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Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released
An anonymous reader writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel: 'It's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time).' The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaces the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new Firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source-level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree."
Seriously, what the fuck is going on with slashdot?
I've read & reread the linked articles, and not a single mention of the iPhone - and it's been over 48 hours since an iPhone story. Seriously - it's like slashdot's turned into a linux site, instead of an iPhone site.
Let's not forget our roots folks - just because linux is the big hype story today.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Dude, Google is your friend: http://lwn.net/Articles/229984/
http://xkcd.com/313/
There for you, help yourself.
BTW in short plain english, it adds some voodoo stuff to struct page, removes a lot of metadata cruft from the slab allocator, adds lesser and simple locking after removing most of locks which are not required because of the changes in the cache layer.
So if you are running your kernel on a huge farm of processors of the order of thousand(s), you ll find a remarkable memory saving, which is a big overhead in slab allocation.
HTH
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
Great improvement! SLUB is obviously better than slab, since it's all uppercase. I get a lot of emails these days using uppercase to distinguish their importance. I think it's a good thing the linux community is catching on to this IT trend.
I think this is just not true (yet). I haven't read anything in the changelogs.
nemesis. Home of an experimental fe code.
have any information on how good the new wireless stack is? That's what I'm most interested in.
For anyone in the dark, disk IO has been broken sometime after 2.6.17 on amd64.
- 450.html
...Or should I be worried that something so utterly fundamental has been lost in the shuffle across so many kernels in the past year? Amid all the eagerness to add new features since then (virtualization for example, and now complete rewrites of firewire?!?!).
I thought I was going crazy, being on 2.6.18 and discovering that any disk activity slows down the whole system, let alone accesses to any other disk.
Then I found a 19-page thread on the gentoo forums that says I'm not alone and it's not unique to a particular chipset:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start
(with evidence that the deadline scheduler may alleviate _some_ of the problem but not the root cause)
And more importantly the kernel bug report here:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372
So I'm happy people aren't ignoring the problem.
Why can't we have a 2.7 kernel for this stuff?
Linus has repeatedly stated that his code will not be converted to GPLv3. You are either grossly misinformed, or on someone's payroll. If so, they are not getting their money's worth.
http://kernelnewbies.org.nyud.net:8090/Linux_2_6_2 2#head-650cd139886ede5053ce6b7e1dd080b5378cc521
Some other possibly unnoticed effects of the GPLv3 include:
- You can't use a CPU of the same manufacturer that has previously executed GPLv3 code in the same room as a computer running a Microsoft operating system. If you have exhausted all the alternatives and you still need to run your GPLv3-infected hardware in the same room, you can negate this by drawing a chalk circle around the machines running the MS software and sprinkling a ground-up printed copy of the GPLv3 over and around them. This is all standard as per Section 5.
- In the case the Richard Stallman's or any of his buddies' computer blows up (for any reason - read the license for full details), he's allowed to walk into your house and take your computer right off your desk and keep it, even if it has never run GPLv3 code!
- If left unattended, disks containing copies of the GPLv3 can become corrupted and mutate into GPVv3 (General Public Virus version 3), which will assimilate all carbon and silicon-based matter with in a 3 mile radius into a demonic, electronic, GPLv3 spreading zombie ox (or it might be a buffalo - that part is unclear).
This is why we should all boycott GPLv3. It is just too evil and virusy.
The fact that you were modded up informative really shows that somebody is out here doing a a REAL FUD jobber. Few here, would say that if the kernel did switch to GPL3, that it would not even have a mention in the posting. That means that the modders are deliberate, not just ignorant. Considering that they are modding, shows that most of the time, they do not step off the deep end. That pretty much means that several ppl (30% informative), are most likely on a payroll.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ok. You have a major release, it's permission to break all backwards compatibility, to completely change the face of computing.
Given the hardware around. What features should Linux 3.0.0 have?
Deleted
I believe that brings the amount of the Linux kernel containing Voodoo to 13%.
I don't understand 70% of the changes listed and don't care about/don't use the rest of them. I know, I know... I must be new here. *sigh*
Not sure why that is modded Insightful and just above that is another user asking which usb device would be best to buy for a linux box, but that is modded "off-topic." I remember when slashdot was about news for geeks and sharing information about geeky things for linux/bsd/etc.. Now it seems like its just about modding up snarky comments and crap articles about george bush. Sad turn its taken over the last few years.
Anyways, I was thinking of adding one of these USB wireless accessories.. could anybody here recommend one that has a good track record of working in linux ?
I would recommend using one of the PCMCIA cards instead. Find one that uses the Anthros chipset. I picked up a D-LINK one that was recognised by Dapper Drake. I didn't need to install NDIS Wrapper of Network Manager. I don't remember the model number of the card, but setting it up was as easy as setting it up in Windows except I didn't need to use the setup CD that came with it. Dapper recognised it as an Unknown Wireless. Properties showed it has an Anthros chipset made by D-Link. From there I gave it a static IP on my LAN and plugged in the WEP key after picking my SSID from a list. I added some DNS listings and put in the gateway address of my router and I was online. There have been some difficulty with configuring many of the USB cards. Check the forums and purchase carefully.
The truth shall set you free!
Specific complaints should be stated as such instead of rubbish about it all being broken. The Gentoo thread quoted above is about people discovering that writing to optical drives is horribly slow and puts a lot of load on the CPU in comparison to dealing with hard disks - looking up ATAPI may have been a good move at that point instead of a lot of speculation.
To quote from the bottom of the page: [The mm-tree] can crash your machine, eat your data (unlikely but not impossible) or kidnap your family (just because it has never happened it doesn't mean you're safe)
I notice the patches being tested include Reiser 4...suddenly the above warning appears a bit more sinister.
See http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131 for explanation. In short, Linus has good reasons to use goto.
Your arguably insightful post was kinda flattend in advance by GKH at OLS:
http://www.linux.com/feature/115767
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
IMO, goto has been demonized a bit too much.
Yeah, too much of it results in spaghetti code.
But used well, it can compensate for the lack of some things in C. For example, exiting nested loops. In Perl you can say "last NAME", where NAME is the name you gave to the loop, and exit from the outer loop directly.
In C, if you avoid goto what results is a check in every loop to determine whether the inner loop decided that we've got to bail out. This is much uglier than just using goto in the first place, and more error prone too.
Using goto is also handy for error handling: When you're allocating memory, goto allows jumping to the right point in the cleanup process, instead of duplicating bits of code everywhere.
It's my understanding that in kernel programming goto also has advantages in terms of speed over other alternatives.
That's not to say we should use everywhere. But IMO, what to use should be decided on the basis of what is the cleanest and less error prone option -- If goto results in cleaner code, then use it, if it doesn't then don't.
Slashdot has always been turning for the worse. In fact, it never was any better in the first place.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I'd be careful about anything with a Broadcom chip. There is a Broadcom driver for Linux, but it doesn't always work. The alternative is ndiswrapper which can somehow make a Windows driver work under Linux. My experience was that setting up ndiswrapper was not much fun. Not knocking ndiswrapper -- I'm utterly astounded that it works at all
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yeah, here's the breakdown of the 2.6.22-generic (Linus' kernel) source from krnl-magick-analyzer:
$ krnl-magick-analyzer --percentages --nice-format
Linux Kernel Magick Analyzer v0.01 -- Monday, July 9, 2007 8:30 AM DST
Linux Kernel Version: 2.6.22
Path:
High Magick 10%
Santeria (w/o chicken sacrifices) 5%
Santeria (w/chicken sacrifices) 5%
Witchcraft 8%
Hoodoo 7%
Voodoo (Voudon) 13%
Daemonology 20%
Other 22%
My blog
I've seen some insightful posts from you so I'm not assuming you're trolling. But this has been discussed to death. There are perfect kernels in the 2.6 series and they're created by your vendor. That's what Linus wants and that's how it goes.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Did you read the article? It is not enabled by default, at least till all the drivers get ported to it.
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
eeeh, strike that.
Torrent File Here
Well, how about "Slashot, going down hill since 1997" ?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Both the 'old' firewire and the 'old' wireless frameworks and their corresponding drivers are still in the tree. If you don't want to use these new and relatively untested stacks then simply don't use them in your 2.6.22 config.
Remember that the kernel is C, not C++. The goto here is safe. The deal with GOTO was that it was not supposed to be used to jump from one function to another or to replace functions. (C will not allow you to do this.) That was the point of the "go to considered harmful" paper - That explicit jumps would cause people to avoid writing properly structured code. Inside a function a go-to is entirely legal and sometimes allows you to save clocks by skipping things you don't need. In kernel code, saving clocks is entirely worth it, since your function may possibly be re-entered at a high rate, and your code blocks all other code in the system (you're the kernel). In an application, it's less worth it and the goto is probably unnecessary.
Personally I use whatever the language gives me wherever I can to make things as computationally short as possible. Sacrificing performance for programmer comfort does not make sense. If the code looks ugly, but it works (and works fast!), that's all it needs to do. For every one programmer you have thousands of users, and the users don't care if the source is pretty or not.
Ah, the GNU/Generation. In Linus/Linux speak:
/proc/sys/kernel/voodoo
# cat
1: 10 5:5 8 7 13 20 0x00000022
--
GNU: A recursive acronym "GNU's Newbie Unix"
Just because you don't understand them or know that you use them doesn't mean that you really don't use or benefit from them.
Do you know and understand all of the technology in your car? your cell phone?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I presume you mean "Atheros". I recommend not using those cards. Atheros cards do not have Free Software drivers; they're binary-only. They don't handle suspend well, which is kind of a big issue when you're dealing with a laptop. Ralink or Intel cards are a much better bet.
JFS is one of the better linux filesystems. And while you can't select it in the installer, you can definitely install the tools to support JFS from universe in Kubuntu, and it's similarly available in the Fedora base repositories. The kernels come with the modules pre-built already, so...
And you can shrink and grow them. And it has nice backup and fsck utilities... Oh, and it supports extended attributes and ACLs and all that good stuff. And it's faster than XFS.
So use it!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This is getting increasingly Digg-like...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
However I am running Kubuntu Feisty. Maybe it's time for an upgrade?
Probably true. I'm running Dapper because I have a life. I spend little time as a noob putzing with it. I'm more of an end user. I settled on Dapper because it is the LTS version so I wouldn't have to be on the 6 month upgrade cycle.
Anyway, in a couple years, I'll upgrade. In the meantime I'll enjoy the sunshine and warm weather, camping, etc. When rainy weather sets in and I have time to blow my install and learn how to recover it, I'll ditz with it.
In the meantime, I have a date with a jetski.
The truth shall set you free!