgrade. The rule of thumb is pretty much to run the kernel which was stable around the time your PC was purchased. If the server is still stable, no need to upgrade. :)

Re:So what's cool about 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, its a troll because the guy isn't running OS X. If he's not running OS X, then he is by definition a loser, and thus a troll. You're not a loser are you?

Seemed pretty obvious.

[ebbomega]

Looks like it was pretty obvious that it was a joke.

It just wasn't funny.

Modular source code?

[pjack76]

How difficult is it to only download those kernel modules I actually want to compile? As time goes on and new stuff keeps getting added to the kernel the source just gets out of hand. Someone should set up a little webby clicky thing that's like "make menuconfig" but then assembles a tarball only containing your precise configuration and those modules you've selected. Just a thought.

Re:Modular source code?

[Tribbin]

$ make netconfig [URL]

Just kiddin'

Re:Modular source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard is to just download the patch?

You aren't suposed to download the whole thing if you don't know what you are doing anyway... handling module dependencies is already difficult enough as it is.

\\k

Re:Modular source code?

[pi_rules]

Whoa.... that's friggen cool. Seriously.

Most of us have big pipes for bandwidth so pulling a 22MB kernel archive isn't that big of a deal. Sure, it takes some time but we can do it and live with a 5-10 minute delay.

This idea is just waaaay geeky though, and cool. It would have to be a distribution specific type thing though. There's no way I'd expect the kernel maintainers to take on this task -- it's just not their style.

Debian could, with some work, create a 'kernel-source-2.6.0-skeleton' package though with modified Makefiles that would wget the source files if needed at compile time. That could be friggen awesome. You'd just nab a 200k skeleton package and as it compiles it'll start snatching files. With a little script-fu pulling header files from neccessary .c files should be a piece of cake.

I'm tempted to say that this might cut total bandwidth down by half, maybe a quarter... which after the efficienty of a .tar.gz of the whole thing might not net you much in saved bandwidth. However, it would just be plain -neat- to have only the .c and .h files absolutely neccessary for your particular build. No matter what file you open from your kernel source tree you know for sure that it has an impact on the actual build of your kernel. If you modify something from such a system you know your binary output is going to be different. That is, barring GCC optimizations and such. If you turn the line 'c++' into 'c = c + 1' you won't net a binary change.. hopefully.

Super cool idea... what else could this do?

Well, instead of having /usr/src/linux-2.6.0 you could just have /usr/src/linux (not just a symlink mind you)... and the scripts within there would have enough know how to automatically pull the most up to date code and such. Lets say 2.6.1 comes out:

cd /usr/src/linux
make oldconfig && make

Sha-zam! You're pulling 2.6.1 code (what has changed at least)_and rebuilding.

I like the idea. Go code it dude. :)

Re:Modular source code?

[MBCook]

While a neat idea, I think that it would be very hard to implement, and the tradeoff isn't a good one. What tradeoff?

Well, the patch for -test7 is just over 650k if it's bzipp2ed. While it would save space/time/whatever to only download a i386 version (no PPC code, etc), or a version without all the sound code (I'm making a server, I don't need that...) etc, you run into a problem. Just what are you going to do? Let's say you have 4 architectures, the sound option, an ISDN/amature radio option, some PPP/dialup stuff in an option, and two others. That's 4x2x2x2x2x2, or 128 possible combinations of kernels. Now there are more than four architectures, and there are probably some more things that could be put into downloadable options.

So, are you going to do everything through CGI scrips that fetch the right one? Are you going to use those scripts to package and test each of the possible sets of options to make sure no important code gets left out? Is it simply going to be a single choice: x86 or "other"? Do you want to move things like sound to external patches like ALSA has been for such a long time?

Really, I don't think that this is worth it. It's a neat idea, and if you want to make some things available on your personal website or something like that, go ahead. More power to you. It's a good idea. But for it to be "official", just seems like too much of a hasle.

Re:Modular source code?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Kind of like how Windows had done with every service pack since Windows Update was first put in place?

Re:Modular source code?

[Chops]

This is an LKML FAQ. The short answer is, "Yes, it would be cool, but it's much harder than you think. We're busy doing kernel code; you're welcome to do it yourself if you wish. People would thank you profusely."

Re:Modular source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he was talking about only downloading the absolute base, the network driver and the scsi driver, and leaving out IDE, power management and graphics support.

Not like windows, where you cannot even leave out the freaking web browser.

Re:Modular source code?

[surprise_audit]

Sounds rather like the NetBSD (and others) way of building the kernel. You take the generic config file, which has all the really common/useful options already selected, then you pick the various bits you want and comment out the rest. Once you have your custom configuration, you run the config program against it. This creates a compile directory that contains symbolic links to the necessary source files, and probably fiddle with Makefiles, etc. You cd to the compile directory and run make. Some time later, you have a kernel.

Now, suppose the "symbolic link" stage was replaced by a wget-if-newer, pulling the source files from the official source tree...

Of course, this would only really work with the standard source tree. If you wanted to be able to add any random patch sets, the config program would have to be a lot smarter.

Re:Modular source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we may finally have found a reason to use LISP.

Brandon

Re:In practice

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using 2.6.0-test4-mm4 without any problems. Alsa is included and the desktop interactivity is much better under load than with the 2.4 kernel.

Of course however I won't be putting 2.6 into production use until at least 2.6.7 to make sure there are no nasty surprises in there like goatse.

Russ

Strictly necessary stuff?

[bennomatic]

Wait! Wait! Wait! I've got a million lines of SCO code I want to insert!

Re:Strictly necessary stuff?

[GlynDavies]

Bad luck, looks like your too late. Still, try contacting IBM or RedHat - they may have some alternative suggestions on where to insert it. ;-)

Re:Strictly necessary stuff?

[Doomdark]

Wait! Wait! Wait! I've got a million lines of SCO code I want to insert!

Don't be greedy, pal. It's enough to put in 70 lines, as long as it's cut'n pasted from an ancient CS book and has no copyright comments. Or at least that seems to work ok for some, YMMV.

Re:Strictly necessary stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

... I and Andrew are trying to calm down development ...

They're announcing a freeze on development! This must be because of the SCO thing! Is this the beginning of the end for Linux?

Re:Strictly necessary stuff?

[Captain Large Face]

they may have some alternative suggestions on where to insert it.

Is that before or after printing it out on sandpaper?

But will it

[Anonymous Coward]

run Linux?.... Oh wait....

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this that all belong to us in Soviet Russia where the plan is...

1. Compile 2.6 kernel
2. ????
3. Profit

That should about do it...

You can boot into Reiserfs

[Anonymous Coward]

Why an ext2 /boot partition?

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Theatetus]

Because you rarely write to the boot partition, you shouldn't mount it, and it's a bitch to tell GRUB to ignore the length of the journal.

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Just use -o notail. Or LILO. Or ext3. None of those are particularly painful.

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Chuck Bucket]

from my /etc/fstab: /dev/hda1 /boot reiserfs noauto,noatime,notail 1 1

Yeah, that was a bitch.

P

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Anonymous Coward]

Compareded to a friendly wizard? Yeah, it was.

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Theatetus]

OK, I'll come clean. I've never used a journalled filesystem on my /boot partition. It just never seemed important, and the Gentoo install guide said it required extra configuring and I was tired of messing with it. OK, are you satisfied?

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[stor]

> Compareded to a friendly wizard? Yeah, it was.

If I had a friendly wizard I'd have no need for a computer.

Cheers
Stor

Re:You can boot into Reiserfs

[Assembler]

LOL

That was great.. thanks

Sorry but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Half life 2 has been delayed, without date by now, i think. One cool thing less for this month.

Re: Sorry but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, that was the joke. Thanks for playing.

Re: Sorry but...

[kubrick]

On their current form, the full "unofficial" release of HL2 should be along any day now :/

Re: Sorry but...

[stor]

Huh? Source code is available, man.

8)

Cheers
Stor

any bets for linux-2.6.0 release date?

[cpeterso]

Wasn't there a web site with a betting pool for the linux-2.6.0 release date? I know there was one for linux-2.4.0. The web site required that you submit your guess using time_t seconds! :-)

My guess is linux-2.6.0 will be released December 31, 2003.

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so. But SuSE had a BSOD emulator. Don't know if it still does.

Radeon FB fixed?

[fishbowl]

Is the Radeon FrameBuffer Console fixed?

It's been horribly broken in the 2.6 test kernels I've tried.

Re:Radeon FB fixed?

[efti]

Nope, sorry, no changes to drivers/video/radeonfb.c. Are either of these bugs the problem you're having? If not, then you should report it here.

Re:Radeon FB fixed?

[bfields]

Have you seen this thread?

Re:Radeon FB fixed?

[fishbowl]

Yep. I've been a hawk for every bit of information I can get my hands on. I don't think a fbconsole on a Radeon 8500 LE should be this weird of an order. (I know, the devteam cannot test every combination of hardware, yadda, yadda).

If I have to buy another video card just to upgrade the linux kernel, I want to know precisely which one will give me satisfactory fbconsoles ahead of time, and I will write it down in the TCO-margin column.

When I get time, I will install the latest 2.6, regress through the various patches for radeon, and see if the problem has magically gone away.
I don't know a good way to characterize the effect though. You run fbset to a high resolution, and end up with a console on 1/4 of your screen and various garbage on the rest of the screen, and general instability.

It doesn't seem like very many people are using fbconsoles and it certainly doesn't seem like the people developing the ATI drivers have their hands on very much ATI hardware. I know, volunteer effort, yadda yadda, but is it a mature OS with a huge developer base and widespread adoption? I figure this will probably get fixed before 2.6 comes out, but if it doesn't, Radeon cards shouldn't be on the compatability list for it.

Re:Radeon FB fixed?

[lintux]

Tried -test7 on my iBook (Radeon 7500) last night, it worked perfectly. Didn't need to use the OpenFirmware framebuffer anymore. :-)

MatroxFB was still broken (in -test6 at least) though. But that might also be a configuration issue.

Re:Radeon FB fixed?

[bfields]

Yep. I've been a hawk for every bit of information I can get my hands on. I don't think a fbconsole on a Radeon 8500 LE should be this weird of an order. (I know, the devteam cannot test every combination of hardware, yadda, yadda).

You probably know this already, but if you have some time to spare and know your problems haven't already been reported, and you're willing to follow up, try patches, etc., it'd be worth sending a message to lkml with all the details. That's one of the ways developers manage to keep the kernel working on hardware they don't have direct access to.

--Bruce Fields

YHBT, HAND

[Anonymous Coward]

well done, man. bravo.

look at all these retards answering this post. even if it is a refactored troll that is commonly seen in these parts, it managed to hook all the above morons.

keep up the good work.

Re:BSOD module

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I guess you're referring to the XScreenSaver hack, bsod. IT emulates not just the infamous Windows error screen, but also Mac, Amiga, Unix, etc error messages. Might be fun to leave running on a cow-orkers desktop.

Injunction?

[Roofus]

So where's the injunction from SCO to stop distribution of this? I mean, they are trying to mitigate their damages aren't they?

Re:Injunction?

[Doomdark]

Just a small clarification; editor must have stripped out couple of missing decorational chars:

I mean, they are trying to "mitigate" their "damages" aren't they?

Hope this helps!

I miss 'make dep'

[Theatetus]

It's not the same thing without 'make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install'

Now it's just 'make menuconfig && make'

Linux has gotten soft... time to migrate to BSD. I would if I could get my laptop's touchpad to work. Sigh...

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[dotwaffle]

eh? just make? no bzImage? But surely then there will be a vmlinuz, a bzImage and everything.. Or are we using parameters again in a config file? Or indeed, a make install? One that works with grub? I'm only using lilo because make install is so much easier ;)

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it be easier than grub? You don't even need to change anything for grub.

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what he's saying is that on the 2.4 kernel, you can just run "make install" and it will do the lilo stuff for you, whereas with grub you have to do a "cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.ver" or whatever it is you do exactly. I think on 2.6 it automatically does the grub stuff, but I haven't tried it since I like to have some known goodness to fall back on.

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[Theatetus]

targets listed in `make help` for 2.6(beta 6) are:

• [dummy] := all
• clean
• mrproper
• config
• menuconfig
• xconfig
• gconfig [GTK xconfig]
• oldconfig
• defconfig [user-obsequious xconfig]
• allmodconfig [everything possible as modules]
• allyesconfig [bloated kernel]
• allnoconfig [anorexic kernel]
• all := vmlinux modules bzImage
• vmlinux
• modules
• modules_install
• dir
• dir/[file]
• rpm [?!]
• tags
• sgmldocs
• htmldocs
• bzImage
• install
• bzdisk
• fdimage

Hmmm... "all" doesn't run "modules_install". I just noticed that and it explains a problem I'm having. RTFSTDOUT, I guess. `make dep`, btw, yields "warning: make dep is obsolete".

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[Saeger]

Why is that funny/sad? Because for many geeks, their sense of pride comes from memorizing tons of arcane shit typed on the command line.

You may mod me down as flamebait now (even though I'm running 2.6.0-test6 atm as well, but don't mind the sensible changes for ease of use. heh.)

--

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[anthonyrcalgary]

Sadly, BSD is getting soft too. Everything on my OpenBSD system keeps working without me having to get my hands dirty. FreeBSD is worse. Don't even get me started on OS X...

NetBSD still has promise though. It's practically unusable. It doesn't even have sudo installed by default. If you're in a masochistic mood, try it out.

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[dotwaffle]

Normally on a program you'd do make all ; make install anyway, so I guess not doing modules_install is normal. make install does modules_install anyway.

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[MGS Hartman]

make dep?

i says make duck

mk nuke && mk

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[KiwiSurfer]

NetBSD still has promise though. It's practically unusable. It doesn't even have sudo installed by default. If you're in a masochistic mood, try it out.

FreeBSD dosn't include sudo in its default install too. You have to install it from the ports collection. Whenever I install FreeBSD, sudo is often the first program I build.

- James

Re:I miss 'make dep'

[anthonyrcalgary]

I had forgotten that...

I stand by my assessment though. :)

Re:BSOD module

[Overly Critical Guy]

I don't know, since BSODs are a thing of the 90s, and most Slashbots are stuck in the last decade as they use a BSOD as their only desperate attack against a Windows world that moved on four years ago.

ataraid

[thrift24]

Does anyone know if ataraid is in the kernel yet, or what exactly they plan on doing with that? In 2.6-test6 there wasn't a trace of ataraid around. This is bad news for anyone wanting to upgrade to 2.6 who use highpoint or promise raids. Wanted to install gentoo w/ 2.6 on the girlfriends computer a couple days ago when i found this out, now she's running a heavily patched 2.4 kernel and ataraid is buggy...It would really suck to not see a working ataraid driver in the 2.6 kernel

Re:ataraid

[Zoko Siman]

Read through the change logs. I did, and I saw no word on ataraid.

Re:ataraid

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean your girlfriend uses raid?

Re:ataraid

[sracer9]

No ataraid in 2.6 yet. I've worked around the lack of proper drivers with dm (device mapper), which is part of the lvm stuff. I've got a 2 disk raid0 stripe connected to a PDC20276 which I use mostly for backup purposes.

It's possible to set it up so that you can access it properly, but to boot from it would be a bit tricky. You'd need to use dm-setup from the lvm tools, together with a config file all wrapped up in an initrd image.

Too much work to bother at this point. Hopefully ataraid makes it in soon.

Re:ataraid

[thrift24]

ya dude. chicks think RAID is sexy. her computer

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, since BSODs are a thing of the 90s, and most Slashbots are stuck in the last decade as they use a BSOD as their only desperate attack against a Windows world that moved on four years ago.

Granted, BSODs are kind of retro today. But I like my Atari 2600 emulator and my C64 emulator! And some times I have a strange appetite for BSODs, and then I fire up my Windows emulator and enjoy this jolly blue screen.

pcmcia fix

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe they finally fix pcmcia now

Re:pcmcia fix

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah mod the sucker down. people whose pcmcia sockets crash 2.6 kernels are assholes anyway.

Re:pcmcia fix

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, this is why browsing at -1 is fo fux1ng hilarious.

mod down this infidel!

Re:BSOD module

[Pharmboy]

But then again, Windows doesn't have a DLL for kernel panic either. I am not sure if its because the Windows kernel is apathetic and simply doesn't care or what.

On a lighter note, back in the windows 3.1/Lantastic days, I used to mess around with a program called "The Draw" (i ran a bbs, figure it out or google it) which could turn an ANSI screen into a .COM file. I would create a false BSOD that would say something along "Windows has detected a dumbass on the wireless end of the keyboard. Please use a pencil and paper instead" and place this in autoexec.bat, just before a "pause >nul"

The funny thing is half of them would tell me they have a "blue screen thingy" without reading it, giving me the opportunity to ask them "what does it say?". Its much more fun to hear them actually read it out loud over the phone intercom.

Re:BSOD module

[be-fan]

Heh. Windows XP doesn't BSOD for me anymore. Now it just refuses to boot... Something about hal.dll being corrupt. Time for a reinstall --- if only Battlefield 1942 ran in Windows!

thwap

[Anonymous Coward]

that's for using "Just a thought".

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, ive had W2K BS a few times this week, and my XP box *loves* to spontaniously reboot.

really, dont be such an mcse.

hhmmmm

[ShadowRage]

I'm planning on creating my own custom system using parts of slackware and other stuff.
gonna use the 2.6 kernel when it becomes stable
I'm making a custom sys because most distros piss me off..
and dont mention LFS, I have a lfs system and it wont boot right for some damn reason.. when it mounts drives it craps out.

anyways, on topic, yeah, this is a very good sign for me, now I can get ready to create a custom system

Slackers

[DaveAtFraud]

Slackers:

[dave@bend ~]# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.0-test7 (dave@bend.local.davenjudy.org) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 SMP Wed Oct 8 19:09:28 MDT 2003
[dave@bend ~]# uptime
19:37:24 up 18 min, 8 users, load average: 0.62, 0.20, 0.13

So why haven't *YOU* built and booted with 2.6.0-test7 yet?

Re:Slackers

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Melinda made me wash the dishes first.

[whg3@myeviltoy whg3]$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.0-test7 (whg3@myeviltoy) (gcc version 3.2.2 (Microsoft Linux 3.1 3.2.2-7msft)) #2 Wed Oct 8 18:24:58 PDT 2003
[whg3@myeviltoy whg3]$ uptime
19:18:28 up 45 min, 4 users, load average: 0.83, 0.83, 0.38

Re:BSOD module

[shellbeach]

Now it just refuses to boot... Something about hal.dll being corrupt.

oh no ...

"Boot up my computer please, HAL."

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that ..."

Re:BSOD module

[Overly Critical Guy]

Cool, sounds precisely like a driver corruption issue you need to sort out.

I won't even get into the hell that has been setting up X for the past ten years, no matter the distribution or video card.

But will it julienne fries?

[cranos]

Seriously does anyone know if this will support SMP in the old old Proliant boxes? Like the 4500s and earlier?.

Re:But will it julienne fries?

[Anonymous Coward]

and detect the memory correctly in de 2500R, which the kernel only detects 16 megs

Re:But will it julienne fries?

[johu]

Who cares? Dual PPro 2500 + 768MB working just fine. All you need is couple kernel parameters. If you can't find answer using Google maybe you should leave old server hardware alone and go with new PCs instead.

Re:But will it julienne fries?

[cranos]

Hell if I could get a newer box for $120.00 I would however I can't so I wont.

As for the kernel parameters, what are they? Everything I have read on Google says the old boxes used a proprietry SMP architecture and weren't compatible with Linux.

Re:BSOD module

[pompousjerk]

In the last year, I've had it randomly (well, for no apparent reason) BSOD. Twice.

Even if you didn't have to reboot for every upgrade (Windows developers, if you're reading: DON'T PUT EVERYTHING IN THE KERNEL), you still can't get Linux-class uptime.

Or better yet

[Nailer]

make rpm

I think there's also a make dpkg too.

This is called Doing Things Properly.

Bad Headline Phrasing

[Anonymous Coward]

I first read that it a stable system freeze.

Re:BSOD module

[aled]

That's hal9000.dll being corrupt.
"Dave, if you want the door open you have to pay me."

Well,

[ebbomega]

Heh. Here I was ready to make a snarky ass comment about my desktop uptime being somewhere around 60 days, and I realized that about 2 hours ago the power flickered off then on.

*sigh* Maybe I should go grab one. =)

Re:Well,

[DaveAtFraud]

The dev box gets a new kernel whenever Linus decrees that it is time. As for the server:

[dave@fraud ~]# uptime
21:08:15 up 81 days, 7:46, 13 users, load average: 0.26, 0.15, 0.10

Its on a UPS.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

That's crap. May I introduce you to my router:

[root@localhost root]# uptime
21:29:33 up 234 days, 2:25, 1 user, load average: 0.33, 0.18, 0.06

Re:Well,

[DaveAtFraud]

The subject came up at one of the other places I hang out:

bombardier% uname -irs
SunOS 5.6 SUNW,SPARCstation-5
bombardier% uptime
10:30pm up 959 day(s), 9:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01
bombardier%

Damn. Almost three years. The original post is on the Linux forum on 2cpu.com.

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

Lamest troll ever.

Cool? Precisely? Way to help this guy out OCG. Now make sure to bash Linux a little bit... ah that's the stuff, that's an OCG post.

I'm sure that you have been setting up X on various distros for the last 10 years on many different video cards. All of your insightful comments on Linux, (jesus h christ man, almost 2000 comments already?), really show your expertise in that area. But have you ever heard of Mandrake, Redhat, Lycoris, Xandros, etc.? If you can't get X setup on any of the various video cards you've claimed to have used over the past 10 years then you are an idiot, plain and simple. The autodetection of hardware in those distros is good enough to detect the video cards across many years worth of boxes. X being tough to setup is a straw-man, even on Slack and Debian the toughest it gets is running xf86config. "I won't even get into the hell that is installing a driver to get my Nvidia GTS running in a mode other than 256 colors on Windows Me." Damn troll.

2.6 test 5

[iplayfast]

was stable enough for me. I've been running the 2.6 series for months now, and have had no major problems.

Stability freeze? Why bother, :)

Re:2.6 test 5

[RdsArts]

So they can bring pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng in line with the 2.6 series?

I've heard of people getting it to work (I can't, but hey), but damned if it isn't a pain.

Look! Up in the sky!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's sarcasm flying way the fuck over your head!

Serious question...

[Cable_Monkey]

We are currently having some serious problems with our mail/web server. We aren't sure what is going on with it, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of being hacked. We were planning on upgrading the server to the 2.6 kernel and installing some hardware upgrades around Christmas time, but it looks like we will be forced to do at least the hardware part (and reinstallation of the system) this weekend. This machine operates on dual 1.3GHz Pentium III processors. My question is, do you think I would have any problems running Linux 2.6.0-test7? ...or should I just stick with 2.4.x until we decide to redo things again...probably in a few years?

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Re:Serious question...

[Creepy Crawler]

Since what you describe is production, I'd advise to keep it at 2.4 .

If you wanted to, you could mirror data out so that there's a 2.6 mail server in testing.

Even that as a mail server, there's little reason to go towards 2.6 . The user-space and driver config (addition of /sys and other noticible improvemets) are probably of little value for a mail server. A client computer would benefit trmendously fro the additions made in 2.6

There is 1 feature that you could use: NSA security patch. It's in the "Alternate Security Model" part of the kernel. With those patches, it could make 'root' harmless. Since they've been back-ported into 2.4, it isnt much as a reason to stay with 2.6 .

Re:Serious question...

[Cable_Monkey]

I failed to mention this, but all email is accessed via SquirrelMail. We also use Amavis to scan all incoming and outgoing emails for viruses. Both of these combined during the busiest part of the day seems to keep the server quite busy load-wise. I was thinking the new scheduler and job spool methods would help manage things a little better. Now don't get me wrong, the current setup is not terrible, but I am looking for improvements.

However, given your opinion, I will stick with 2.4 for now. Thanks for the info.

Re:Serious question...

[Creepy Crawler]

As I reccomend not to go to 2.6test branch now, wait a few kernel versions: perhaps 2.6.3 and then have a test box to determine what you think is correct.

I do know that both (job and spooler) have been 'improved', but how that equates to the real world is only solvable by testing. All I know is testing a new beta kernel gives me the willies. you know.. the same feeling when you put a "patched" windows server on the external network

Re:Serious question...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you doubt him, you might want to subscribe to the LKML and see just how many security updates for 2.6 go by in a week... And some of these are very similar to the ones found in older 2.4 releases.

I wish I could offer direct links, but I'm pretty sure there were security announcements for 2.4.18 even. That's supported by the fact that my yast2 update a few months back updated the sources for my kernel. I don't remember what the problem was though...

Re:Serious question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather try new hardware before doing that. As long as just the usual server-software is running (apache, mail-server), well - it does run on many systems quite fine, so chances are big it really is a hardware problem.

doesn't compile on...

[acidrain69]

my alpha. :(

2.6.0-tests running great but...

[ph1nn]

Currently running 2.6.0-test7 & Slackware 9.1 (managed to get the kernel 67kb smaller than test6 w00t) Only downside ive noticed throughout the versions is my throughput seemed to have gone down a bit.

A couple months ago i ran a test (from memory):
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
Time buffered cache: 182 MB/s
Time buffered disk: 34.2 mb/s

And doing it now im getting:
Time buffered cache: 173 MB/s
Time buffered disk: 32.8 mb/s

Im wondering if there are some tweaks im missing to get it back up. Kinda strange... other than that everything runs absolutely beautifully.

ha ha ha

[rutledjw]

real funny, you insensitive clods!

You know what? My job (as if I had a choice to accept it) it so install this new kernel on IBM x445s and get the SOB working so we can get 16 CPUs and 64GB of RAM on a single machine (and we're planning on a farm of these - don't ask, it's a "unique" situation...). This is supposdly available only under RH Adv Server 3.0 (but not really)which uses "features" from the new 2.6 kernel.

Considering RH AS 3.0 isn't coming out until the 15th, this is going to be ugly. Ugly, as is become-a-drunk-and-heroin-addict ugly.

Playing with cutting/bleeding edge tech is one thing. Playing with bleeding edge tech on a deadline is quite another.

But as much as I bitch about it, it's still kinda cool...

Re:BSOD module

[Solosoft]

I have had some on my Windows 2000 machine ... I got them when I overclocked it and I have gotten then for no reason. There there ... not as often as in Windows 95 and 98. You would get one just taking a disk out.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another reason why OS X is the best environment going. Who TF cares about file systems and kernels? For christ sakes, people, computers are about getting work done and OS X gets out of your way and lets you get work done, unlike Linux and Windows where you're either patching your kernel or patching your email reader 24x7 just to have a working system. On top of that OS X runs on the fastest hardware money can buy. While you dipshits are spanking it to "reductions in spin lock contention", we Apple users are getting paid and getting laid.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe. good one.

Re:WTF?

[Narchie Troll]

And the Apple developers are talking about the exact same thing the Linux people are.

Please, for the sake of us all, blow off your fucking head with a shotgun.

Re:WTF?

[mccormick]

Just a thought: for some people, the work to be done is investigating how to save oneself from unncessary work in the future.

Some people also enjoy fiddling with the small details, perhaps only later applying it to real usage. Not everything has the same level of care or interest for the details, so let it be.

You obviously.....

[RdsArts]

Missed where he mentioned Debian.

Part of the Slashcode instantly +1troll mods any post containing the words "debian," "rms"(in all lower case), "is dying," and ") Profit!"

Where you've seen them modded something else are simple glitches in the modding matrix.

agreed

[bogie]

ACPI on Linux has a long long way to go. The official line last time I checked was that there were so many not fully documented ACPI implementations that they couldn't possibly cover them all. This of course is hard to argue with. At the same time its defintely a bit of a letdown when you consider how well linux is doing these days regarding hardware support. You all don't know how easy you have it compared to how it used to be.

For anyone who wants to use Linux on their laptop make sure and do your research. I'm not saying that's its not possible to use linux on your laptop(duh I'm typing this from my RH laptop) but realize that it may take a bunch of work to get all/any of the acpi features to work as well as they do on Windows.

Re:agreed

[wampus]

ACPI bugs me. My last machine was a Via 133 based Duron. It would do S3. I had a Via333 based one for about a week before I gave up on it as being unstable and shitty. It would do S3, but required an unplugging to ever turn on again. My current machine is an Nforce2. I love everything about it. Stable, quick, nice black color. Except it refuses to do S3. It refuses to do X if ACPI is even turned on in the kernel. It stays on and running 24/7 under linux rather than napping like it does under windows :/

Where in the world is Linus Torvalds?

[rice_burners_suck]

Who does this Torvalds think he is, claiming that only "strictly necessary stuff" is going into Linux? Hey, if I want to patch it with stuff that makes Linux make coffee, you better believe I'm gonna do it!

Re:Where in the world is Linus Torvalds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, though I'm sure you're joking, some people may not understand. He's just limiting what's getting into his Linux source tree. As always, anyone is free to start and maintain their own tree...

Re:BSOD module

[Penguin Follower]

On a lighter note, back in the windows 3.1/Lantastic days, I used to mess around with a program called "The Draw" (i ran a bbs, figure it out or google it) which could turn an ANSI screen into a .COM file

I'm still using "TheDraw" :) I run one of the many Synchronet BBSes that are beginning to make a comeback.

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you still need to reboot to change your workgroup name?
Hell, I just emerge -u'ed gnome, recompiling and reinstalling everything from gcc on up through X and on to all of gnome, and all I did was kill X at the end of it.

Back again

[Anonymous Coward]

with your poorly formated charts of benchmark results I see. If your code is as incoherent as your charts, no wonder people stay away from reiser.

yes, but

[JW Troll]

only 2 of the software choices are open source! not incl. the kernel of OSX10.3 of course

Re:BSOD module

[some guy I know]

Does linux have a BSOD module in the kernel?

I heard that BSOD was dying...

UMSDOS

[Leffe]

Lucky!

If they deem it unneccesary on the other hand... grr...

SERIAL ATA - where does it stand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well like the subject asks is SATA working and reliable. Currently in 2.4.xx it is jsut to iffey to make me feel good about using it.

Dave

Re:SERIAL ATA - where does it stand?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about firewire, fibre channel, iscsi instead?

CD-RW / DVD Packet Writing?

[PastaAnta]

Does someone know if packet writing is in?

In kernelnewbies status list it is listed as pre-2.6.0 stuff, and the patch has been around for ages. I very much hope we will finally be able to use CD-RW's instead of the antique floppy drive. It is frustrating and somewhat embarrasing Linux still does not support this feature. I assume DVD-RAM/-RW/+RW etc. also depend on this?

Pretty, pretty, pretty, Please!

Re:CD-RW / DVD Packet Writing?

[lintux]

Yep, at least you can select it in menuconfig, so I suppose it works. ;-)

Re:CD-RW / DVD Packet Writing?

[Nadir]

UDF file system support is there

Re:CD-RW / DVD Packet Writing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. And Mount Rainier. Get it off your butt Jens.

Re:BSOD module

[stor]

> since BSODs are a thing of the 90s

Almost (my friends get 'em sometimes in XP but I suspect a hardware/driver issue there).

But I agree, mostly: Microsoft have done well making Windows a lot stabler (building on the NT kernel rather then the ol' klunky 95/98 kernel is obviously beneficial).

Now, if Microsoft would stop adding annoying shit like "Product Activation" and "Browser redirecting me to Microsoft on startup from time to time, without warning" it would make me happier with their products: sometimes it seems it's "one step forward, two steps back"

Oh and lighten up dude: the joke is tired, old and dumb but it *is* just a joke...

Cheers
Stor

Keyboard issues are still not solved

[chrysalis]

No 2.6.x kernel ever worked with my keyboard (tried to various hardware, just the keyboard was the same).

The keyboard is a Logitech Cordless Pro (ps/2, not USB).

With a 2.6.x or 2.6.x-mm kernel, the keyboard works a by oddly. A single key stroke can produce 20 characters. Or sometimes 0. It's very irregular and using the keyboard becomes impossible.

I had no problem with older 2.5.x kernels nor 2.4.x kernels. No problem with OpenBSD either.

It's a real pity :(

Re:Keyboard issues are still not solved

[Bernie]

If you can identify the first kernel to exhibit this behaviour (use the -bk snapshots too if you have time), it would help the kernel hackers pin the bug down!

Re:Keyboard issues are still not solved

[zenyu]

There was a discussion of keyboard problems on the kernel mailing list. You might want to read it and see what was discussed and whether it jibes with your experience, and to see if any proposed fixes work for you. These are the types of problems Linus is still accepting patches for.

LFS

[Kourino]

No offense, but if you can't debug drives not mounting on boot following someone else's instructions, I wouldn't recommend going to build your own distribution.

Have you read the excellent FAQ, or asked on lfs-support?

Re:LFS

[ShadowRage]

actually, it's something wrong with devfs, doesnt detect the hard drive partitions at all. or the devices. it worked ebfore, and one day, it just stopped. dunno why.
oh and asking those people is impossible because they troll you for not being l33t like they are.

Re:SERIAL ATA - where does it stand?

[superchkn]

You might want to check out libata.

As I understand from watching things on the LKML, 2.6 will support SATA devices through libata. I've noticed every once in awhile, IDE developers are being told not to add SATA support to the drivers and instead that it will be supported by libata (which pretty much spells it out ;-). I would suppose this is to get a clean break from the mess (so I've heard) that is the current IDE code.

Good news for bug-fixes

[deggy]

This is great.

We don't like to complain about the Linux kernel because we don't pay for it but I was getting very frustrated at new things being included while existing bugs (like usb-storage and datafab CF card readers) were not being addressed.
Let's hope that the kernel ships with nothing broken.

D,

Re:Good news for bug-fixes

[Zarf]

I was getting very frustrated at new things being included while existing bugs (like usb-storage and datafab CF card readers) were not being addressed. Let's hope that the kernel ships with nothing broken.

You and me both brudda.

I think I've found my next crusade.

Law of diminishing releases

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a law that each successive release of a major OSS project (Linux kernel, Perl) tends towards temporal infinity?

BitTorrent download available

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit Torrent download link available from http://www.distributedbandwidth.info/torrentmap/ex plorer.jsp?cat=Lin260.

PCMCIA?

[Jim Morash]

Is PCMCIA still broken when you use HZ=1000? What about serial?

Re:BSOD module

[mark_lybarger]

you've got to share some of that you're puttin' in the pipe, please. MANY, MANY folks have used X from a distro out of the box with no issues. the video card/distro does matter to some degree. Tools like xconfigurator or other vendor specific tools help the issue A LOT.

i agree that intense X configuration file changes can be a beatch, but come on now. 10 years, with common video cards? and you can't get X to work? share the "wealth"...

So I guess its too late...

[Anonymous Coward]

To contribute this half life 2 source or unix system V code...

Oh well... theres always 2.7 ;)

Re:BSOD module

[Izago909]

Ha, ive had W2K BS a few times this week, and my XP box *loves* to spontaniously reboot.

That's the 2000/XP BSOD. Miscrosoft was getting upset how BSOD was quickly becomming part of the technology lexicon. Their solution was to automatically reboot after a BSOD. Usually, it reboots faster than the monitor can draw the entire screen. The option can be removed so that the system freezes (req. hard reset) after a BSOD. I can't remember the exact registry setting, but one program I use is X-Setup. It's a freeware app that puts the TweakUI powertoy to shame.

kernel freeze stable?

[Tukla]

I suppose so. My computer has always been very stable after the kernel froze.

I actually kinda got it to work - me a linux newb

[spineboy]

Well, I was able to get 2.6test 4 compiled and working on my box, EXCEPT for the bloody NVIDIA drivers!. Stuck in text mode - couldn't get X up and running, even afer DLing those patches from that german site for the NVidia stuff.

Sigh....... I'll guess I'll have to wait..

Re:I actually kinda got it to work - me a linux ne

[zenyu]

Gentoo is patching the nVidia drivers successfully for 2.6.0-test5 for me, you might want to look at their
patchset (look in the files directory).

Re:BSOD module

[superchkn]

You can also just go into the Control Panel, System tab I believe and then click on the button about error reporting and recovery. Then you can change how long it waits before rebooting after a BSOD. I set mine to 5 seconds so I can keep score between which driver is causing the most ;-)

It's not like I ever expect them to be fixed, so I might as well make it a game. Kinda like, wonder how much code I'll lose this time...

Re:BSOD module

[be-fan]

Yep. Dontcha love progress?

I don't have to reboot to change my kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

$ uname -r

1.5.5(0.94/3/2)

Long live Cygwin

duke nukem

[jonnyfivealive]

i shall expect duke nukem "forever" or whatever its called out by the end of the month as well

I, too, am an early adopter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for the 2.6.12-rh5 kernel. Don't think I won't have backups on hand when I do it though.

Actually, I'm sure it will be okay, but there is little reason to change. 2.4 promised so much, but after firing up my cyrix 233 with 2.2.12 a while ago, I realized what simplicity has going for it. I don't think I've ever used USB, and anyway, it's been backported since 2.2.19 I think.

Re:BSOD module

[darxyde]

The Draw was AWESOME!

Re:BSOD module

[Anonymous Coward]

To fix "Browser redirecting me to Microsoft on startup from time to time, without warning", just turn off "Automatically check for Internet Explorer updates" in the "Browser" tab of "Internet Options".

Linux 2.6 @ SCALE 2x

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel developers Anderw Morton, William Irwin and Patrick Mochel will be giving technical talks regarding the Linux 2.6 Kernel next month in Los Angeles