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What to Expect from Linux 2.6.12

Posted by timothy on from the free-candy-for-all-users dept.

apt-get writes "Saw this Linuxworld report from the annual Australian Linux conference, Linux.conf.au, in Canberra last week. The article outlines some of the new features we can expect for the 2.6.12 kernel release, including: support for trusted computing, and security enhanced Linux. The kernel developers are also working on improving the 'feel' of the Linux desktop with inotify for file managers and events notification so hardware 'just works'. Unfortunately no release date other than 'sometime soon' is given."

32 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Trusted Computing by khujifig · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is the inclusion of trusted computing a good thing here? Many people in the /. crowd didn't seem to like the idea of it's inclusion in Windows...

    Was its inclusion in the kernel by choice?

    1. Re:Trusted Computing by madaxe42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      do something good with it (make computers safer)

      Call me silly, but how is 'making computers safer' a good thing? I don't *need* protecting from the big bad wide world, there are enough intrusions into my life to make it 'safer' as it is - each and almost every one of them pisses me off.

    2. Re:Trusted Computing by paulpach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes. Trusted computing is a very good thing. This is some of the things you can expect:

      When you compile or install a software, you can sign it. The computer will not execute anything that is not signed. This stops many viruses and trojan horses, so you can trust that you authorized everything the computer executes. It is just a security layer just like the no execution bit.

      The important thing here is that the user is in full control of the system. The user gets to sign the packages or he can choose to use a distro that signs them for him. He chooses what the computer runs and what not. There is no third party that limits what the user can/cannot execute.

      Besides signing software, TCPA (the chip that is going to be supported by the kernel) does encryption on hardware. So you can have hardware accelerated encryption/decryption, and your CPU will be free to do other things. This is not much different from hardware accelerated 2d & 3d graphics. Again, this is a very good thing.

      Many people opose trusted computer because they confuse this with DRM (Digital rights management). DRM is technology that limits the right to open media. Trusted computer does not limit your rights at all. The confusion arises from the fact that microsoft plans to use TCPA (Trusted computer) to implement DRM.

      TCPA support will totally be optional. You can enable/disable it when compiling the kernel. You normally want it enabled to take advantage of hw accelerated encryption, but if you are still paranoid (read misinformed) and think there is some evil corporation that is going to use TCPA to limit your rights, you can just turn it off.

      There is a nice article from ibm that clarifies the issue

    3. Re:Trusted Computing by finkployd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Trusted computing as a whole is a good thing, with one componant that is a very bad thing: Remote attestation. This will allow remote systems to know exactly what software you are using to connect to them (cryptographically, so no spoofing it unless you are really good at factoring large primes :)

      The nightmare scenerio is far beyond the typical DRM use case that most slashdotters fret about. Imagine if Microsoft wanted to ensure that only "trusted" client can connect to windows file sharing services, ie lock out Samba. Or make it so that only IE can connect to IIS webservers.

      Sure they may not, but they are building the technology to allow this to happen and if ever they fall upon hard times, they will be legally obligated to their shareholders to take any advantages they can to ensure profits.

    4. Re:Trusted Computing by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Trusted computing as a whole is a good thing, with one componant that is a very bad thing: Remote attestation.

      Nuclear bombs are on a whole good things, with one componant that is a very bad thing: widespread death.

      You can't admit that the single motivating factor of a system is bad, but then say that the afterthoughts and bonus utilities somehow make up for it. And if you don't believe remote attestation was the driving factor to create Trusted Computing, just look at its history of sponsors.

    5. Re:Trusted Computing by Alsee · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Who modded this up? It is wrong on almost every point.

      When you compile or install a software, you can sign it. The computer will not execute anything that is not signed.

      Which has absolutely nothing to do with Trusted Computing.

      If you want to do that you can do it right now with a trivial change to the EXE loader code. Hell, you can do it on a Win98 machine without a patch - all you need to do is redirect EXE and similar filetype association to point you your own little stub code to do that check. You can obviously do it with a trivial patch to Linux or DOS or any system.

      Trusted Computing has nothing to do with signing files. In Trusted Computing any code's hash *is* it's "signature" and controlls what data it may decrypt. It is that hash which is reported over the internet. No need for any signature from anyone. You can certainly add signatures for various purposes on top of the Trust system, but it really has nothing to do with Trusted Computing itself.

      The important thing here is that the user is in full control of the system.

      Sure - in the sense that if he does not "voluntarily" turn over total control to the Trust system and to other people then it is impossible to install and run the new Trusted software and impossible to read or use any Trusted files and it will be impossible to view any Trusted website, and potentially in about 5-8 years he may be denied any internet access. The Trusted Computing Group has announced a project for routers that would deny an internet connection to any computer that is not locked down in Trusted Compliant mode. In fact at the Washington DC Global Tech Summit the president's Cyber Cecurity Advisor called on ISPs to plan on making exactly this sort of system a mandatory part of their Terms of Service to get internet access. I can dig up a link to this speech if you don't beleive me.

      So short term refusal to submit to Trusted Computing and give up control of your computer just means you can't use a few new peices of software and you won't be able to buy the RIAA and MPAA's new DRM download sales. However the problem gets worse over a couple of years. Refusal to submit means you get locked out of more and more software and more and more files and more and more websites. Eventually you may be be effectively banned from the internet unless you 'voluntarily' activate the Trust chip.

      But yes, you are always 'free' to leave the Trust system off. You are 'free' to crawl into a hole in the ground and use nothing new and connect to no one. You are 'free' to to choose to get locked in a prison cell instead of giving up control of your computer.

      So you can have hardware accelerated encryption/decryption

      Lie.

      To be fair I assume *you* are not lying, merely that you are honestly echoing a lie that has been told to you.

      Trust chips cheap low horsepower silicon. Running crypo on them is SLOWER than on even the lowest of ordinary low end CPUs. In fact a single basic crypto operations may take a full second or more to run on these very low capability Trust chips.

      If you want crypto accelleration, great, get a standard hardware crypto accellerator. They've been around forever and they have absolutely nothing to do with Trusted Comptuing.

      Many people opose trusted computer because they confuse this with DRM

      You could get EVERY claimed benefit to the owner of Trusted Computing with identical hardware where the owner is given a printed copy of his master key. The fundamental design requirement of Trusted Computing is that they owner is forbidden to know his master key and the specification requires that the chip must self-destruct and destroy your data if you attempt to get at your master key.

      The *ONLY* purpose of forbidding the owner to know his own key is to enable DRM enforcment and DRM-type functionality, to restrict the owner. Being forbidden to know your own key has the sole effect of restricting what you c

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  2. Those are pretty big changes by Trigun · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Are they backporting from the 2.7 tree? I know that SE linux has been around for a while, but why the sudden interest by the kernel maintainers?

    1. Re:Those are pretty big changes by Zemplar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Are they backporting from the 2.7 tree? I know that SE linux has been around for a while, but why the sudden interest by the kernel maintainers?"

      Perhaps to further strengthen Linux as a viable alternative to Solaris 10, which now includes most of what used to be "Trused Solaris", their uber-secure version. Linux is great, but I still think anyone here would agree that Solars, for the moment, is still more secure than Linux at present.

  3. What about a better solution for device drivers by UnderAttack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think these changes are nice. But what Linux needs is a rethinking of the way device drivers are integrated. Bundling them all with the kernel will just no longer work (did you ever try to configure a kernel these days?). What I am looking for is a way to be able to use the same driver (aka 'module') in different kernels without having to recompile all over again, and the ability to compile a driver without having the complete kernel source installed.

    --
    ---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
    1. Re:What about a better solution for device drivers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting


      I've been a avid user of Linux for a long time.

      The days of compiling a custom kernel is over, except for people who like playing with the latest features or gentoo users.

      Not because it's impractical, just because there is no point.

      If you have a high-quality distro (Suse, Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora etc) then the distro people are quicker to apply kernel patches to fix security issues, test them for bugs, and release updated kernels then what you can normally get thru kernel.org.

      The performance advantage of running a custom kernel to cut down on excess drivers is pretty much null and void if you have more then 16 megs of RAM.

      Stability with distro versions of kernels are generally very good because they are tested in your operating enviroment before they are given to you.

      So unless you run into oddball issues (such as the very latest hardware) or requirements recompiling a kernel is a non-issue, even with very experianced and demanding linux users.

    2. Re:What about a better solution for device drivers by pkphilip · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think it will be useful to have a system whereby drivers can be loaded without requiring the entire kernel to be compiled.

      Granted most distributions do ship with as many of the drivers as possible, but I have found myself in a spot a few times when the Linux kernel did not have the drivers for something fairly critical which was needed during installation - for instance, I am trying to install linux onto my AMD64 machine but none of the linux kernels (including 2.6.11) support the southbridge chipset on my motherboard.. and so Linux cannot detect the harddisk on my computer...which means I cannot install Linux on the machine now.

      I installed XP on the same machine without a problem - just popped in the device driver CD and the harddisk was immediately recognized.

      It will be great to have that facility on Linux as well - changed your graphics card? just pop in the driver CD and install the driver and you are ready to go..

    3. Re:What about a better solution for device drivers by cortana · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Linus has explained why a HAL is a stupid idea several times.

      The way Linux driver development works is: release your driver under the GPL. Show that you are capable of maintaining it. Once it works well enough, get it merged into the Kernel. Continue to maintain it.

      If you don't like it, fork it, and leave the developers with a development model that actually works.

      If Linux had a HAL, we would have the Windows situation: hundreds of drivers that were written, worked for a while, and then were dumped as soon as the company that produced them decided they could make more money by forcing us to upgrade to their next product.

      I would like to leave such cargo-culting of drivers for Windows chumps. This way we get fewer drivers, but the ones that are written are of much higher quality--and are actually maintained, too.

  4. Boring missing features... by mi · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Can Linux, please, implement the kqueue (PDF) interface, please?

    Also, how about growing files with mmap? Currently one can not mmap() beyond the end of the file on Linux...

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:Boring missing features... by Jamie+Lokier · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For file descriptor events, Linux has a better implementation than kqueue, called epoll. It's better because it works with all types of file descriptor (thanks to using the same kernel functions as poll/select internally), not just the subset documented in the kqueue man page. Which means you can use epoll in a generic replacement for select/poll, which you can't quite do with kqueue.

      kqueue can do other things, including aio which is useful, and it is marginally more efficient due to fewer system calls for registration, but the documented file descriptor limitations are a weak point so it should not be copied exactly the same into Linux. It is possible to add the other things that are useful from kqueue to epoll, but nobody has done so. Perhaps there isn't much demand for it.

      mmap: you can grow files while using mmap on them. That's what ftruncate and mremap are for. Oh, did you want to grow files automatically to the nearest rounded-up page when you write to a page beyond the current size? That's not as useful as it sounds, because typically you must still check against a bound, otherwise you'll write beyond the end of the mapping's virtual address. Given that you must have that check, you can easily check against a smaller bound instead and call ftruncate when you're about to exceed it, plus mremap to arbitrarily extend the mapping, which is better than limiting yourself to a fixed maximum size with mmap in advance.

      And if you don't want to allocate disk blocks: ftruncate creates a sparse file, the disk blocks are allocated on demand when you write to individual mapped memory pages.

      Enjoy,
      -- Jamie

  5. Drivers, drivers, drivers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was just reading the latest Kernel Traffic and it hit me how much of a flux the driver model seems to be in. Constantly.

    Microsoft Windows seems to have had a stable driver interface since at least Win2K (probably NT4 too). The weird thing is that eschewing binary compatibility, like Linus likes to do, really ought to make it easier to stabilize a model? I mean, they have all the upsides with none of the downsides.

    I really don't care personally -- I don't write drivers -- but isn't it a bit odd that the system is constantly rewritten (or at least majorly tweaked)? New month -- New driver model. New locking mechanism. New everything. What's not new is broken hardware sleep/resume!

    Drivers aren't sexy, and it seems a lot of time is spent just spinning in place (no phun intended)

  6. Essential links.... by ssj_195 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... for people wishing to know more about the possible ramifications of Trusted ("Treacherous"...?) Computing:

    Ross Anderson's Critique

    IBM's Rebuttal

    Trusted Gentoo

    IBM's rebuttal does a decent job of allaying some of the fears - for example, it states that it will not prevent you from running any OS & programs you wish to on your own computer (which, for the record, I believe - witness the Trusted Gentoo project and e.g. this this link). They state that their approach to Trusted Computing is not particularly well-suited to DRM, and on the face of it, I agree - there seems to be little attempt at restricting the user of a computer with the TPM from doing what they want. However, in my opinion, as a base for an utterly crippling DRM regime, distributors simply could not ask for a better setup, as I'll argue a little later.

    So to re-cap, it seems that if you are running Trusted hardware, there are no restrictions on what you can do on your computer in isolation; you can install Linux, run any number of Open Source apps, etc. But the keyword here is in isolation, and it is here that the dangers of Trusted Computing are revealed. For you see, Trusted Computing enables the usage of remote attestation wherein a server may request a hash of all software currently running on your computer. This hash is, for all intents and purposes, unforgeable, and if you disable your TPM (as IBM stress that you can, and again for the record, I see no reason to disbelieve them), no hash will be sent. The server may then assess this hash of software (or note that no hash has been provided, in which case it may well treat your computer as Untrusted) and decide, based on what software you are running, to simply not serve you with whatever material you requested - for example, it may decide that it will not deliver MP3's to your computer unless it knows for a fact that the receiving application is one that is known to encrypt the content as soon as it is received (so that e.g. it simply cannot be viewed while not running in Trusted mode) and which will take every step to ensure that once received, the unencrypted content never leaves your machine (e.g. by being written to CD, e-mailed , etc.). As you can imagine, the above scenario is not at all far-fetched as the **AA/ other media distributors are positively *creaming* themselves at the thought of stamping out casual file-sharing or even making backups for your own use in some of your other devices.

    So we are left with the situation where someone who does not use Trusted hardware (and is thus unable to respond to attestation requests) or those who do run Trusted hardware but whose software fingerprint is not deemed acceptable by the server will simply not be granted access to certain material, rendering such people at a big disadvantage. And it's no good buying hardware free from Trust chips from China or such places on the "black market"; this offers no advantage at all as Trusted hardware, as mentioned, does not stop you using your computer the way you want in isolation; the problem only occurs when you try to interact with other computers.

    So far, this sounds unpleasant but not too bad (although I would urge you to read Anderson's linked essay for some more imaginative and serious abuses), but if we allow ourselves to follow the slippery-slope, we end up at the state where ISPs will not allow your computer to access the internet at all (for surfing, e-mailing, anything) unless you are running Trusted hardware and software. Obviously, the social, political and legal barriers to this occurence are non-trivial, but we've all seen ridiculous Acts qu

    1. Re:Essential links.... by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm buggered if I can find an answer to this, but if anyone is using Konqueror 3.4 with famd,

      No, I doubt anybody is using famd. At least, someone who uses removable media (like cdroms) can't very well run it, because it will keep directories open and prevent umounting.

      Maybe once linux 2.6.12 brings out the new inotify things, famd will become tolerable to run continually, and it'll start getting bugfixes in.

      PS. I am only 30% joking.

    2. Re:Essential links.... by swillden · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The offered advantages are, in my opinion, fairly weak - you can eliminate online cheating in multi-player games, and media companies are more likely to allow downloads of materials (DRM'd up the wazoo, of course).

      The real advantages appear primarily in corporate environments. Using hashes plus remote attestation to report precisely what version of what OS you're running, in an unforgeable way, is theoretically possible, but, IMO, impractical. It also requires a "secure" BIOS that cannot be flashed with arbitrary code, but only with code that is signed by the board manufacturer. That's a bigger concern, IMO, because it is a technology that has no benefits to the owner of the machine.

      For a corporate environment, however, the usage would be to ensure that the software hasn't *changed*. After IT images a machine, the hash would be stored and then the machine could be queried for a remote attestation that the current hash matches the original value. If not, the machine may not be allowed on the network, etc.

      An even more important usage is strong file/disk encryption, e-mail signing and VPN access. The TPM can store keys that are "bound" to a particular system configuration. If you boot the machine with different software or (if you configure it this way) with a different BIOS configuration, then the keys will no longer be accessible. So, for example, you could configure a laptop that carries sensitive information to encrypt the disk with a key that is bound to a well-secured system config. If the laptop is lost or stolen, the attacker won't be able to get the data through the normal OS (because it's well-secured and he doesn't have authentication credentials to get in) and if he boots the machine off of a live CD or some such, the decryption keys will not be available.

      Similarly, a key used to authenticate to a VPN can be bound in the TPM. That way, IT doesn't have to worry about infected/hacked machines coming in through the firewall.

      There are other examples.

      This is useful technology, and it may even be useful to home users. It's certainly useful to people who have a need to care about real security.

      Unfortunately, it may also enable strong DRM. That's just one application of the technology. It's an application we need to fight, of course, but the oft-heard refrain here on slashdot "Attack the use, not the tool" is applicable, IMO.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  7. Latency and preempt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apparently, accourding to some posts on the Linux Audio User list the latency in native 2.6.12 is as good as the patched 2.4 for audio use.
    This is great news for all of us using Linux for audio. It's also a pretty mean feat, as the 2.4 low latency patches were a little bit brute force compared to the 'correct' method in 2.6 of fixing all the problem spin lock areas in the kernel, a much harder task.
    Now all we need is to get the RT LSM module into the main kernel. (It allows non root uses real time scheduling without messing about, it's not vital for perfomance but nice for usability.)

    I have not tried 2.6.12 myself yet, but have got great results with unpatched 2.6.11 kernels.

  8. Re:And then... by NotThatKindOfDoctor · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What I meant by the above post is...I appreciate the rapid development, but the kernel has of late become a moving target. Doesn't anyone else out there wish the releases would slow down? I would like infrequent releases of a stable kernel rather than rapid bugfixes.

  9. Re:Maybe I'm missing something.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Xen would be able to run Windows perfectly well in it's current state, and it did at one point, but the problem is legal and licensing restrictions.

    Either some of the software that is used, or some of the drivers that are used, are under a restrictive license (probably from MS) so that while it's technically possible, it is legally impossible.

    Isn't closed source a bitch?

    With the newer CPUS they have built in abstractions into the hardware that would possibly allow things like Xen to 'operate closer to bare metal' and thus avoid whatever software has the legal restrictions.

  10. Re:What a waste of effort... by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is interesting is that "Trusted" used to be a label applied to systems like Trusted Solaris that implemented mandatory access controls (similar to what SELinux does for Linux). Which version of Trusted computing are they talking about? Mandatory access controls or the DRM nonsense?

  11. Boycott Trusted Computing by wikinerd · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I do not agree with Trusted Computing. Recently I was offered to buy a brand new IBM sub-notebook at a very low price and I refused because it supported Trusted Computing. If 2.6.12 supports Trusted Computing I will never upgrade to it. I boycott it. There are more evil uses of Trusted Computing than good uses, so I see no reason why I should empower the corporations to dictate what software I should run on my computer.

  12. Re:Just use Solaris by omega9 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How are any of these feature `revolutionary' or any sort of significant milestone? Maybe it is in the Linux world..
    SELinux, please. Solaris has had..
    Reiser 4!? C'mon! Solaris 10 will have..
    Xen you say? Eh, not to burst your bubbles but Solaris 10 now features...

    Isn't that the exact point? This is noteworthy because these are features of LINUX, which LINUX didn't have before. By your arguements there would be no reason to ever start a new OS project. "Oh shit, we're adding harddisk support. That's been done, so... we can stop here."

    I'm glad you're a fan of Solaris. So am I to an extent. But if we could get the same capabilities under the development and openness model of Linux, then how cool would that be? Sun likes to try and talk a big game, but they're never going to open up Solaris as much as Linux is.

    --
    I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
  13. Re:What this means by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I tried plugging a laptop hard drive to a USB adapter and then into a Windows desktop so I could recover the drive (the laptop was dead). It recognized it as a USB mass storage device, but did not give it a drive letter. Took a look in the Disk Management control panel. It saw the drive, and its partitions, and acknowledged that there was no drive letter. I right clicked the partition and the option to assign it a drive letter was greyed out. So I tried the diskpart command line tool. It said that the drive was active, and it saw the NTFS windows partition, but that the drive was hidden and had no volumes. There was no command to mount the partition.

    I tried the drive on 3 computers, with XP home, XP professional, and 2000 professional. Same results on each, except that the 2000 computer spontaneously rebooted and afterwards could no longer mount any usb drives.

    So I plugged it into an ancient computer running Ubuntu Hoary. The drive was immediately detected and mounted. An icon was placed on the desktop. A nautilus window was popped up to browse the drive's contents. I was able to backup the entire drive to a server without error and without the use of a command line. I just dragged & dropped.

    I haven't encountered your problem yet. You could try Ubuntu Hoary to see if that fixes it. To upgrade from the command line:
    sudo gedit (or whatever text editor you prefer) /etc/apt/sources.list
    replace each "warty" with "hoary" and save
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  14. I've had no problems at all. by anti-NAT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm running a circa-1999 machine, and have been running 2.6 since 2.6.0, and am currently running 2.6.11. I use it everyday, so it isn't just sitting idle. Here is my current uptime :

    23:13:10 up 29 days, 5:21, 5 users, load average: 0.26, 0.29, 0.25

    At the risk of starting a religious war, are you running any binary modules ? They can cause some stability problems.

    I avoid binary modules, or rather, make sure that the hardware I buy is supported by official kernel device drivers. Back in 1993, when I first started to use Linux, you didn't have a choice - it was open source device drivers or the hardware just wouldn't work.

    Here are some brief specs on my machine.

    >cat /proc/cpuinfo
    processor : 0
    vendor_id : GenuineIntel
    cpu family : 6
    model : 7
    model name : Pentium III (Katmai)
    stepping : 3
    cpu MHz : 448.172
    cache size : 512 KB
    fdiv_bug : no
    hlt_bug : no
    f00f_bug : no
    coma_bug : no
    fpu : yes
    fpu_exception : yes
    cpuid level : 2
    wp : yes
    flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
    bogomips : 886.78

    >free
    total used free shared buffers cached
    Mem: 385796 380076 5720 0 25692 93820
    -/+ buffers/cache: 260564 125232
    Swap: 1999736 224860 1774876

    >lspci
    0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
    0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03)
    0000:00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Standard Microsystems Corp [SMC] 83c170 EPIC/100 Fast Ethernet Adapter (rev 06)
    0000:00:0e.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. (formerly CMD Technology Inc) PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller (rev 02)
    0000:00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
    0000:00:10.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 02)
    0000:00:10.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 02)
    0000:00:14.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
    0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
    0000:00:14.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
    0000:00:14.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
    0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 SE] (rev 01)
    0000:01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 SE] (Secondary) (rev 01)

    OpenGL isn't fully working on my Radeon 9200 yet, following the dri-development mailing list, there seems to be some bugs that are causing it to lock up. I've had glxgears run for about 4 minutes, then X locks up. If I desperately need it, I'll put my Matrox G550 back in.

    In my experience, 2.6 has been as stable as 2.4.

    --
    The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
  15. Go to the source by Corbet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Should you be curious, I've posted the slides to my talk on LWN.net.

    --
    Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net
  16. Gamers: Configurable USB Mouse Polling Rate! by Jagasian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One feature that isn't talked about much, but is very popular amongst gamers is the configurable USB mouse polling rate. For years it has been available as a kernel patch, but now it has finally been included in the kernel. This means no more recompiling your kernel just to increase your mouse polling rate from 125hz to 500hz. It can now be set from your boot loader or from the command prompt.

    Why is this so great? Well, the typical polling rate of 125hz for USB mice is noticably less smooth than a polling rate of 500hz, whether you are using your mouse in games or a desktop app. For this reason many people preferred to use PS2 mice, as they could be polled at up to 200hz. Now with this new feature, PS2 can be retired. Get yourself a high resolution USB optical mouse and set the polling rate to 500hz.

    You can feel the difference.

  17. Re:What this means by intangible · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Windows will only assign a USB drive the next drive letter after the last physical device. For example: if your cd-rom is D: then the USB drive will try to mount at E:, however, if you have E: mapped to a network drive, the USB drive will not be mounted.

  18. Re:What this means by spitzak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The fact that you *have* to "unmount" is the bug, you know.

    I know, they may have trashed their data because they did not unmount. However it is silly to "punish" them by making it impossible to stick the disk back in to see if it is trashed.

    Here is what I consider the ideal solution, far better than Windows or OS/X. Lets see if somebody can actually do this right:

    When the drive is pulled, the system checks to see if all I/O had been flushed to it. If so it unmouts. The desktop environment responds instantly by removing any display of that drive or it's contents in file browsers.

    If I/O has not been flushed the disk indicator remains in the desktop display, with a big red mark indicating that it had been pulled. Usually sticking it back in and pulling it after a second will flush the rest of the data and unmount it correctly. The user can also ignore it and stick new USB drives in (getting new icons) or do something on the menu to make it forget about the drive.

    Attempting to shut down or log off with any red marked disks will ask the user to stick them back in so the data can be flushed. The user can hit cancel if they don't want to.

    This flushing of a reinserted device must check carefully that it is the same device and it has not been written to by another machine while it was pulled.

  19. Re:Amount of changes by agrippa_cash · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been using Reiser4 on a spare partition for a while now, and my only suspected issue (inexplicible HDD activity) may not have been related. When I compiled it in, Hans Reiser stated that there were 0 open bugs. My understanding is that Reiser4 is so bizarrely un-posix that Linus isn't comfortable with it. The HR/LT discussion regarding R4s inclusion was posted here a while back.

  20. Re:I Wish firewire would just work by evilviper · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There are some serious issues with firewire on linux. It is nowhere as mature as it is on winxp or macosx.

    No doubt I'm opening myself up to a Troll/Flamebait mod, but...

    FreeBSD's Firewire support is much better than Linux's. FreeBSD had firewire support before Linux, and it was considered stable and released in the default kernel before Linux even had it's unstable Firewire drivers available as an option, IIRC.

    Having good firewire support leads to other interesting developments too, like the ability to debug a crashed system over firewire.
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