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Linux 2.6.0 Kernel Released
thenextpresident writes "It's here! Just updated on kernel.org, the Linux 2.6.0 kernel has finally arrived! We've been waiting a long time for this, and it had been rumored it was going to be released tonight. Well, it's here indeed. Happy downloading." There's also a changelog online for this long-awaited update.
Got a torrent of it for ya'll:
Linux 2.6.0 final (tar.bz2)My god. Now SCO will have to update all of their lawsuits!
I run linux as my desktop at home, and I also run it at work in a scientific computing cluster.
I'd like to know what benefits I could expect from the new kernel in each area in which I use linux.
I'm glad the new kernel is out in time for the holiday season... wait... that's sad isn't it?
Esoteric reference.
Read Dave Jones' "post-Halloween documents". You'll have to read them from backups, since the host davej's website is usually on recently suffered some sort of catastrophic hardware failure.
Thats a bit of a long list. New scheduler, pre-emption for the kernel, some new drivers, ALSA is the default for sound in this version. You can burn cd's without ide-scsi. devfs is now deprecated in favor of udev (which is roughtly the same thing but userspace as opposed to devfs's kernelspace). sysfs is also new in 2.6 which adds some information mounted in /sys. I hear firewire support is much improved as well and many other things I'm probably forgetting.
:). Now you'll have to excuse me while I reboot.
To the end user (me) 2.6 is much faster than 2.4 both in boot time and while operation. Kudos to all of the developers
Lord of the Rings and 2.6 Kernel released on the same day
Argh! What to do? What to do??? See LotR or build the kernel? See LotR or build the kernel??? I'm stuck in an infinite look! Argh! Does not compute! Ack! Out of memory error!! Blthlt!
Shit, my brain just dumped core.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Damn! Now I've gotta clean my keyboard again!
For a summary of changes from 2.4 to 2.6, read Dave Jones' "post-Halloween" document. (The Changelog only lists changes from -test11 to 2.6.0 and so is not very useful. However, a full Changelog from 2.5.0 to 2.6.0 would be massive information overload, as well as just not terribly useful for a broad picture of what's different.)
http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html
This is a great place to start. It's very comprehensive, and a worthy read.
But if you really want a ultra-summed-up explination, 2.6 has 63.8% more kickassedness than 2.4 does. That and ALSA support built in.
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
Duh, they had it done a week ago, however they chose today to release it in a cunning plan to make geeks stay home so the developers wouldn't have to wait in line. Clever bastards......
nvidia users might want to download the proper patches before trying out 2.6. the patches can be foundhere
the start of something?
My thesis project involves a module similar to SELinux and I have found that the best 2.6 kernel for messing around with it is actually the BK tree mantained by the Linux Security Modules (LSM) project. Technically SELinux is one module that is part of the LSM project but the two are often referred to synonymously. LSM is at: immunix and you can check out their kernel branch for extra features that are not yet in mainline 2.6 (and may not get in at all if the kernel maintainers aren't confortable with the changes)
;)
My personal project is actually a big modification of the Domain & Type enforcement that is present in LSM now. but the code is nowhere near ready for inclusion just yet
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Here
For those of us upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 and don't know where to begin, you may want to check out an upgrade guide.
It's small but very helpful for someone that doesn't completely know what they're doing.
Gus
I mean I went there but there's no trusted computing logo. How can I trust software if it doesn't say I should. Linux will never be ready for the desktop until it's part of a trusted computing initiative.
I'm sitting on top of a decently fast link and I'm leaving tomorrow, so I suppose this mirror couldn't hurt: linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2.
The answers is obvious:
Download & configure kernel.
Start compilation and go see Lotr with a smug "i'm more clever than thou" geek look knowing that you are actually multitasking.
Come back from the film with the kernel and modules crisply compiled for you, install boot loader and enjoy.
If not, why not? It's been 10 minutes since the kernel was posted and I'm not getting any younger.
but I *liked* make menuconfig; make clean && make modules modules_install bzimage!!
Excuse my ignorance (I'm not familar with the new 2.6 build system) but I really *did* like the make menuconfig approach. It's been that way since way-back-when so I could probably do it blindfolded. In addition, make menuconfig is great for building a new kernel over a slow (e.g. dial-up) ssh session. I actually rebuilt the kernel on my PC in Virginia from a cyber-cafe in Paris once.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
In related news, Redhat/Fedora has announced that the next Fedora release will ship with 2.6. They've called it a "stop-ship" feature :) Fedora Core 2 is tentatively scheduled to be released in April 04.
My preciousssssssssss...My precioussssssss 2.6...
SCOses can't haveses our precioussssssssssss kernel....
Look at the evidence from the Changelog:
s hing.orgh otmail.com
mdharm-usb@one-eyed-alien.net
trini@kernel.cra
jes@trained-monkey.org
James_McMechan@
Now ask yourself, do you want a patch submitted by someone at "one-eyed-alien.net" running on *your* production server? Can we really trust patches submitted by people using Hotmail accounts?
Go back to Windows, and rest assured that every developer will be using a trusted microsoft.com e-mail address. Don't you feel safer already?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Take the laptop to the theatre, Luke, take the laptop.
2.4.18 works just fine for me and I see no reason to upgrade
don't all 2.4 versions before .23 have some kind of security problem?
what's your IP address? :)
Here you go...
2
http://sco.com/OurCode/Linux/Kernel/2.4.bz2
Might just want to get the new one....
http://sco.com/ProbablyOurs/Linux/Kernel/2.6.bz
"The new kernel also monitors for new events more frequently--1,000 times per second instead of 100--a fact that slows down the system about 1 percent..."
I assume it's to try and respond to events faster but increasing it tenfold, isn't that overkill? I mean, it slows the system down by 1% which isn't horrible and if a real-time app has a problem with it, you can always modify the kernel yourself but couldn't they have upped the polling to 250 which is a decent increase but not a 10x one.
Polling 100 times a second has been the standard figure in the Linux kernel for a long long time. Meanwhile, the top CPU speed has increased by much more than one order of magnitude (say 300MHz -> 3GHz). Most desktop distributions have already been shipping with this set to 1000 already, since it makes the machine overall more responsive, something that's particularly important for a GUI.
I'm guessing that on a top-of-the line server pushing bits to this disk here, that NIC there at very high speeds, it'd be just as good as the old setting, keeping buffers flowing. That 1% quote is completely without context, and might be true on a really low-end machine where 1000 context switches takes up a lot of CPU time, but overall I don't think that's accurate.
Edit: I found this quote on a google search:
"I don't know what the costs of a higher HZ value might be, except for the obvious one: more cpu cycles will be spent servicing the timer interrupt. On my PPro, servicing the timer interrupt takes around 1500 cycles, so with HZ = 100 this accounts for fraction of a percent of the processor's time. With HZ = 1024, this still wouldn't be much more than one percent (I expect the figures to be similar for a K6)." So that figure might be accurate for a 150MHz Pentium Pro...
If you're running an embedded system or something else on limited hardware, you'd probably want to tweak that now, but then again you probably should have tweaked a lot of kernel settings in the past as well. So nothing new here, just staying with the times. Hell, on a GUI machine I'd consider experimenting with setting it even higher.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
-make xconfig looks really professional now /etc/modules.conf contains only OSS aliases, no alsa config files at all. so no sound at the moment...
-make / make modules / make modules_install has all been tidied up by the looks of it -- no more endless printout of GCC syntax. had me worried for a second that nothing was compiling but overall looks pretty slick
-alsa comes installed as default, but the configuration seems a little screwy (on debian at least) --
-usb mouse doesn't seem to work here when compiled in the kernel, but works fine as a module -- same problem i've had with 2.4.18-23
-the nvidia 2.6.0 patch available at minion.de works great, so i have a functional X11 server with nvidia modules
The only thing I can find to fault is that somehow the X11 server on the backup 2.4.23 kernel crashes on bootup due to some problem parsing the XF86Config-4 file. I'm not sure if this is a side-effect of the 2.6.0 install or something else (maybe some apt-get update X11 changes i missed?), and i've had the occasional problem before with older kernels becoming only partly functional after newer kernels are installed.
All around though, nice job! Compiling the kernel is getting easier and nicer to look at. And it seems the problems with mouse lagging during 100% CPU usage are gone, at least as far as I've tried it this evening.
Thanks to Linus and all that contributed..
experimental audiovideo minimalism: Rebuild All Your Ruins
Linus said it sucks.
1 2/ 09/1341236
In early November, Bill Davidsen
responded to a post on the LKML about a problem someone was having with burning a CD. Davidsen said:
There is a problem with ide-scsi in 2.6, and rather than fix it someone came up with a patch to cdrecord to allow that application to work properly, and perhaps "better" in some way. Since the problem with ide-scsi seems to still exist for other applications, you will probably find you have to work around the problem, by using the -pad option of cdrecord (thought that was standard now for TAO at least) or reading using the ide-cd driver.
Torvalds responded to Davidsen's post by writing:
On 6 Nov 2003, bill davidsen wrote:
>
> There is a problem with ide-scsi in 2.6, and rather than fix it someone
> came up with a patch to cdrecord to allow that application to work
> properly, and perhaps "better" in some way.
Wrong.
The "somebody" strongly felt that ide-scsi was not just ugly but _evil_, and that the syntax and usage of "cdrecord" was absolutely stupid.
That somebody was me.
ide-scsi has always been broken. You should not use it, and indeed there was never any good reason for it existing AT ALL. But because of a broken interface to cdrecord, cdrecord historically only wanted to touch SCSI devices. Ergo, a silly emulation layer that wasn't really worth it.
The fact that nobody has bothered to fix ide-scsi seems to be a result of nobody _wanting_ to really fix it.
So don't use it. Or if you do use it, send the fixes over.
Linus
The back-and-forth between Davidsen and Torvalds has continued, and as a result more and more of Torvalds disdain for the ide-scsi and cdrecord interface has bubbled to the surface. Torvalds has said, among other things, that:
* "anybody who uses cdrecord has either been confused by the silly SCSI numbering"
* "Some people ended up having to boot with ide-scsi enabled to burn CD's, but then if they wanted to watch DVD's (on the same drive), they needed to boot without it."
* "the old cdrecord interfaces are an UNBELIEVABLE PILE OF CRAP!"
* "It's an interface that is based on some random hardware layout mechanism that isn't even TRUE any more, and hasn't been true for a long time."
* "It's bad from a technical standpoint (anybody who names a generic device with a flat namespace is just basically clueless), and it's bad from a usability standpoint. It has _zero_ redeeming qualities."
There's more, but that's enough to give you a sense of Torvalds' unhappiness with the whole approach of both one particular (though very popular) app and the ide-sci module itself.
http://programming.linux.com/article.pl?sid=03/
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
Windows uses SCSI-emulation just like Linux 2.2 and 2.4. Using ATAPI directly is one place where Linux is way AHEAD of windows.
If you are complaining that CD-burning was not setup for you automatically (which has nothing to do with kernel 2.6), throw out your geek-friendly Gentoo, and use a user-friendly distro instead, which will setup things just like windows.
You might want to keep an eye on your 2.6.0 machine if it's on a network that's readily accessible to the outside world. Apparently not all of the security fixes that occurred in the 2.4 line have made it into 2.6.0.
Dave Jones' post halloween document, which is mentioned in an earlier post as a good summary of changes, mentions the following (near the bottom):
Security concerns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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. Testing known 2.4 exploits and reporting results
is useful.
LOTR:RotK -->
Lord Of The Release:Release Of The Kernel
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Does anybody have a howto on how I can migrate my LVM version 1.0.7 volumes from 2.4.23 to 2.6.0? I know LVM has been replaced by device-mapper. Do I have to run some kind of conversion tool, or will device mapper just magically find and activate my LVMs? I can't find any information on this.
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 00:15:50 EST
---cut---
Desktops and laptops may have more trouble at this time because of the much wider range of hardware and because of as-yet unimplemented fixes for the hardware and BIOS bugs from which these machines tend to suffer.
During the 2.6.0 stabilization period a significant number of less serious fixes have accumulated in various auxiliary kernel trees and these shall be merged into the 2.6 stream after the 2.6.0 release. Many of these fixes appear in Andrew Morton's "-mm" tree (...)
---cut---
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
but my point is that the quality of bugs has been pretty high lately - Linus
;)
We have bugs... but at least they are *high quality* bugs! Take that Microsoft
(Congrats to all the developers for 2.6! Looking forward to getting rid of OSS and ide-scsi!)
The biggest bonus I got from 2.6 was DMA with ATAPI commands finally works. Earlier kernels would not use DMA for ATAPI commands (read: CD/DVD burning commands) even if DMA was enabled for the IDE device. This effectively limited CD burning to the speed that PIO would work at, which was about 12x on my 900Mhz K7. It also ate up your entire CPU.
:)
With 2.6, DMA works properly with ATAPI commands, at least when using the new ATAPI virtual SCSI bus (NOT the ide-scsi module!). To use the new virtual bus, use 'dev=ATAPI:0,0,0' in a cdrecord command. You may also need to use the latest alpha of cdrecord.
I can now burn 2 CDs at once (multiple burners), at 52x without my CPU load going over 0.2!
Of course, if you had the luxury of using REAL SCSI CD burners before, this won't make a lick of difference to you.
2.A, you decimal supremisist