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Linux Kernel 2.6.11 Released
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."
What distro do you use? It works for me using Gentoo, but I also use the unstable nvidia drivers (because I couldn't get the "stable" ones to work months back).
Which reminds me, when is Linus going to leave the 2.6x tree alone so we don't have to worry about so much broken shit all the time? Imagine if Windows changed it's kernel a couple times a year and broke the video drivers each time. People would bitch endlessly, but I guess as Linux users, we just have to put up with it.
You can use Infiniband as a LAN, for storage, or maybe for within a box. You could say that Infiniband starts where Hypertransport leaves off.
For the short-haul usage, Infiniband is kind of big in terms of chip real estate. You can't cram it into a corner of a little FPGA like you can with RapidIO. For the long-haul usage, 1 gig or 10 gig Ethernet might be a better choice.
Note that Intel, originally the primary sponsor behind Infiniband, no longer gives a damn. But hey, if you have money to burn...
Since reiser4 is in beta, I doubt it will be in the mainstream kernel particularly soon. It's going to be tough to use experimental filesystems without using experimental patches. I don't think anyone sane is storing important data on reiser4 partitions without doing extensive backups.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
There doesn't appear to be a full changelog yet, but I have been following the release candidates, and it appears that Parallel ATA (AKA "Ultra ATA") Hard disk support is still not in the kernel.
This is frustrating. I had purchased an Ultra ATA Hard disk drive (which came bundled with a Serial/Parallel ATA controller), and I had it working fine under SUSE Linux 9.0. What I didn't realize at the time was, Promise made proprietary drivers for SuSE Linux, and no other distro.
I have wanted to switch over to Fedora Linux for some time now, but although it is able to detect my SATA card and load drivers for it just fine, It does not recognise the PATA connector, and does not locate my hard drive, as a result.
There does appear to be a patch available for this, but it is still officially "in development", and I am concerned that it will not make it into the mainstream kernel in time now for Fedora Core 4 to be able to recognize my hard drive, and install to it.
This is so frustrating. What is the holdup? PATA support appears to have been discussed for almost a year now and it is still not in the kernel. There appear to be a lot of Ultra ATA hard disks on the market; I can't be the only one encountering the frustration of not being able to install a modern version of Linux due to lack of driver support.
anyone know if the X series of thinkpad IBM laptops will suspend properly now? mine doesn't return from sleep, and won't even begin to suspend to disk properly. (thinkpad x30)
then again, X goofs up for me with the bios 'hybernation' feature too. though I think that's independent, as it still "works" - just with screen garbage on resume.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Which reminds me, when is Linus going to leave the 2.6x tree alone so we don't have to worry about so much broken shit all the time? Imagine if Windows changed it's kernel a couple times a year and broke the video drivers each time. People would bitch endlessly, but I guess as Linux users, we just have to put up with it.
This is somewhat a Good Thing, and somewhat a Bad Thing. The latter is self explained, but the Good Thing about it is that the kernel developers are free to make not only good code, but great code.
How many people bitch about Windows legacy crap? Do you think the developers over at MS wants to support all that old mess? Of course they don't, remember the win2k leak; in the code you could see all sorts of comments relating to hacks (that exact word) to prevent breaking legacy software.
It creates a mess doing that, and one of the beautiful things about free software is that developers are free to persue the best solution to any given problem or task, even if it means rewriting mayor parts of the software (in this case the kernel). In Windows they can't do that, so they're stuck with the same mistakes they made many years ago. (Talk about solid code, eh?)
In SP2 it looks like they finally gave up and decided they *had* to break something to close some huge security gaps (or whatever they were fixing). Free software (including the Linux kernel) doesn't have this disadvantage at all. Securityfixes seldomly break compatabilty, but new features sometimes do. In general, securityfixes are backported all the time, so you can safely use some old free software if a newer version breaks some compatability (given the old one is maintained ofcourse).
But if you don't need the old compatability, the road to great code and great features are ahead. The choice is yours, choose whatever suits your needs. This is a Good Thing, and a good reason to use Free software.
Life is Reality
It's not trade secrets that they're trying to protect - they're using licensed technology in the 3D accelerated drivers, so they can't open-source them. I think I read that in an interview with a nVidia engineer.
C-x C-s C-x k
In case you didn't understand: the OP is asking about S3 (suspend to ram) not S4 (software suspend).
VIA's support for Linux on EPIA boards is crap and I can't compile accelerated framebuffer for CLE266 and vesafb doesn't work for EPIA.
X11 driver works, but I need terminal emulation on framebuffer and also directFB should be quite a bit faster than X11.
VIA is offering source, but that source doesn't compile on 2.6.10 or 2.6.11.
It seems that there were quite some changes in fbdev in that time and I can't make that source to work with 2.6.11.
Aye, I've been perusing the LKML archives for a few days (since the system has only been up and running for a coupla weeks, and the first week was windows configuration) and I'm slowly compiling data about it and trying a few random patches - it's very much a known issue and goes all the way back to 2.5. If I can't fix it within a week I may well stump up the moolah (and I've got more USB->PS/2 adapters than you can shake a stick at), although getting it to someone outside the UK will be tricky.
:) I could probably solve it all by doing away with the adapters, but it makes dual booting a pain (esp. as I find USB very unresponsive in windows under heavy load).
All in all it's still a very small blemish on what is otherwise the most crap-reistant system I've ever used
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