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

Framebuffers

[Durin_Deathless]

They still haven't fixed the problems in the framebuffers. Anyone know why this is so low priority?

Re:Framebuffers

[GammaTau]

They still haven't fixed the problems in the framebuffers. Anyone know why this is so low priority?

As far as I understand, there is still a significant body of new framebuffer code that hasn't been merged to Linus' tree. There is a message from the framebuffer maintainer on the Linux framebuffer development list saying that the merge will happen, quoting him directly, "Very soon. I have new software cursor code that I'm debugging right now. This is the only thing holding back the syning."

Re:Framebuffers

[binary paladin]

His use of the term "FAGBALL" perhaps?

nifty meter

[Anonymous Coward]

... but kernel.org has a nice little bandwidth readout on the front page so you can see how hard their servers are being hit...

how many people are going to go there not to download, but just to see the nifty meter and end up slashdotting them ;)

Do I

[110010001000]

Do I need to pay SCO $699 for this release too? Or does the license I purchased from them cover this as well?

XFS

[rf0]

Well I've been using test5+mm4 under heavy load with no problems. Now the mm4 did include the XFS fix and its been totally stable under constant I/O. Looks like 2.6 is shaping up very nicely. Would like to put it into real production but won't quite yet as there might be still one or two nasty little surprises. Overall thought hats off to Linus et al

Rus

Re:XFS

[dubious9]

not to sound ignorant or anything, but what are the mm patches? Memory management optimizations? Why aren't they included in the kernel?

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.

Microsoft Dismisses Linux Kernel 2.6.0-test8

[Anonymous Coward]

On the eve of the Linux 2.6 introduction for personal computers, Microsoft's General Manager, Windows Division, Dave Fester posted his thoughts on Linux Kernel 2.6.0-test8. In his comments, Fester concludes that Linux Kernel 2.6.0-test8 is too limited for PC users.

"Unless Linux decides to make radical changes to their service model, a Linux-based operating system will still remain a closed system, where PC owners cannot access content from other operating systems," said Fester. "Additionally, users of Linux are limited to programs from Redhat's install CD... this is a drawback for PC users, who expect choice in music programs, choice in games, and choice in Word Processors from a wide-variety of Microsoft products to use for various purposes. Lastly, if you use Linux's desktop environment along with Linux, you don't have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows XP-compatible GUI skins. When I'm paying for a desktop environment, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future."

When asked how the Linux Kernel 2.60-test8 differs from Windows-based services, Fester talks about Microsoft Office and the different types of options it will offer users. Fester concludes that it will be the best experience that ultimately wins over consumers.

"All told, copmputer fans should look for services that offer the best experience and take advantage of the best digital rights platform available for PCs. With Windows XP 2003, you get faster starts, better quality internet, and support for the most websites," Fester said.

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"...

What Features are included?

[dragin33]

Does anyone know where i can find a good list of new features that are included in the 2.6 kernel?

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:Why?

[pair-a-noyd]

Every few days?? How about every few minutes!

A monkey could take a huge, steamy shit in the middle of the floor and you could plug a mouse, keyboard and monitor into that monkey shit and have a superior system than you would get with an M$ system.. And it would get fewer viruses and crash far less often!

"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:Did they write that themselves?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the real Alan Cox!

I know this becuase the REAL Alan Cox would never use punctuation or capitalization! Clearly this is an impostor.

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:does anyone know

[Brandybuck]

Don't ask. Everytime I've asked this question on Slashdot, or any Linux support forum, I've been flamed. Apparently until the SATA gets hammered down and made a default part of the kernel, the typical Linux advocate regards it as unimportant. It's almost as if they expect people NOT to use SATA drives just because it isn't ready for Linux yet.

Yet SATA-only systems are becoming increasingly common. I expect in six months that OEMs won't even ship IDE systems any more. If Linux distros don't put in SATA support by default in their install CDs, there's going to be a real problem.

Dave's post-Halloween list

[Kourino]

This has been posted here before. Check out Dave's post-halloween document.

Re:Why?

[pilot1]

My installation skills? How can my installation skills have anything to do with it when Windows XP doesn't let you customize a damn thing during installation?

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.

17MB on a floppy?

[bbk]

17493892 bytes?

You can put roughly 17MB of data on one floppy? Wow! I'm upgrading to test-8 ASAP.

(nice troll by the way)

-bbk

Re:does anyone know

[Drakon]

you're asking the question wrong. To quote from bash.org:

<dm> I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
<dm> For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.
<dm> Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.
<dm> So if you're starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with "Linux is gay because it can't do XXX like Windows can". You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.

It keeps getting better...

[IpSo_]

2.6.0-test7 was a good 2% faster across the board on file system benchmarks then 2.6.0-test5, lets hope test8 continues that trend.

Benchmarks for both test7, and test8 will be posted on that site within the next week for all those interested in getting the maximum performance out of your Linux box.

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*.

Re:does anyone know

[binary paladin]

Funny that, I used to go into IRC rooms with the handle "beach`girl" and those nerds were dying to help me out. I dunno know the name of the chick whose picture I was handing out to them when they asked but hey... that got something new to wank to and pretend it was a Linux interested girl and I got information.

Maybe this should make me feel dirty but... I'm pretty much a whore.

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....