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Linux 2.6.17 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the spit-shine dept.

diegocgteleline.es writes "After almost three months, Linux 2.6.17 has been released. The changes include support for Sun Niagara CPUs, a new I/O mechanism called 'splice' which can improve the performance greatly for some applications, a scheduler domain optimized for multicore machines, driver for the widely used broadcom 43xx wifi chip (Apple's Airport Extreme and such), iptables support for the H.323 protocol, CCID2 support for DCCP, softmac layer for the wireless stack, block queue IO tracing, and many other changes listed at the changelog"

2 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. Where is 2.7? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A hell of a lot of this stuff seems to me to be the sort of code that should be going into the 2.7 stream, not 2.6. The earliest days of Linux had revisions X.Y.Z. If Y was even, it was a "stable" branch, and could generally be considered safe for production work. If Y was odd, it was a "development" branch, and could break things badly.

    This was a major boon for Linux: if you needed the bleeding edge, you could get it, whilst acknowledging the risks in doing so. If you needed something stable, again, you could get it. Now? It seems that the supposedly stable kernel is right out there on the bleeding edge ...

  2. Indeed, Airport Extreme support is HUGE by RedBear · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Woohoo, Broadcom 4300 drivers! I hope they work. ...I wish this had been brought to my attention before 1 A.M.

    I'm somewhat shocked that nobody else has pointed out the new Broadcom 43xx/Airport Extreme support. That's the one thing that grabbed my attention in the whole paragraph. Not having support for Apple's built-in wireless hardware has been a showstopper for a lot of people to even consider trying out Linux on a Mac, especially the portables. This driver will open up several million possible new computers for Linux to be installed on, since at this point the wireless hardware was about the last incompatible piece of hardware on the Mac side. This is a very big deal for anyone with Mac hardware or anyone planning to buy a Mac, and for all the geeks who are already running Linux on their Mac.

    Very cool.