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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.
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.
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