Linux Kernel 2.6.6 Released

maradong writes "The new Linux Kernel 2.6.6 has been released just 2 hours ago. The Patch from version 2.6.5 to 2.6.6, which can be downloaded on kernel.org measures 2.4MiB and the Changelog can be found at the known place."

Comments

Re:Uh oh, here come the Linux apologists

[cozziewozzie]

No,

Linux updates = good
Microsoft updates = good

Whatever keeps those crappy windows worms at bay is great. The problem with windows updates is:

1) They don't happen often enough
2) They break things
3) They change license while you're not looking

If you're still having problems, I can break it down into even simpler terms.

Right....

[Theatetus]

Yeah... because Win2k SP2 didn't break any drivers at all...

If I lived in this strange world that a lot of slashdotters do where hardware apparently works easily and reliably with Windows, I would have never switched to Linux. But, in my world, Windows never loads the right drivers, and loses or breaks the drivers once you install them.

Re:Mebibytes (MiB) ?

[Kevin Burtch]

I'm still shocked that Mibibabyboobybytes has been accepted as a "standard!"

How many thousands of titles (possibly billions of books) have been written based on the FACT that Megabytes and Kilobytes, et al, have all been BASE-2 from the initial concept?

The ONLY people in the entire industry who considers MB/KB/et al to be in base-10 are the hard drive manufacturers, and that's just so they can claim their 230GB drives are 250GB!

You don't go out and buy a 536.89MB stick of RAM, you buy a 512MB stick!
Your video card doesn't have 134.22MB of video RAM, it has 128MB!

I don't know why, I should be used to it by now, but the "standards bodies" still blow my mind with their utter stupidity.

Re:Mebibytes (MiB) ?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Not really. M, k, G, B, etc are the universally accepted SI prefixes for 10^6, 10^3, ...., but 'byte' never was (and probably never will be) an official SI unit. Can you give any examples of technical fields where MB == 10^6 bytes is a standard notation? The only example I can think of is hard drive marketers on crack, which doesn't count as a technical field.

If you wanted an SI unit of information, it would be more sensible to use 10 bits as the basic unit (or even one bit), rather than a byte (which is actually not even a fixed unit, but is usually read as 'octet'). Attempting to graft MB = 10^6 bytes is at least as arbitary (even more so, IMHO) than defining MB = 2^20 bytes.

Re:Kernel Acceleration

[Ann Elk]

3/5 through the lifespan of the 2.6 kernel? WTF?? The kernel after 2.6.9 will be 2.6.10, not 2.7.0. For example, the current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.26...

2.6.0 is not as reliable as 2.4.26 because the latter has had 26 updates to get things "right". This is just the way things work in kernel development.

The 2.6 series has broken a few things, largely because:

• There were a lot of major, architectural changes between 2.4 and 2.6. It probably should have been called 3.0.
• A few kernel features that have been marked as "deprecated" in previous kernels have now been officially removed. This should have surprised no one. The kernel team is neither arbitrary nor capricious (for the most part :-).
• The kernel is, obviously, a single point of failure. If a new kernel is deployed on 1,000,000 machines and only 0.1% have problems, that's still 1,000 people complaining on the mailing lists.

Would I run 2.6 on a mission-critical highly-buzzword-enabled enterprise server? Not yet. Do I run it on my desktop? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Where are the English release notes?

[gosand]

Why, oh why, can't there be an official release of the kernel that describes the changes in plain language instead of coder-speak? Look, I know what kind of people it takes to hack the kernel - brilliant people. They think like coders. But when new versions of the kernel are released, why can't there be a summary of what is new/changed? In simple terms.

Not everyone who uses Linux is a kernel hacker, especially nowadays. And yes, there are sites out there that give rundowns of what has changed. But wouldn't it be nice to have an *official* release statement that outlines the changes made? It seems logical to me that the people managing the changes would be able to articulate this the best. I think it would go a long way in making Linux seem a bit more mature.

Re:Mebibytes (MiB) ?

[vrt3]

I don't think computer science needs those foolish names and unit changes to ensure complexity in the units. It is not a commercial game.

Computer science started by changing the names (the meaning of the names, actually). In order to reduce complexity, we need to undo that change.

KISS is the rule.

Exactly.
What is the simplest:

- k equals 1000, Ki equals 1024

or

- k equals 1000 in all sciences, except in computer science where it means 1024, most of the time. If followed by 'B' it mostly means 1024, when followed by 'b' it means 1024 when talking about memory sizes and 1000 when talking about transmission speeds. It all depends on the context.

Re:Mebibytes (MiB) ?

[Phs2501]

Not all things involving computers and bits have been measured in binary multiples.

Network speeds have always been done in decimal. 10base{5,2,T} = 10 Mb = 10,000,000 bits per second. And Ethernet (in its 10base5 Thicknet variant) is old, dating from 1972. It's not just greedy hard disk manyfacturers.

I don't have a problem with disambiguating them. I just wish the names weren't as stupid. (MiB is okay, but mebibyte?!)