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Linux Kernel 2.6.4 Released
justinarthur writes "The Linux kernel version 2.6.4 has been released at 03:16 UTC. Included in the changes from version 2.6.3 are fixes to XFS support, Wide Area Networking, USB connectivity, and IEEE1394 connectivity. To download a copy, it is recommended that one utilizes a Linux Kernel Archives mirror. Linus Torvalds' announcement to the Linux Kernel Mailing list concerning this release is available here." Reader k-zed points out that Linux 1.0 was released in March 1994, ten years ago.
Hmm.. I don't see it on ftp.sco.com yet. What lousy service for $699.
Trolling is a art,
10 years and that guy is only on version 2?
Does it run Linux?
(Ok, sorry. I know its not funny anymore.)
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
... hasn't even gotten finished compiling the last 2.6 kernel release *grumbling* *adding yet another patch to my to-do list*
... I was thinking "I don't need this kernel upgrade, 2.6.3 has been working great for me..." I find in the changelog:
[IRDA]: Add stir4200 driver.
doh... finally added support for one of my usb-irda dongles.
Damn.
FLR
The name of this release amongst the core developers was "Heathen Chemistry.". Alan Cox came up with it - it's was inside joke about british pop/rock phenomenon.
has there been any talk of removing the alleged SCO code? or rumors? i guess linus wouldn't make a statement about it now, since there's the lawsuit going on
Oh no! Someone leaked their source! Call Microsoft, maybe they can help track down who leaked this to the internet...
oh, wait... nevermind.
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
usermode linux runs linux on linux.
So, the answer is yes.
Odd. I'm still stuck on my 2.4.xx version. I tried to upgrade a few distros to 2.6 and things didn't go very well (kernel panic)
It seems to me that the number of users who have picked up 2.6 x compared to the number that picked up 2.4 from 2.2 has greatly diminished on many of the distro mailing lists. From this it seems that either the migration is uglier than anticipated, or that more people are just willing to sit back and wait for their distro to provide them with all their needs.
Who will be the first to ship kernel 2.6 by default?
this is the first time i've installed the kernel and had it running before the slashdot announcement!
i just checked the new one after lunch. blasted centrino ultralights need all this new stuff in them.
I think i'll go celebrate "I beat slashdot's unnecessary kernel release announcement day!"
Wonder if we'll see reiser4 in 2.6.
You can test it now, but it is very experimental.
Maybee they'll merge it with 2.7
I haven't gotten 2.6.3 compiled yet, and here comes 2.6.4. Hell, I'm still running 2.6.0-gentoo. What's with this heightened release schedule? I mean, gcc is only so fast on my machine.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
2.6.4-rc1 ChangeLog:
d .org/msg58421.html
[libata] catch, and ack, spurious DMA interrupts
Hardware issue on Intel ICH5 requires an additional ack sequence over and above the normal IDE DMA interrupt ack requirements. Issue described in post to freebsd list: http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-stable@freebs
Since the bug workaround only requires a single additional PIO or MMIO read in the interrupt handler, it is applied to all chipsets using the standard libata interrupt handler.
Credit for research the issue, creating the patch, and testing the patch all go to Jon Burgess.
---------
Woo, this is very exciting. If you had problems with SATA & ICH5... this probably fixes those problems.
all it needs now is some love and it'll be ready for my machine.
Copy down the numbers from the kernel panic.
I know it's a pain, but we really need this.
If you're terribly lazy, just get EIP, ESP,
and any names you see.
Mail that to linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org and
expect a few questions about your hardware.
That's not so difficult, is it? This gets the
bug fixed so that the next release will run on
your system.
Maybe you mean the desktop experience? That's provided by KDE/GNOME/fluxbox whatever, and it's very clear what innovation is going on there if you look at KDE 3.2 vs KDE 1 (for example).
In the OSS world, major releases are counted in the minor numbers, so 2.6 is what a commercial company would have called 26.
Aren't you confusing kernel and distribution? Microsoft Windows is like a distribution (it's a complete running system). How different are Slackware 1 and Slackware 9 for instance?
;-)
If you looked at what's happened to the NT kernel during those 10 years, I reckon it would also look like "10 years of incremental patches". Apart from the graphics renderer turning up in it, that is
Its kinda funny, I run windows on one of my machines, and I'm constantly installing patches. Not to mention my 3 BIG patches the ones that cost me a hundred or so dallors. My 98 - 2000 patch and my 2000 to xp patch. The process is still the same, the only difference is the linux changes come bit by bit instead of in a bulk jump on a cd. Personally, i would rather get my updates in small increments. That why I can pick and choose what updates I want. If 2.6.4 doesnt add anything I need, maybe I'll hold off to the next one. And besides, it beats spending cash.
I am waiting on 2.6.4.5.4.333a I hear there will be good things with that.
Incremental improvements inspired by others is not innovation. What great new features have Microsoft ever introduced to the world? It has to be more than a couple to claim the status of "consistently innovating".
Things like ReiserFS? Major sections of the kernel have been completely rewritten since 1.0. The scheduler, the module loading system, the /dev handling (static /dev to devfs to udev), the network subsystem. Anybody even remotely familiar with the kernel wouldn't make the claim you are making.
That's a straw man argument. People don't claim that open source automatically makes something perfect.
Desktop OS of choice for some people. It's certainly not the desktop OS choice for me.
Zealots of any kind aren't objective. But people who use and develop Linux at home or work are not automatically zealots as you seem to be implying.
What else than "incremental patches" does Microsoft deliver, especially in the days where there is no week with new IE and OE exploits being announced and eventually (after months) being fixed?
The reason why "Windows is still the desktop OS of choice" is just because it comes preinstalled with any vanilla PC you can buy out there. Because it will run the games people copy from their friends. Because it runs Microsoft Office.
If Microsoft released Office for Linux I'm more than sure that numerous offices will switch to Linux and if it's just to escape the virus race which cost them plenty of time, money, and nerves.
I found this Changelog entry rather funny. Looooong story about stir4200 driver - then another commit that adds stir4200.c:
[IRDA]: Add stir4200 driver.
After a long maturation, this is time to send you the latest
version of the stir4200 USB driver. Initially started by Paul Stewart,
modified by Martin Diehl and me, and later partially rewriten by
Stephen Hemminger.
The hardware has many quirks. This is the first version that
work reliably at SIR and mostly work at FIR. We may never get optimal
operation from this hardware due to its pecularities, but at least its
now usable.
[IRDA]: Forgot to add stir4200.c in previous commit.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Speaking as a Debian Unstable user...
Y'know how apt tends to make X-Windows jerky and unresponsive? It doesn't happen with 2.6.3. Now if I can only figure out why the OSS modules are being autoloaded for my built-in VIA 82something-or-ther rather than the ALSA ones, I'll be all set.
Finally they've included mdpart. This means anyone with a SATA RAID motherboard can use its full potential. Excellent :-)
it takes 30 minutes to install a service pack (which can change any functionality in windows, so it's a comparable procedure)
This is not quite true, Windows does not run on as many architectures as Linux does.
Look at the new Debian installer, it takes alot of time to "get it right", only because it has to work on so many architectures.
I think this is the same reason why there is no 1-click upgrade procedure or something for Linux.
It doesn't mean it's impossible, I think it's just damn hard to create such a procedure which works the same way on so many platforms
I can't remember to ever have upgraded the kernel on my windows machine. Hm, thinking of it, this may be because MS does not allow me to download new kernels from their kernel repository. I they did, it wouldn't be newbie-proof either. Therefore, your comment makes no sense whatsoever.
...). Using the distribution's tool for software upgrades is, last time I checked, nearly as newbie-proof as possible for current distributions. At least each of them beats Windows' "Add/Remove software", which is a sorry excuse for a software manager, easily. I also find it more friendly than Microsoft's web-based update manager.
"Normal people" wait (and rightly so) for new packages coming from their distributor (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake,
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
No.
There are separate change logs for each kernel release in the kernel download directory, though.
From the Changelog
[PATCH] kthread primitive
From: Rusty Russell
These two patches provide the framework for stopping kernel threads to
allow hotplug CPU. This one just adds kthread.c and kthread.h, next
one uses it.
Most importantly, adds a Monty Python quote to the kernel.
Haven't had a chance to pull in the source. Anyone know what this is?
A 'service pack' would be something like upgrading from 2.6.3 to 2.6.4, which you can do trivially, it's a single patch. If you don't want to deal with patching, or are a few versions behind, you can even download a clean copy of the source and delete your old. Then you do 'make oldconfig' and say 'no' to the new drivers that have popped into the kernel, (unless, of course, you need them), and run make install. Or you just download a binary.
Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 is like upgrading from the Windows 2000 kernel to the Windows XP kernel, which you can't even do. WIth Linux, you can do it as long as you update a few important things, depending on how old your distro is. A lot of them support 2.6 even if they don't come with 2.6, so all you'll need is a new version of the module loading utilities, or possibly not even that. Alternately, you might need to upgrade half a dozen packages, which should be fairly easy if you know how to upgrade packages on your distro. There are lists of the version you need.
But, anyway, it's not the same as a service pack, it's an entirely new version of the kernel to go from 2.4 to 2.6, despite what you might infer from the version numbers. You're going to have to update a few things, but be glad it's not a microsoft OS, you'd have to do an installation of an entire operating system over your old one to go from 2000 to XP.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I don't even know of anyone running 2.4 anymore actually. I mean, why not upgrade?
I finally got around to compiling 2.6.3 last night; ran into some issues.
its much more responsive than 2.4 for desktop use
The desktop is definitely more responsive, but (at least for me) at the expense of everything else. MPlayer, xmms, and anything that's remotely timing-intensive is unusable (xmms actually skips while playing MP3s, and Mplayer prints the message "Your computer is TOO SLOW to play this file" when playing anything I've got. Note that everything works fine under 2.4.)
I went through the various mailing lists looking for suggestions, with no luck; every suggestion is OK (checked drive DMA, kernel settings, X nice level, etc.) - interestingly enough, one post I read said to try glxgears.. I did, and it runs better under 2.6 - constant frame rate, regardless of what else I'm doing, whereas in 2.4, even moving the mouse drops the frame rate.)
So it's back to 2.4 for me. I'll probably try 2.6.4, to see if the situation has improved, but for the mean time, I'll stick with 2.4.
2.6.2 => 2.6.3 completely broke ALSA on my system. I haven't seen any ALSA patches go in after 2.6.3. Anybody have info on that? Is there another big ALSA merge coming soon?
You should almost *never* need to upgrade your kernel from the one that comes with your current distribution, assuming you are using a reasonably modern distribution...
This is why new kernels are "bleeding edge" for people that want to play until the distributions release them officially. This kernel release has *nothing* to do with why people are put off from using Linux. In fact, since 1997, when I've started using Linux, I've NEVER once upgraded my kernel because the official "standard" kernels have always been sufficient. Generally, if you have a resonably modern distribution, it's included kernel is enough. Those people that say that "normal users can't recompile their kernels" are missing the point... You NEVER need to recompile your kernel, in the majority of circumstances. Simply upgrading your desktop with the most recent major revision of your favorite distribution is simply enough, and these days, that is almost always as easy as simply popping in a CD and rebooting. The only time that I ever considered upgrading my kernel was due to a hardware flaw in the KT600 chipsets that hardlocks AGP in 3.0 mode. Kernel 2.4.22 doesn't support AGP 3.0, but kernel 2.6 does. Fortunately, I was simply able to use ATI's internal GART driver instead of the kernel's driver. This does not mean that I'm incapable of recompiling my kernel (I've done it several times for testing)- I just see no need to do it when the current *standard* kernel works so well on my machine. I'll update my machine to 2.6 when it is an official Slackware kernel.
I understand that you meant well by your post, but you are seriously missing the boat here. It's the myths about Linux difficulty, from *non-Linux users*, that make Linux seem difficult.
So I went to the 2.6 series when they first came out. I was very happy with it at work, there was a noticable bump in speed...mainly in starting applications.
/dev entries. So no reading CD's, DVD, or writing CD's. I honestly don't do it that much anyway, so I didn't spend a lot of time trouble shooting it. Plus after a day at work trouble shooting problems I don't feel like doing it at home.
/dev and the /sys stuff is not mountable. Enabling USB debugging just shows me that things are messed up but does not really help much.
At home it was another story. Sure the speed increases I noticed at work were still there but there were some fairly large problems.
First, neither my DVD reader or CD burner were assigned
Second, I have not been able to mount my USB flash drive. It is an MP3 player which I changed CD's on weekly so I am not listening to the same stuff at the gym every day. Well after a few weeks of Outkast it was time for a change so I sat down to fix the problem. Two hours later, I just went back to the 2.4 kernel.
I have gotten as far as getting the kernel to assign sda to my usb device but it never creates an entry in
I also started to get annoyed with all the SCSI emulation needed to mount a USB storage device. I don't understand how Linus can hate SCSI emulation so much when it comes to burning CD's yet it is perfectly acceptable to use it to mount a USB disk. Seems a bit hypocritical, but then again...he did sort of invent Linux so I guess I can cut him some slack.
So all in all, I have been disappointed in the 2.6.x series of kernels and if they are the one's that are supposed to take the desktop market by storm then I think Linux on the desktop is in trouble. It is no wonder Redhat and SuSE are staying away from it for the most part right now. It is going to take both of them a lot of work to get everything working properly I would imagine.
Am I the only one who went back?
There is a difference between extension and patch (bugfix) in that extensions are entirely optional. If you don't need anything in Linux 2.x, then you are perfectly able to run Linux 1.x or even 0.x.
"But I can do that with Windows!"
Not really. You cannot (in general) run a Windows NT program on Windows 3.11, as Windows 3.x is a 16-bit OS, whereas NT, ME, XP, CE, 2000, 2003, etc are all 32-bit. 32-bit applications don't run well on 16-bit OS'. The 32-bit support for 3.x is OK, but far from perfect and is totally unmaintained.
"Early versions of Linux are unmaintained, too!"
Not entirely correct. Linux 2.2 and 2.4 are under active development, and people occasionally submit bugfixes for earlier kernels.
Innovation - what has XP got, really, in terms of innovation? The GUIs are just front-ends to functions that largely already existed. QoS was in Linux before Windows, and in FreeBSD before Linux. The same is true for IPSec and IGMPv3.
Filing systems - Reiserfs and Reiser4 are vastly superior to NTFS or FAT32. LustreFS wipes the floor with CIFS/SMB, and CODA is without parallel. Unfortunately, CODA is also without any real development work, these days, but that may change precicely because it's Open Source. If CIFS was abandoned by Microsoft, who could take it over?
Terminal Server offers very little that the "R" tools (rcp, rsh and rlogin) didn't provide 20 years ago. The "S" tools (scp and ssh) are slightly more flexible and a lot more secure.
I can weight certain classes of application on XP's scheduler, but that's it. Under Linux as-is, I can specify the exact weight of each application. I can even choose between different schedulers (standard, real-time, heirarchical, etc).
Do you have to tinker? No. These are all options. Virtually every distro can run out of the box, and remain running without any alteration, upgrade, patch, or even a reboot for years.
Linux isn't perfect. There is much that it needs to really rework. (The TCP stack has a lot of rats-nest coding, for example.) There are some GUI issues that need resolving (XFree, Berlin with an X layer, or either KGI or GGI with an X layer?), better drag-and-drop, shadow passwords with a wider range of hashing options, etc.
However, none of these are serious obstructions. They are things that need to be done, but they are not show-stoppers. A typical Windows user, who primarily wants Office, can switch to Open Office or KOffice, MySQL and a decent MySQL interface, and either Gnome or KDE.
Where is tinkering necessary or even desirable for the average user???
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Its very obvious that you should be waiting for your particular distro to put out a pre-tested version that has 2.6 in it. So you had problems with CD burning and your USB device. Stuff happens. Many others have moved to 2.6 and have all of their devices working and are enjoying a nice boost in speed.
"if they are the one's that are supposed to take the desktop market by storm then I think Linux on the desktop is in trouble"
I'm sorry but your particular experience doesn't mean what you think it does. Just because you had issues isn't the litmus test for Linux desktop use.
"It is no wonder Redhat and SuSE are staying away from it"
They aren't "staying away from it", they are currently testing it and will have distros with 2.6 out this year.
I know how it can be annoying when things don't work, but in this case regardless of your linux experience it very much sounds like you should stick with what works for now and wait until your distro vendor or community puts out a fully tested 2.6 release.
...why kernels are still not offered up via torrents yet?
Seems like it would help a lot.
Right now, I can't even connect to a use mirror. Grrr.
Depends on your hardware. If you're using SMP, it will help; the scheduler is a bit better. Also has better support for the P4/Xeon's Hyperthreading. Overall lower latency operation as well. udev is a nice upgrade from devfs. No need to use proprietary sound or ethernet drivers on an nForce platform. If you're dealing with LOTS of traffic, it will perform better under stress.
What hardware do you have?
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
That is not normally enough to get a 2.6.x kernel working correctly with the rest of the system.
Debian Distros Only!
First edit your apt sources file so you are upgrading to unstable. (Insert Windows Joke Here!) (I don't know offhand if any other Debian branch has the right stuff for Linux Kernle 2.6.x)
apt-get update && apt-get install module-init-tools && apt-get upgrade
apt-get upgrade may not upgrade module-init-tools for some reason. You might also want to run "apt-get install udev" if you have the hotplug stuff built into your kernel. Other things may need to be done for your system. This was enough for mine.
The debian command dselect may do a better job of Upgrading your debian system as far as conflict resolution is concerned, but I really don't like the user interface to it. If you want to know more about debian packages check out http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages.
A complete Debian 2.4.x to 2.6.x upgrade guide would be nice. Anyone know of one?
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
I'm sure the Kernel people were serious about USB and IEEE1394 from the start. The problem is that they can get things to run perfectly on their own machines and other people will still have problems. How do you check for problems on hardware you don't have access to? I guess all they can do is releace a stable kernel and wait for the bug reports to come in.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
Even Kernel 2.4.6 still locks up frequently on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard unless I specify the options "noapic nolapic" at boot time. Then the system runs flawlessly (even with ACPI-support).
I read somewhere that the problem currently lies in the BIOS, rather than in the kernel, and that some vendors have already released proper BIOS updates that add a "C1 disconnect" option, which supposedly does the trick.
Unfortunately, Asus has released no such update as of yet.
Does anyone here (perhaps one of the kernel developers involved) have any more details on this?
Can this problem eventually be solved in the kernel, even without any BIOS updates?
After all, as far as I understood it, the BIOS pretty much takes a back seat as soon as the kernel is running, right?
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
Looking through the 2.6.4 changelog, it looks like there were problems with 2.6.3's e100 driver (which I have.) As my machine uses the network heavily (I've got about a dozen NFS mounts) this could be the reason that I was experiencing problems.
Like Debian GNU/Linux 'apt-get upgrade'? Any good modern Linux distribution does include a smooth OS update path. But upgrading from kernel 2.4.x to kernel 2.6.x is not something most people are going to want to do. It is not the equivilent of a "service pack." It is much more akin to an OS upgrade. Few expect that to go without a hitch... even on Windows.
It's things like this that puts "normal" people and companies off using Linux on the desktop. To linux guys and developers it's not a big deal, but imagine if you were some granny somewhere - it'd scare the pants off you and if something went wrong, nigh-on impossible to fix.
So when Windows breaks, Granny is capable of fixing it? Give me a break. She's lucky if she is able to format her harddrive and resinstall without a hitch.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Are you sure about the X nice level? Your symptoms sound exactly like what happened to me when I ran 2.6 for the first time, and my problem was the X nice level.
For 2.6, you want X to run at nice 0. Many Linux distros set X to nice -10 for kernel 2.4 and older, but for 2.6 that gums up the works.
Debian users can fix it like so:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common
Then, when it asks you what X nice level you want, set it to zero.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
They're a hell of a lot younger than the Windows GUI, but IMO, they're at Windows 98/ME level of user friendliness and gaining quickly on XP and Mac OS X.
I dont think so. I have a dual-boot laptop running XP-pro and linux with KDE3.2. IMHO, KDE 3.2 is way better than XP-pro. KDE has long overtaken windows as far as user friendliness is concerned.