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2.6.13 Linux Kernel Released
LynuxFre@k writes "Linux Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.13 Linux kernel. He noted that there was a major change to the x86 PCI code, and that while all bugs from the change were believed to be found during the release candidate phase, it's possible that some devices may have problems. From this release on, it is intended that major changes only be merged into the kernel within two weeks after a major release. The rest of the time will be spent fixing bugs, with the goal of both increasing overall stability and decreasing the amount of time between major releases. Download the latest Linux kernel from a kernel.org mirror."
"From this release on, it is intended that major changes only be merged into the kernel within two weeks after a major release. The rest of the time will be spent fixing bugs, with the goal of both increasing overall stability and decreasing the amount of time between major releases."
I wish Linus would arrive at a policy and just stick with it instead of all these gyrations of "we'll use this method from now on...no wait...we'll use this one from now on...and by the way I want everyone to switch revision control systems now...oh wait...sigh.
I'm not really a grammar/spelling/correctness nazi either, so I can't really complain about slashdot going down hill. I just feel compelled to post.
Uh... I wish my name was Linux?
It's LINUS Torvalds. God, I hate reading typoes!
it's kernel.org. they mirror other people's stuff.
2.6.13 Linux(TM) kernel
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
- RMS
I'll give you my opinions on these.
A) It's been years since I've recompiled a kernel, and I've only compiled a few software packages in years. I use Linux daily at work, and exclusively at home. It may not be as easy to install software as on a Mac, but a good distro is equal to Windows.
B) I agree, but at the same time I find it rare that I have to drop to a command line to do normal computing tasks. I still go there daily, but by choice.
C) I can usually find anything I need online without having to post to a message board myself. However, I do agree that it needs significant improvement. I wouldn't expect non-technical people to search online for their answers.
By the way, you should find other examples to "prove" your technical skill. Ripping videos and using Photoshop aren't too "technical" in nature, especially here. Alternatively, don't try to prove it, just leave it assumed. Note: I'm not calling your knowledge into question, just your examples.
Industry standard 3d, compositing and editing tools all run under linux which is the natural progression because of their IRIX legacy.
I've also done some DTP under linux but that probably wasn't professional, since I didn't just bang a series of poorly masked raster images together like most 'professional' agencies we dealt with.
Does this make me a linux fanatic?
As they say in osnews, devfs seems to have been removed from the kernel.
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You don't have to. years ago when I used SuSE, I never ever compiled anything, and I had no problems
Linux does have something similar. How about Yast or Synaptic or up2date? True, it's not identical to way things are done in Windows or OS X. But Linux is not Windows or OS X.
I don't think the kernel-developers are to blame if some GUI-tool doesn't do the job. They work on the kernel, not on the GUI.
Failed at what? To satisfy the whims of some random user who propably hasn't paid one dime for the software he's using? Here's a hint to you: they (the developers) don't owe you anything.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I've been using Linux since 2.0.27. It has usually been generally quite stable for me. But recently, I've been encountering more and more kernel crashes. For trivial things to, like a kernel crash when I try to use ifconfig yesterday when setting up a machine. And random crashes on one of my servers that doesn't seem related to RAM. I know that some kernel versions have "problems", but it seems to be more than that. A recent trend of unstability. Can anyone else who has been using Linux for a significant amount of time attest to this?
A) Fine. So we'll distribute one binary version of the kernel. It won't work as fast. It'll be hundreds of megs in size. It will take ages to load as it checks for every single known piece of hardware. You've just lost all the speed/memory advantage of having a tailored kernel. Alternatively, it'll come with a hundred modules. It'll also never be x64 optimised or, for that matter, able to work on every machine (some options crash some machines, while the opposite options may crash others) and APM/ACPI will NEVER work on some machines.
B) Fine. You come up with a GUI that can allow me to find files modified on the second Tuesday of every month between May 1, 1946 and June 27, 1978, which contain the words 'secret' and 'report' within 26 characters of each other, sort them by date, and replace any occurence of the word 'anchovie' by 'dead bug'. Some things GUI's just cannot do, some things GUI's do that are just command line interfaces in a fancy coloured textbox, some things GUI's can do once in the time that someone who knows the command can do twenty times.
Secondly, how do you expect a GUI to be able to do stuff like modify computer internals safely? Windows answer to this is usually that settings won't take effect until the next reboot, which makes your computer *stop all it's work* until it's done. X can be restarted with a single keystroke to have the same effect. Maybe a couple of command line edits in between but meanwhile none of your users have been disconnected, no programs have stopped doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Command-lines are not for the faint-of-heart. Then again, last time I touched the command line on my own Linux desktop (not counting other machines that are cmd-line only via SSH) was to run LILO - not something that a "desktop doughnut" should be doing. You obviously have either different ideas of what you should be doing on a normal desktop machine or have not found out how to do them GUI-wise. By the same token, Windows should never expect me to recover in safe mode, or via recovery console, or by running any batch commands ever. Fine for the ordinary desktop user because it very rarely does. Not fine for a power user. An ordinary desktop user wouldn't even notice if you ran a Windows GUI on a Linux machine.
C) Man pages can be a pain in the arse (make it compulsory to include enough examples to demonstrate every option!). HOWTO's are not always up-to-date. Forums are, pretty much, for people who want to know how to install this Linux thing they downloaded. Then again... how much documentation do you get with Windows?
A small booklet showing you how to use a mouse to point at the various icons. An online help system that, even with it's wizard-style help for some items, is next to useless if you don't know the terms to look for (I work support for six schools... that's about 60-100 staff and a few thousand pupils. I have NEVER seen or heard of anyone even bother to try using Windows Help or Help inside ANY program because it's never been useful to them). Annoying dogs, wizards, paperclips that people want me to TURN OFF for them because they can't figure out how.
That's surely Linux 0-0 Windows in terms of help.
If you're an advanced user, you've got to be comfortable with the command-line. I carry a USB key full of cmd-line utils and use them almost every day on Windows and Linux. It's amazing how much quicker "Start, Run, Cmd, ipconfig" is than navigating that poxy GUI network settings. And while I'm there, doing "route print" is the ONLY way to discover Windows network routes.
Anyone who's not going to set up networks or advanced stuff (i.e. users), or home users shouldn't ever NEED to worry about the command line on either OS. And they don't. They pick a distro like Lindows and once the installation is complete, they never see it again. Or they have a decent desktop set up and then never see the command-line again. You, however, are on the border. You are trying to do stuff that NEEDS a command line, stuff that's beyond a GUI point-and-click.
There's a good summary of the new features over at LWN. Among other things, inotify has finally been merged in - about time! I wonder when Gentoo will add the new version to Portage, and if I'll dare to upgrade?
You're kidding right? A kernel release like this doesn't even make kernel.org break a sweat. Read this. The only time they ever even start to see some strain on their bandwidth is with a new release of Fedora, because they are a mirror for it (both of their gigabit links become saturated). For kernel releases though, they say that their bandwidth stays pretty normal at around 150Mbps to 200Mbps.
Regrds,
Steve
Linux DOES has a stable ABI, this is, the syscall interface. It hasn't been changed in years...I know people who is running binaries compiled for linux 1.0 in 2.6 kernels. If your app breaks or works bad when changing the kernel version (ej: openoffice when the semantics of yield() where changed in 2.5) is probably because your app was broken in first place. Now, regression and bugs can happen too, but those aren't on purpose
s /linux-2.6.git;a=blob;h=f39c9d714db3d6bf2f6440d2f6 cf9353057eeae5;hb=02b3e4e2d71b6058ec11cc01c72ac651 eb3ded2b;f=Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt
Maybe you mean the internal kernel API - which affects to modules, NVIDIA & friends etc. That API is unstable on purpose, as explained here: http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvald
Or maybe you mean "compatibility" WRT gtk & friends, if GTK breaks compatibily thats their broblem
Any time I'm forced to drop to a command line, you as a developer have failed.
Without getting into the whole "you have failed" thing and whether or not your particular requirements are some sort of mandatory minimum, it's my opinion that the same thing applies to GUIs. I think every piece of functionality should be available in three different ways:
The common Unix and OSS methodology is to build the command-line tools first, then factor out libraries and add GUI interfaces that use either the libraries or even the command-line tools underneath. So, it's common that features are accessible for a while from the command line, but not from the GUI. In the Windows world, the methodology is to construct the GUI first, then expose functional components via OLE and then, maybe, to create command-line tools. Of course, it's very common in the Windows world to stop after the GUI.
IMO, the Unix and OSS approach is superior because it improves the odds that all three interfaces will be implemented, leading to maximum functionality not only for novices, but also for power users and developers. But I won't clam that Microsoft has "failed" because I understand the difference between my opinion and global Truth.
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Okay, this is something that's been on my mind a while, so I hope it'll get some amount of attention and hopefully an interesting reply or two.
I also hope it's not going to get modded down to the seventh level of hell, as I'm about to (gasp!) express disagreement with Linus.
First of all, I am vaguely concerned about the Linux kernel development. It's been a long time since there's been major improvements under the hood. I've had Linux desktops freeze on me. In the past, that never happened. Ever. I don't know which kernels are trustworthy anymore. I've read something to the extent that stabilizing kernels is now considered the Linux commercial vendors' job. Excuse me, but WTF?
In the meanwhile, while we Linux types wave our dicks around and gloat over how great we are, the guys at Redmond are happily making it possible to change video drivers in their OS on the fly, and to unload a crashed driver without taking down the system. Will it work? Probably not 100% well right away, but trust me, they WILL make it work or they'll die trying. And Windows 2000 is proof that they can certainly do things well when they put their minds to it.
And Linux is about to become the unstable OS choice and it seriously pisses me off.
A very long time ago, Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum had a since famous argument about the core structure of the kernel.
Linus's argument was, if my memory serves, that it all boils down to pushing bits around, and that you should as well push the bits in the simplest way.
And this is where I disagree.
Kernel development is about pushing around the bits that will push bits around. Those are the bits you want to push around in the simplest way. The goal is not simply to produce a good kernel, it's to produce a maintainable, efficiently improvable set of source that will compile into a good kernel. Otherwise, the end product you get is a good kernel for its time that will be a bitch to drag into the future.
Perhaps the state of the Linux kernel development today is but Tanenbaum's schadenfreude.
Assuming that kernel improvements have indeed, as is my admittedly fragmentary view, slowed down worryingly, I find myself wondering if, simply, now is when Tanenbaum should be speaking up, rather than all those years ago. The structural needs then were simple: few consumer devices, reduced architechtural diversity. Today's aren't. And there is STILL no 'just-works' way for third parties to deliver drivers to their customers. The least worse they can do is deliver sources to the kernel maintainers and hope that 1) they will be accepted, and 2) there won't be too many months between now and the moment their customer's OS uses that kernel. Or they can ship scripts that will compile glue code between their driver and the currently running kernel, and hope that the customer has a freaking compiler installed. I'm sorry, I can compile drivers and upgrade kernels manually, but neither are acceptable solutions for the mass market.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and predict that unless the kernel's structure and development processes are rethought to take into account the use of an OS as a three-party system -- the OS vendor, the user, and the commodity/paraphernalia providers -- Linux will never be a significant player in the desktop market.
Thought on that? Please, please, please prove me wrong. I'm a long time Linux user, I did in my time the mandatory contributions to the kernel that allows me to speak up and bitch now, and from what I can see the future is not looking well for the Linux kernel. So please prove me wrong. Thanks.
That works both ways - the users do not owe you anything either, which means that you can't complain if they then decide to go and use XYZ other OS.
"Why do all these lusers keep using crappy Windows? They should use a product that they don't understand and that we refuse to improve for them because it's free and we don't owe them anything!"
Because THAT'S a good sales pitch...
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."