Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds & Linux Dev Process
sebFlyte writes "Builder UK is reporting that Linus Torvalds is concerned that the Linux production kernel maintainence process might be overly taxing Andrew Morton, saying: "One issue is that I actually worry that Andrew will at some point be where I was a couple of years ago -- overworked and stressed out by just tons and tons of patches. If Andrew burns out, we'll all suffer hugely." Morton himself wants to make -mm releases more often. He sees bugs as more of a problem, rather than patches themselves. His solution is simple: "I'd like to release -mm's more often and I'd like -mm to have less of a wild-and-crappy reputation. Both of these would happen if originators were to test their stuff more carefully.""
What if he gets hit by a bus? What would happen then?
Is there a hierarchy of maintainers (like the succession to President) or what?
Seems to me they should have at least 2 people at that spot so its not completely a single point of failure.
I have to say that we in my lab are thrilled with the progress in the Linux kernel. We have been running Linux in our labs for ages, and it now controls the massive coils that circle all the corridors in our buildings, ominously humming in the night. Before, we had Windows XP controlling the titantic voltages that flow through the rings, and we found that very often the control threads would become scheduled into irrelevance and the voltages would become unstable. This would lead to devastating magnetic fields that would reverse the path of time across the carpet in my room, staining it really badly.
Shitram Brown, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
Don't be silly. That's what users are for.
At least, that seems to be the prevailing ideology the past 10 years or so.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
There doesn't seem to be much happening out there wrt 2.6.15," said Morton in a mailing list posting. "We're at rc2 [the second release candidate of 2.6.14] and I only have only maybe 100 patches tagged for 2.6.15 at this time. The number of actual major features lined up for 2.6.15 looks relatively small too," he said in a later posting.
Ok, not that much going on w/this kernel, and then we get:
In the same mailing list thread, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of the development kernel, expressed concerns that the kernel development process may need to be changed to make sure that Morton is not overworked.
So, there isn't much traffic coming through and Morton wants to do even more -mm releases but Linus thinks he might become overworked? I'm confused. Any clarification on this from the list that the article doesn't give?
He suggested this may indicate that the kernel is nearing completion. "Famous last words, but the actual patch volume _has_ to drop off one day," said Morton. "We have to finish this thing one day."
I still haven't even bothered to move to 2.6.x as I have no reason to. I used to update my kernels immediately (and even ran various -AC, etc) but 2.4.x has been so stable for me that I see no reason to bother. Perhaps the reason why traffic is low is because of that?
Whoa! Did they pull the "Windows is broken" story? It was on the front page five minutes ago. I can't find it anywhere!
It was a duplicate article from Saturday. I assume they realised belatedly and pulled it.
They probably realized that the submission was just putting a different spin on the WSJ story about Vista's development process that had been posted a few days ago.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing history here. This is the first time Slashdot has actually pulled a story.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It was a dupe. And it was sent in by one, too.
Perhaps we ought to come up with a new methodology, something like agile programing, but for collorabative open source projects.
Clearly a conspiracy. The weird part was, for a moment if you clicked the comments to the windows broken story it took you to an it.slashdot story that just said "Nothing to see here, please move along." As for the windows thing, I think it was an error. Sounds like some things in the Cringley article posted a while ago, and if I remember correctly those comments made by the Achley (sp?) were from over a year ago concerning a rewrite of longhorn. I think it's safe to say this was an accident and that the story was erroneous in the first place. Over-zealous /. staff, perhaps?
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you, becuase it's probly real big and could crush you or somthing." - From the Wise prov
Label this OT if you want, but a few mins ago /. had a story called "IT: Microsoft Windows is Officially Broken" - it appeared to have comments too, but when I went to read it, it was gone. Switch back to the front page; also gone. Hmmm...I'll post a screeny here: http://cryer.us/images/slash_story.png
fak3r.com
So, what happened to the previous lead article about Windows vista being borked. It myteriously disappeared. Maybe it was due to the poor way it was presented with old data from something that was supposedly WSJ but was being served out of an Australian web news site.
/. ?
Do articles often just disappear on
Add a requirement that each bug should have a failing unit test, that fails before the patch is applied and succeeds after the patch is applied.
I think this is the link, but the site may have been taken down as part of the conspiracy (http://www.smartofficenews.com.au/Computing/Platf orms_And_Applications?article=/Computing/Platforms %20And%20Applications/News/E5T7U6H8)
Does anyone have a mirror?
It looked really interesting. Does this mean they won't release this Vista?
This is an architectural problem, not a resource problem. There is no reason why the Linux kernel should require the baroque system of manual patches and updates that is currently in place. Instead, it should be composable at runtime out of many modules that are encapsulated enough and insulated enough from one another to be developed and updated independently.
In the Pugs project, the coders and testers are generally different people, when the tests being written first.
I'm fairly ignorant about the kernel development process, so I ask: could automated testing play a greater role in the quality assurance of the project?
It's happened before. I don't remember what the story was about, but someone else might.
Where the hell is the 2.7 kernel? I just don't feel kewl if I am not running a Linux kerenl with an odd second #. Is Linus dropping the ball here?
No apparently this is a bad combination of old, new and bad news. The annoncement that Vista was broken was a year ago. Signifant changed where made, and its now looking better. The rumor that Microsoft was breaking up was last week, buts its still just a rumor.
Thank you, editors. That makes the first time I've seen you pull a dupe...ever. For those curious about this unprecedented event, it was a dupe of the "why vista had to be rebuilt from scratch" story from a few days ago which linked to here; it made things sound as if this was current, breaking news (instead of being a year in the past).
Back ONtopic, these concerns about kernel maintainers burning out harken back to the BitKeeper uproar. IMHO, it would make health, job, and life easier if Linus et al found a better way to streamline the kernel dev process. We would all benefit.
Perhaps Linux needs to switch to a more Windows like development process:)
I read the article, and it's clearly some sort of shitty spam website to begin with. If you read through the entire article, you will find that there are 3 pages, with pages 2 and 3 being mostly the same thing regurgitated from the first page. On top of that, it's clear that they didn't run the article through a spell checker, and the grammar is clearly not right in several places. It's a reseller site or some shit like that, and it looks like one of those news aggregator websites that appears legit to Google's search engine, but in reality is just there to try and generate some ad-click revenues for the spammers running it. Guess the slashdot "editors" got wise to the spammer/submitter's tricks and yanked the article for once.
Now if only they would do that for all the Roland Piquepalle "articles"...
"At least, that seems to be the prevailing ideology the past 10 years or so."
I thought the prevailing ideology was "with a thousand eyeballs all [insert here] is shallow". Doesn't seem very shallow if burnout can hurt it. It seems almost cathedralish in fact.
I got it too via rss and when I clicked on the link I got:
:) (and the captcha is "blockage" :) )
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
"TripMaster Monkey writes "This just in from Smartoffice News: Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. Jim Allichin, Vice President and co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division, reportedly has told Bill Gates that Vista is "not going to work". From the article: "[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly." Allichin is spearheading a revolution within the company to change how the software giant works. The solution: a more 'Linux-esque' methodology, of course."
Nothing to see here indeed!
Nothing to see here.. Move along.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I lost track of the SCM status for the kernel, but my crude understanding is that the kernel developers rolled their own, git. Is git a fully-featured SCM? And if not, could using git be causing any additional workload that would be alleviated by using darcs or whatever?
And just for the record, what's the strategic plan for kernel SCM?
And to add to the irony, it was submitted by TripMaster Monkey and was a dupe of a Zonk article from just two days ago. Congratulations Monkey! God, I admire you.
--
__________
You must be new here :7 It was neither the first, nor the last time for a dupe to be pulled.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
"I was trying to point out that 'point of failure' is just inappropriate whan applied to humans, as it is very rare that it would be unrecoverable at all."
Damn! Einstein got hit by a bus.
Is it me or has kernel 2.6 been comparibly unstable and quirky in the past six months? I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this instability and wish that the Linux developers would move back again to their old even-stable and odd-testing version numbering. Things did seem to be a lot more stable back then when this old versioning scheme was used. I mean really, for the past few months kernel quirks in 2.6 have made the kernel appear more like a testing kernel than anything. I am thoroughly disappointed.
I know that people will complain that I have not cited anything specific or tangible; that is fine. The point for me is that I am sick of random spurious issues that seem to be fixed in one release and then some new permutation thereof appears later. Candidly a lot of these things have to do with CPU throttling, power management, USB, and other aspects of the kernel.
While I appreciate how much Linux's hardware support has increased over the past few months, the desire for a more mature environment has left me wanting something more.
In all seriousness, if the quirks of kernel 2.6 keep persisting, I might be inclined to migrate to, god-forbid, BSD.
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
Actually, the windows is broken article goes with this article, as it
gives some ideas to change in development processes, like automatic bug testing.
WTF - it really is an article, dig it here: Microsoft Windows Is Offically Broken. Is this a 'parody' or not? If not, why was it deleted, esp since it was just posted to their site today (so it *shouldn't* be a dupe here on /.)
Hmmm...developing story!
fak3r.com
As someone who uses unit testing for application development, I'd have to wonder whether the cost of setting up such a system would be worth the benefits? One of the big challenges in automated testing is measuring behaviour to check correctness.
How do you check that a kernel driver is using hardware correctly? It's more or less difficult to measure the beavhiour externally depending on the system. Effectively you need to use mock/simulated interfaces -- in this case probably virtual machines -- but then what kind of code coverage would you get?
Personally, for the kernel, I'd guess the bang-for-buck of adding static checking would be higher than dynamic checking.
Microsoft Windows Is Offically Broken
David Richards & WSJ - Monday, 26 September 2005
From: http://www.smartofficenews.com.au/Computing/Platfo rms_And_Applications?article=/Computing/Platforms% 20And%20Applications/News/E5T7U6H8&page=1
Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.
Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. "It's not going to work," he told Gates in the chairman's office, the paper reports. "[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. "The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin's warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.
Microsoft's Jim Allchin
Accordingly, according to the Journal, Microsoft then went down the Linux path of first developing a solid kernel for what's now called Vista. It is now adding the features it wants, one by one. Gates was eager for his programmers to add a fundamental change to Windows called WinFS that would let PC users search and organise information better. WinFS was so troublesome that engineers began talking about whether they could make the "pig fly". Images of pigs with wings started appearing in presentations and offices.
The Journal says the Longhorn crisis helps explain the sweeping restructuring that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced last week, splitting the company into three major business units. The goal is to force Microsoft to be more nimble in producing and delivering software. The result: Microsoft has thrown out years of computer code in Longhorn and started out with a fresh base. It has now set up computers to reject bug-laden code automatically. The new Vista will be simple. Bells and whistles will hopefully come later - including WinFS.
According to the WSJ, Gates resisted at first, pushing for Mr. Allchin's group to take more time until everything worked. Over the next few months, Mr. Allchin and his deputies would also face protests from programmers who complained he was trying to impose bureaucracy and rob Microsoft of its creativity.
"There was some angst by everybody," says Mr. Gates of the period. "It's obviously my role to ask people, 'Hey, let's not throw things out we shouldn't throw out. Let's keep things in that we can keep in.' "
Ultimately, Mr. Allchin's warning proved cathartic and led to what he and others call a transformation in Microsoft's most important product. A key reason: the growing threat from rivals such as Google Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and makers of the free Linux operating system. In recent years these companies have been dashing out some software innovations faster than Microsoft. Google has grown particularly effective at introducing new programs such as email and instant messaging over the Internet, watching how they perform and regularly replacing them with improved versions.
Microsoft's Windows can't entirely replicate that approach, since the software is by its nature a massive program overseeing all of a computer's functions. But Microsoft is now racing to move in that direction: developing a solid core for Windows onto which new features can be adde
fak3r.com
.. it should be far easier for branches/nodes of the linux kernel codebase to cross-polinate.
.config/Makefile hegemony, i think we'd be seeing a whole lot more public, broader testing going on. its only because i can't confirm/share system .config databases with my peers that it makes it so hard to test other peoples patches; this could just as easily become a 'namespace' manipulated through existing tools ..
.configs from .torrent servers[or whatever]' as part of the -basic- Makefile in the kernel releases.. yes, svn&co. have their 'namespaces', but i'm talking about 'make update_patches -server:blahblah.org' as a commonly accepted means of contributing to the patch-sphere.
the -mm releases are definitely a high order, public priority; but the broader picture is that there are as many possible permutations of linux code as there are tarballs being globbed.
i see the taxing of andrew (and linus before) as more of an issue of broken tools. if the linux kernel codebase had tools integrated into the core Makefile which would allow for easier tree/pruning/updates and public server integration as the most -common- interface to the
i mean, there are too many ways to get yourself a copy of the kernel, maneuver the patch universe (why haven't patch namespaces become another NS record type yet, i wonder..?), find bits you want to test, etc.
i imagine a broader 'namespace of patches, and public tested
which is, actually, huge.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Given how wildly unstable and crappy the 2.6 kernel has proven to be, maybe Windows and Linux need to switch to a more (Open||Net)BSD style approach to developing code: do it slow, do it right, and stop fucking around.
Seriously, I have yet to install a stable 2.6 kernel (which boots consistently, and I've tried ubuntu, debian, suse, and slackware on multiple computers. Linux (2.6) is far more unstable than windows at this point. (at least windows will boot consistently for fuck's sake!)
http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/09/26/1334220.shtml?t id=109&tid=128&tid=218
Can search/browse tons of source code by function calls, class hierarchy, method definitions, comments, macros, etc. It recognizes language syntax, and should be useful for Linux development.
Linux Kernel Gets Fully Automated Test
n t
2.6 stabilization project (helped a lot during 2.5.x develpment AFAIK)
http://www.osdl.org/docs/stabilization_plan.curre
Unstable how? It doesn't boot?!?!?!
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Yeah, but the dateline (and dead tree version, most likely) was 3 days ago. It's not a conspiracy, the editor just tried to yank the dupe before too many people bitched.
Doesn't seem to have worked, tho.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
"I might be inclined to migrate to, god-forbid, BSD"
:)
Your above comment not withstanding, you would be welcome.
It's hardly the Magic 8-Ball, but the word to confirm I'm human is "change."
I just looked at the main page and saw "Windows Is Officially Broken" and then it disappeared. Did anyone else notice?
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
BSD is fine; in fact, I have used it on-and-off for a long time. I just added the 'god-forbid' part to make a mockery of Slashdot's negative vibe toward anything BSD-related, which I have never really understood.
You do realize kernel 2.6 is not supposed to be stable since it is the development version, correct?
I don't know what you saw and what is there and what not and where is there, but an article with the name you mentioned, "Windows Is Officially Broken" was indeed published today.
_ Broken_-_Microsoft_has_admitted_it
It is also featured (and linked to) in Digg:
http://www.digg.com/software/Windows_Is_Offically
... the bug can still exist, you only test with such a test that the bug doesn't appear anymore in THAT particular situation.
API unit tests should make sure the API interface specifications match the actual implementation. If that's succeeding through the unittests, THEN you have at least knowledge the API is implemented OK (according to the specs) and any bugs following those tests are the result of a bug in the DESIGN.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Well NetBSD is finally becoming stable but its a tiny obscure OS that is still years behind Linux in terms of SMP. FreeBSD is not stable anymore and I have not heard of anyone running mysql in a production environment that has gotten it to run reliably. OpenBSD is a nitch and is not smp ready.
You may want to try Solarisx86
I am about ready to make the jump. And Because Sun has paid for the patent rights to use proper fonts it looks alot better than Linux.
http://saveie6.com/
These wouldn't solve ALL problems, or even the majority of them, but they would solve some and they would make life easier on developers in the long-run. Are these being used? Well, a glance at the Freshmeat graphs for Web100 shows that it is getting downloaded. This doesn't mean it is getting used, though. The same is true of virtually all of the other code I've mentioned. People have copies, but if the code being submitted is flakey and taking a long time to fix, then maybe the code is not being used as much as it could/should be.
The tools exist, the tools exist on people's hard drives, but unless the tools are being used in practice, that's not going to do any good.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I believe the reason that LT discontinued the odd-even numbering was that the "development" kernels were under-tested and provided insufficient grounds for migrating the tree from development to stable.
Are you aware that the LKM team puts out a stable subversion of each release? I.E. 2.6.11 is released, then 2.6.11.1, 2.6.11.2, 2.6.11.3, etc?
Quality comes from design and implementation, not testing. Testing confirms that quality (or its lack). Testing is only one means of achieving that confirmation, and it's almost never the most effective of those means (assuming "effectiveness" is measured as number of defects removed per unit of effort expended).
> (Open||Net)BSD style approach to developing code: do it slow, do it right, and stop fucking around.
There is nothing slow about OpenBSD development. They churn out a new version on time at least every year but usually semi-annually. But I do agree with the other two criteria.
'slow' meaning they only officially release twice a year instead of 'omg it's Monday get something ANYTHING uploaded to kernel.org omg omg omg'.
If it is testing, why does the Wikipedia refer to it as stable?
v ersion_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel#Stable_
Of course, this may explain France's military record.
Melt in your code not in your hand...
The Linux kernel has not been quirky for me.Perhaps you should file a bug report, if you haven't already. FreeBSD 5.3 supposedly has stability problems of its own.
1 518217
9 .html
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/
Also according to Coverity source code analysis tools, Linux has less bugs detected per lines of code than FreeBSD. Ofcourse, this cannot detect every kind of bug, but it cannot be argued by a logical person that because FreeBSD has more bugs per lines of code, it is actually more stable.
http://www.coverity.com/news/news_06_27_05_story_
a commercial entity actually freezing a kernel version and just fixing bugs? They would work on a much longer release cycle, maybe every third year switching to a new kernel version. My gut says there isn't, but I've got nothing telling me otherwise. (ignore the scale/complexity of doing this and just entertain the idea)
Help enlighten me here if I'm not right, but it seems to me that there's an acceptable level of performance vs. bugs in the free Linux kernel because there are so many installations, so there's little demand for a kernel with less bugs.
Any feedback would be great.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No, clearly not there yet. Now obviously the Linux Kernel is more complicated than your average project, but it would seem the system Mozilla uses, Tinderbox would be also useful, as it seems the IBM automated test referenced above is not for when code is checked in, but after a release. The other thing with Tinderbox is that folks that check non-unit tested code in that breaks the build don't get to do that at a certain point ;)
I thought it was funny.
SuSE/Novell and RedHat Enterprise products (and derivatives), among other goals, aim to do exactly what you describe, grab some arbitrary, yet recent kernel and only take bugfixes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is it possible to be more than 100% correct?
I have been explaining (well trying to explain) that XP and most RAD methods don't scale well. It's an old problem - get too many people working on something or on too big of something and eventually communication breaks down.
There are really only so many things that can be kept track of and eventually someone makes an assumption in RAD. I have seen it. I'm not saying XP doesn't work but I think every XP advocate would agree that to make XP work you need a very focused scope, an on-hand "customer", and a team that's all located on site.
I don't think you could really develop an O/S this way. Maybe a module or function of the O/S but not the entire O/S or the kernel. I just couldn't see it.
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Can you provide a link and elaborate upon this font stuff?
You've got no mercy for the n00bs, have you? ;)
Really, I have rather exotic hardware and all of that is working under 2.6.12 (yeah, I know, I haven't tried for 2.6.12 or 2.6.14 or another bleeding edge). For _me_, 2.6.12 is stable and snappy and I never expierenced problems with that.
However said that, I would like to see Linus and team to sucess in management of kernel, because development of it is so active that I really wonder how they still keep pulse on all this. My pick is that they should seperate development kernel from stable one - or at least get it more stable somehow - and get more people to review/test paches and kernel versions, at least submited patches.
Some grunting are signals that there are problems, inteed, and I guess Linus is very well aware about them - as it seems from this interview. So let's help them, instead of bashing them.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I realize that the kernal needs to be carefully controlled and maintained so that it is consistent worldwide, but to put that responsibility in the hands of one or two people (Linus could pick up immediately if something happened) seems like a very risky way to oversee one of the most important products in the world.
If Morton does not have an apprentice or helper, then when he burns out (and he will) we are all in trouble until someone else can become competant and trustworthy enough to fill in. That could take months.
The reason Coverity (Dawson Engler and his former students) say that Linux has fewer bugs than FreeBSD is that about five years when they were writing their bug detection tool they used Linux as the testbed. Don't you remember the deluge of bug reports they reported?
With great power comes great fan noise.
You're right they do, but they are -still- on roughly annual upgrade cycles. They stop maintaining the old kernel and go into some kind of security patches updates only for a short time thereafter.
I think the average Linux server customer is happier on 3-5 year upgrade cycles, but I don't think any Linux organization can maintain their relevance and keep volunteers interested in such long cycles. The Debian Sarge release is a perfect example. Great product, but the sometimes justified complaints of it having "stale packages" already dog the release.
Something about people wanting "new" over "tried and true" would make a distro that tried a 3-5 year cycle a really tiny niche product. I've thought about this alot, too much in fact. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to hear some opinions either way.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Nice Troll attempt. Linux, or rather X.org font rendering is excellent. My linux machines have nicer fonts than my apple OS X. Apple's are slightly fuzzy on LCD, in KDE they are the best I have seen. That includes XP and solaris.
I recently coded a somewhat complex multithreaded telephony message delivery/communications system. Using abstraction, I was able to code up a cental simulation plugin, which simulated underlying hardware, triggering multi variable states according to use case, but in faster than real time. This allowed me to simulate several months worth of use thru the system and have the problems highlighted. End result is a system that is guarenteed to be stable and no knowledge rampup to fix obscure bugs when they are triggered 6 months down the road. Caveats are that the problem must be well understood to implement the abstraction and simulation and that there is a bit more initial dev time (but much less in the long run). So, if a test framework could be put into place which includes stress simulation alongside unit testing, bugs can be dramatically reduced. Having such a system which must be used before submission to AM or other maintainers would lessen the load and increase stability and performance. Thoughts?
Why don't you ask the Linux Counter about the kernel version usage stats?
VKh
Strange. I have gotten 5's before. I have never been labeled as flame, troll, etc. But when I type in "WHOA, what happened to the previous article that disappeared? Does this happen often?" - I get a minus one.
Excuse me for fixing my spelling while others got their comments on. Could someone with some karma put me back up to zero.
peace, mark
I did have a horrible problem with spurious mouse events a while back (2.6.9, I think) that was related to power management in some completely non-intuitive fashion. I also had a single occasion where I found my daughter's PC to be totally locked up. I am not sure if the kernel itself was the problem - I recycled the power switch rather than try to log in from my computer over ssh. Otherwise, both computers have been absolutely rock stable on 2.6.11 ever since the 2.6.11 source made it into Debian Sid.
Uh, Wikipedia might be wrong?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Yes, I second that.
2.6 was very unstable to me... spurious reboots (no panics, just reboots), random app crashes (seems like memory hungry apps mostly - Vuescan, Gimp etc). I was tired of this and had to go back to 2.4.
Please, please go back to the old stable/unstable version schema... I used to have uptimes measured in months... now I forced to reboot to win xp to scan my stuff.
A watermelon after a romantic encounter with a loaded rail gun.
Careful programming, thought, and writing programs like novels, with a flow, consideration for structure and areas you touch will ALWAYS beat out testing.
There is a fundemantal flaw in relying on testing, or assuming testing 'better' will save something.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Okay, how about this: why does kernel.org say it's stable? :)
Voltages do not flow. Electrical current, a.k.a. amps, a.k.a. electrons, are what flows in an electrical circuit. Shame on you.
Are you aware that the LKM team puts out a stable subversion of each release? I.E. 2.6.11 is released, then 2.6.11.1, 2.6.11.2, 2.6.11.3, etc?
I'm aware of it, but I'm also aware that it's not actually stable.
2.6.12.5 is more stable for me than 2.6.13, which actually locks up (emphasized because in my 10 years of using Linux, I've never, ever, seen it happen.)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61228&threshol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=131&mode=thread&cid=5758997
d .php?s=&threadid=257705
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/FDU/truetype.html
http://www.niii.ru.nl/~pauldv/fonts.php
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthrea
Does this help? Basically the 2 issues are hints embedded within a font for optimal viewing, and the second have to do with freetype fonts which modern oses use over ttfonts. The Linux version is not feature complete due to the legal mess. I am sure you can download the patented versions and install it yourself but its a pain.
Kernel Panic: Bus Error
It doesn't. The homepage says that 2.6.13.2 is "the latest stable version". The old "2.x.y is stable if x is even, otherwise it's a dev tree" hasn't been correct anymore for quite some time. So, 2.6.13.2 is considered stable, but that does not mean that every 2.6.x.y is considered stable. Plus, Linux now leaves final stabilization to the distros, because that is what people run in production. There's been a lot of discussion going on for months, it's all on kerneltrap.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a 5 year support life cycle. Which should mean 5 years of security/bugfix patches to a specific release of the kernel that came with the RHEL distro you bought (assuming you bought it with the service contract, and all that jazz).
Are you really that dumb? I'm not even French and yet I know that the French have a glorious military history! You stupid bastards know you're repeating a lie - and why? Because France said no to attacking Iraq! At least France didn't illegally invade a foreign country (Iraq) and get stuck - losing marines by the hundreds to the locals! Go USA! Hahahahahaha!
Nobody can touch the Monkey!
Persistence is futile. You will be metamoderated.
Aha, and that's because 2.6.12.5 is a stable, production quality release with 5 sub-versions of bug fixes and no new features. Conversely, new features went into 2.6.13.
If you're so concerned about stability, why are you running a bleeding edge kernel? Stick with what your distro provides you unless you're okay with it breaking once in a while.
Technically, if it is true that all people will die, then it is also true that some people will die. Universal affirmatives can be converted to existential(particular) affirmatives validly. ::= people will die
:. P
Summary:
P
where _A is the universal quantifier and _E is the existential quantifier and ~o is a logical implication,
_A
_A P ~o _E P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_logic
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
by that I mean, _A _A P ~o _E P :. _E P
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Maybe somebody could arrange for Morton & Torvalds to get a personal secretary. It can just be some CS student that gets some kind of work experience credits or some shit :)
Yes, I know all that. The point remains that any _released_ kernel (version number without any -pre or -rc or -m2u4+2df) within the 2.6 series is (theoretically) stable. All of the brokenness is supposed to happen in between.
"any _released_ kernel" after final stabilization by distros
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I tried your suggestion on my knoppix 3.9 cd (which has kernel version 2.6.11) and it still hung after the 'detecting devices' bar was filled. I also tried mixing and matching the following parameters:
noacpi apic=off pci=bios nofirewire noapic
But the results are the same: it still hangs at that part of the boot process.
I appreciate your suggestion, though; but I'm going to stick to XP and using NetBSD for my *nix (if Solaris played nice with my usb mouse I'd use that instead).