Linux Kernel 2.6.0-test8 Released

djcapelis writes "It's that time again. Latest release is hot off the presses in this final bit of stabilization before 2.6.0 is finally released. Changelog: here. Use mirrors if you're nice, but kernel.org has a nice little bandwidth readout on the front page so you can see how hard their servers are being hit if you don't feel like tracking one down. A few XFS changes from SGI in there as well if anyone is still worried on that topic. Watch for the MM patches when they come out. The FTP server seems to be snappier for some."

Comments

"Tracking down" mirrors?

[Kourino]

Oi, it's not that hard. www.XX.kernel.org or ftp.XX.kernel.org, where XX is your two-letter country code, like fr for France.

Re:Relevance??

[Kourino]

Kernel versions seem more frequent for two reasons:

- The development branch is active. Ideally, devel releases get made once every week or two, and this has been the case for a while AFAIK.
- The 2.4 release process has undergone some ... unsnagging. There was about a year of wait between 2.4.19 and 2.4.20 (or was it .18 and .19 ... ?), and nobody wants to see that happen again. So, Marcelo is paying closer attention to his release schedule to make sure there aren't any more really big, really long kernel releases in his branch.

Re:XFS

[rf0]

They are a series of patches which aim to fix bugs and imporve interactive performace. Some people also feel that they can be more stable than the normal kernel

Rgds

Rus

Re:XFS

[lightcycle]

As far as I understand, it's a bunch of mostly performance-heightening patches by Andrew Morton and others. I think they are omitted because they are too bleeding edge to put in mainstream (Yes, apparently too bleeding edge even for a development/test kernel). I tried them with test6 however, and to me it didn't seem any less stable than vanilla, but YMMV.

Re:Microsoft Dismisses Linux Kernel 2.6.0-test8

[rickbrodie]

This was a real quote from Dave Fester, the AC just changed all references of Apple and iTunes to Linux. Try searching google for "you get faster starts"...

Good stuff

[contrasutra]

I've been running the 2.6 Test kernel (-mm patches usually) since -test5 and everything has been great.

Multitasking really is a dream. I'm able to compile, listen to music, and surf the web without any slowdown. Im no developer though, so I think that the 2.6 will really help Home/Desktop users.

Of course, home users will like improved multi media performance, but the coolest thing I saw was web page rendering. Web pages render twice as fast (for me) with the 2.6 kernel!! This is very noticable, and very enjoyable.

Re:What Features are included?

[MarcQuadra]

I prefer the changelog, I just 'grep' it for things I'm interested in.

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLo g- 2.6.0-test8

For a more 'friendly' summary check out:

http://kernelnewbies.org/status/latest.html

beware, it tends to run a few weeks behind schedule sometimes.

Re:nvidia video drivers :(

[Plug]

NVIDIA drivers on Linux 2.6

Brought to you by Christian Zander, ex-NVIDIA intern.

Re:What Features - the view from 2.4.

[valdis]

The -test8 changelog is only stuff since -test7. If you're coming from a 2.4 series kernel, the link you want is:

http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5. tx t

In particular, *NOTE THAT YOU NEED NEW 'modutils' PACKAGES*. Failure to update these will mean 'insmod' and friends *will not work*.

Things average users might notice with kernel 2.6

[grolschie]

From the post-Halloween document:

• With a recent cdrecord, you also no longer need ide-scsi in order to use an IDE CD writer.
• Ripping audio tracks off of CDs now also uses DMA and should be notably faster.
• The advanced linux sound architecture got merged into 2.6. This offers considerably improved functionality over the older OSS drivers, but requires new userspace tools.
• Support for plug and play devices such as early ISAPnP cards has improved a lot in the 2.6 kernel.
• Users should notice a significant speedup in basic thread operations.
• More hotplug drivers have been added, including a fake PCI hotplug driver so people without specialised hardware can test hotplug features.
• The much talked about preemption patches made it into 2.6. With this included you should notice much lower latencies especially in demanding multimedia applications.
• You should notice considerable throughput improvements over 2.4 due to much reworking of the block and the memory management layers.
• The build system is much improved compared to 2.4. You should notice quicker builds, and less spontaneous rebuilds of files on subsequent builds from already built trees.
• There are new graphical config tools. "make xconfig" now requires the qt libraries. "make gconfig" uses gtk libraries.
• A number of additional filesystems have made their way into 2.6. Currently it supports: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs, minix, romfs, iso9660, udf, msdos, vfat, ntfs (ro), adfs, amiga ffs, apple macintosh hfs, BeOS befs (ro), bfs, efs (ro), cramfs, free vxfs, os/2 hpfs, qnx4fs, sysvfs, ufs.
• The ext3 filesystem has gained indexed directory support, which offers considerable performance gains when used on filesystems with directories containing large numbers of files.
• Systems that support the SYSENTER extension (Basically Intel Pentium-II and above, and AMD Athlons) now have a faster method of making the transition from userspace to kernelspace when a syscall is performed.
• A generic crypto API has been merged, offering support for various algorithms (HMAC,MD4,MD5,SHA-1,SHA256,SHA384,SHA512,DES,Tripl e DES EDE, Blowfish, Twofish, Serpent, AES, CAST5, CAST6)
• 2.6 features support for several new architectures: x86-64 (AMD Hammer), ppc64, UML (User mode Linux).
• The in-kernel module loader got reimplemented.
• Several security issues solved in 2.4 may not yet be forward ported to 2.6. For this reason 2.6.x kernels should not be tested on untrusted systems.

man xfs_repair

[Booker]

.... in the xfsprogs package.

Oh, and there is xfs.fsck but it's a no-op. This
-is- a journaling filesystem you know....