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Linux Kernel 2.6.11 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

Xpilot writes "Linus Torvalds has just announced the availability of the newest Linux kernel release, 2.6.11. The newest addition to Linux that's stirring up some excitement is the inclusion of Infiniband support. You can get it from the usual mirrors at http://kernel.org/mirrors."

11 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. infiniband? by Quasar1999 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    InfiniBand, which is derived from its underlying concept of "infinite bandwidth,"...

    Umm... I don't know about you... but that description didn't help me much... infinite bandwidth? What is this? How is this? How does linux get past physical hardware limitations that other os's can't?

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    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
    1. Re:infiniband? by micromoog · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So what is it in non-marketing terms?

    2. Re:infiniband? by pomakis · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I think infinite bandwidth is more thatn a little misleading! but to take an excerpt from their marketing blurb "The first version of the specification for the technology was completed in October 2000 and the InfiniBand Trade Association is well on its way to establishing a new signaling rate specification beyond 100Gb/s"

      100Gb/s? Then they're almost there! I'm sure infinity isn't much bigger than that.

  2. ACPI suspend? by idlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does ACPI suspend work on more laptops? Inability to suspend is a major problem with Linux on laptops right now, as there are more and more ACPI-only laptops. The situation is considerably worse compared to APM, in my experience.

    1. Re:ACPI suspend? by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why would I have to unplug USB devices if I want to just disable the software support?

    2. Re:ACPI suspend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It should. The problem with ACPI is that many laptops are not true ACPI but merely work as ACPI with the Windows drivers. That means the Linux drivers have to emulate all the bugs and misfeatures in the Windows drivers to fully support all laptops. That reverse engineering process which must be done whenever a new non-working laptop is found takes time.

  3. Re:Article text by strider44 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ross Schibler, CTO of InfiniBand vendor Topspin Communications, told internetnews.com. . . . "Now that the technology has matured to such a point that Linus has accepted it into the kernel, the way is paved for greater distribution of the code and accelerated deployment of the technology," Schibler said.

    That makes for an interesting comment, previously people have been ignoring linux and gunning for windows.

  4. Re:someone tell nvidia! by agurkan · · Score: 2, Insightful
    • It is very rare that you have to upgrade the kernel, check if you need to, before upgrading.
    • Nvidia drivers are kernel modules, so you need to run their installation program every time you upgrade the kernel, since hookups in the kernel may change and a module compiled for a given version of kernel may not work flawlessly with another version. This does not mean upgrade breaks video drivers, if you had to rewrite the drivers, then I would call it breaking.
    • You are barking at the wrong tree. If Nvidia release the source for their drivers, then it could be included in the kernel tree and you would not need to upgrade drivers seperately. That is not going to happen in foreseeable future. I do not think it is fair to blame Linus for this.
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    ato
  5. Re:Still no PATA Support? by bnavarro · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is for Promise Serial ATA controllers (PCI card, not built into the motherboard). Specifically, the Promise FasTrak TX2Plus (rebranded as a Maxtor SATA/150)

    You got it to work? With which vendor's card?? At this point, I am so frustrated, I'm willing to throw money at the solution and buy a new Serial/Parallel ATA controller, if it is affordable enough ($20-30). My understanding, however, was that libata itself (not just the individual drivers, like sata_promise) had no support yet for the PATA connector on any SATA adapter.

  6. Re:SCSI Permissions by shredwheat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are more to the issues than device permissions. The main part of it is that cdrecord needs to lock some of its buffers into non-swappable memory. This is a priveledged operation in an unpatched kernel.

    I believe the patches allow trusted(?) applications to lock small amounts of this memory without requiring root.

    Something like that, I follow along enough to know what's going on, but don't understand everything to it.

  7. Re:someone tell nvidia! by Fluffy+the+Cat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The kernel part of the driver has about 250K of source code (about half of which is header files) and 3.5 megabytes of binary. None of the userspace code is open. How is that "mostly open source"?