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Linux 2.6.16 released
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.16 has been released after two months and two weeks of development. You can check the comprehensible changelog (text mirror of the site). The new features include OCFS2, a clustering filesystem contributed by Oracle, new unshare(), pselect()/ppoll() and *at() system calls, support the moving of the physical location of pages between nodes in NUMA systems, support for the Cell processor, cpufreq support for G5s plus thermal control for dualcore G5s, improved power management support for many devices and subsystems (libata, alsa...), a new mutex locking primitive, high-resolution timers, per-mountpoint noatime/nodiratime, 64-to-32-bit ioctl compatibility for the v4l2 subsystem, IPv6 support for DCCP, the TIPC protocol (Transparent Inter Process Communication, ACL support for CIFS filesystem, HFSX filesystem support, new configfs filesystem (which complements sysfs, not replaces it), support for running executables from v9fs (plan9 9P distributed filesystem), support for many new devices, improved support for others and lots of other changes. Check it out from kernel.org"
does it run Linux?
"Comprehensible"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
support for the Cell processor
I guess the PS3 HDD with Linux was true...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
I thought the 2.6.x series of kernels was stable ? Shouldn't all of these new features being showing up in 2.7.... ?
When Slackware 11.0 comes out, it'll use the 2.6 kernel as default. It looks like Pat is still keeping 2.4 support built in, so it's similar to what 10.2 is - built for 2.4, but contains full support for 2.6. Now it's built for 2.6 but still supports 2.4, in case your hardware really requires it.
Death by snoo-snoo!
I would like to know other peoples experiences with upgrades on 2.6.x. BTW, I run the debian testing kernels and the hotplug to udev switch has given me problems as well.
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
Broken I guess in terms of "doing the right thing",
..
m l
but I have burned with cdrecord on 2.6.13 like this:
$ cdrecord dev=ATA -scanbus
$ cdrecord dev=ATA:1,0,0
see this discussion:
http://community.livejournal.com/debian/186598.ht
But just what in the hell is a 'High Resolution Timer'?
A "timer" is a software or hardware device that keeps track of how many time increments have passed. The "resolution" of the timer is how small the increments are. Thus a timer that tracks the number of milliseconds (1000 increments per second) wouldn't be of a particularly high resolution, a timer that tracks nanosecond increments (1,000,000 increments per second) would be.
The purpose of high resolution timers is to provide better performance through more accurate digital timing. Take a serial port as an example. At 9600 baud, the timer it uses will "tick" about 9,600 times per second. The computers on each side align with these ticks to know that there's new data on the line. Assuming that the electronics can handle it in a stable fashion, the speed of that connection can be increased by changing the timer used for the port. On many serial ports, this speed can be over 100,000 baud, or 100,000 ticks per second.
Modern USB ports can easily require timing in the nanosecond range to produce a high speed signal. Thus the need for high resolution timers capable of producing the necessary signal. Many other uses (such as video signal synchronization) exist.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The problem is that Schilling wants linux to behave exactly like Solaris' incomprehensable s,b,l format even though Linux has to support more devices and refuses to even read patches that make things easier for Linux users. It's at the point that if cdrecord accidentally supports something that doesn't look like the solaris way Schilling will add code to disable it.
Combine that with the fact that the DVD tools from Schilling are no longer open source and requires a License key The project has been forked.
If your having trouble with cdrecord I'd suggest using the alternate version instead.
You have linux installed on your toilet? And you need to upgrade it the minute a new release is available? You really are l33t!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Bah, hit submit too soon on my previous reply:
A high resolution timer is very useful when asking a question such as:
How far apart (in time) were these two 10 Gbps ethernet packets?
With the old, low resolution, timers, you got one of two answers typically: 0 ms or 1 ms. And when it said 1ms, it was actually probably closer to 0 ms, the clock just happened to roll over. The 'real' answer was probably 0.000000030 seconds, and that happened to be enough to make the clock trip into the next millisecond.
With a higher resolution timer, the above scenario might tell you that those 2 packets were 30 nanosecs apart.
This can be rather useful for assorted predictive algorithms, and pretty much any code that needs to measure the passage of time while operating in the greater than 1000 operations per second range.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Whoops. I can't count today. (Hey, it's a monday. :-P)
:)
Nanosecond == 1E-9 == 1,000,000,000/sec
Microsecond == 1E-6 == 1,000,000/sec
Thanks for pointing that out.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In order to install them you must use a patch here, or they won't work.
~ Jim
It depends really.
Lately, the kernel has put lots of improvements for desktop frameworks.
For example, 2.6.15 put forth uevent for managing devices. Wich the latest udev needs.
Udev keeps being more and more powerful, and latest hal takes advantage of it, and DE like Gnome and KDE also take advantage of this.
For the desktop, power management (and suspend) is the reason to go 2.6.16.
Most distros still don't use these features, but I already do, and some tools already use even the 2.6.16 features (no kidding).
That means you don't have to go 2.6.16 now, but eventually, distro will have to install it if they want to upgrade their desktop features on Linux.
The kernel and all the Utopia framework that goes with it.
Udev is still moving fast, some distro are stuck at udev 036. We are already at udev 087 (unusable on anything below linux 2.6.15) !!
I'm reminded of an Emerson quote, "Foolish consistencies are the hobgoblin of small minds." In this case, Schilling wants something that 1) is consistently *bad*, and 2) in general makes life difficult for anyone *not* using a SCSI drive, which 3) is 90%+ of the population. An "elegant" solution that doesn't work isn't a solution.
The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
I think "persecution" is a tad much, and if there are any ill feelings Schilling has earned them.
I would go on about how reiser4's plugin system makes it much easier for people to contribute their own small parts to the filesystem and means we could have the best of everything if only the bloody kernel devs would accept it, but that's a rant for another day.
I am trolling
It worked. Under 2.4.20 my cd burner worked flawlessly. In fact, it still doesn't perform as well as it did then (since I can't have cdrecord setuid root now, I have to burn a bit slower so I don't get buffer underruns). It was fine from the hardware perspective - any atapi drive worked, any scsi drive worked, the clunky 2x parallel port drive I was able to dig out worked. It was fine from the application's perspective - atapi drives support the scsi commandset, so all you had to do is send scsi commands, much like how you send ip packets and don't care what kind of networking hardware is underneath. The only people who didn't like it were kernel people who seemed to have some grudge against ide-scsi - though the only real criticism I've ever seen offered was that it was "ugly". The people going for an elegant solution that doesn't work are the kernel devs.
I am trolling
Great, that's just what Linux was lacking.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
if only the bloody kernel devs would accept it
The kernel devs actually accept it, as long as the bloody reiser devs fixes the obvious defiencies the code has. It has been more than one? two? years since reiser 4 "was ready to be merged" according to hans reiser and the haven't even tried to submit it in the 2.6.16 time frame - a sign that there is not a lot of work to do, for sure (they last time reiser tried it people pointed out him a list of things that haven't been fixed - yeah, reiser sure "was ready to be merged").
Maybe we should accept low-quality code in linux just because it's...reiser and it's c00l? Hey, that's the Microsoft Way, and it works for them! Apparently some people thinks that just because reiser 4 has plugins and plugins sound cool it mean it has zero bugs and all the design mistakes are magically fixed by some sort of magic.
Are you aware that lots of "cool features" were rejected in the past in linux?. Being able to use 1 GB of memory, 64-bit processors, SMP, rmap-based memory management: Those features that sound "natural" today were rejected by Linus because the implementation was HORRIBLE and they weren't merged until someone implemented them in a cleaner way. Why reiser should be different? Linux developers are not going to allow people to fuck up everything because something is "great". It has taken a lot of hard work to take linux where it's now and make it work in 512-cpu SGI beasts, lowering the bar is not going to make linux any better.
It was forked before (dvdrtools), and will doubtless be forked again. The forks will die out once the maintainers realise that it's not Schilling being awkward, it's the kernel people. Last I knew, the fork you mention was depending on ide-scsi, which had a witch hunt against it towards the end of 2.4, was declared obsolete a few times as the latest poorly-thought-out replacement arose, and when this didn't get people to abandon it, was intentionally crippled around 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 time. Whoops. CD writing on linux is bloody hard - the only other project which has lasted any amount of time is cdrdao, and that uses Schilling's libscg for drive access. The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
All this crap is why I stick with the BSDs. They actually act professional and make it a point to retain common sense and stability in their operating systems. I've watched Linux over the years become something like a spiraling rocket that looks a little out of control.
"Sufferin' succotash."
And on that subject, what's so inherently difficult about writing CD recording software? FreeBSD comes with an IDE burning tool, burncd, that has worked perfectly every time I've used it. Is it harder to do the same under Linux, or does cdrecord include some advanced, hard-to-implement functionality that burncd skipped?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I believe you have confused "timer" with "timestamp". All you need for your example is a high resolution time *stamp*. The kernel has had usec accurate timestamps for ages now, and each architecture generally has a way to get better than that (although it's not generically available across the whole kernel).
High resolutions timers are a different thing all together. They're what you would use if you had some code that you wanted to run 100usec from now, but you wanted to give up the cpu in the meantime.
I'd say I'm an open source advocate, but the Linux kernel hasn't made me very happy with the quality of Linux. When someone says "So is Linux more stable than windows?" I have to answer with they're about the same.
In my opinion its coming down to version-o-phobia. Everyone is so scared to incrament a version number that they pushed the problem farther down the number set. I've become really impressed with the quality of FreeBSD releases, which dropped the ball initally in the beginning of 5x, and now have gotten into a more steady release schedule - that also means increasing version numbers. On Linux we arbitrarily screw with the current version and dump the problem of stablizing them on the distros. What in the hell sort of solution is that? Linux needs to get back to developing far away from the stable tree. Linux needs to start with a real testing/release cycle on a regular basis. You don't need to break compatability when you increase version numbers. As Linux has developed into a stable non-hobbiest OS, it needs to step up to the plate and stablize itself. Using the stable version (2.6.x.x.x) or whatever isn't really fooling anyone. No distro is going to maintain ALL kernel versions, sooner or later you have to bite the bullet and upgrade and accept all the new garbage that has introduced bugs in THIS version of the kernel.
And it's sort of funny that everyone shuns the BSDs because they are some sort of "leet" club, yet the reason for the messed up situation is because the finall word must always come from Linus. And this time Linus is wrong. Get the hell out of the stable branch!
As noted above, the cdrecord code has been forked. This forked version of the code is now called dvdrecord. They dropped Joerg's artificial bullshit errors about linux, enabled the dvd code, and fixed up the build to use standard tools.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.