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Linus Announces the 2.6.25 Linux Kernel
LinuxWatch writes "'It's been long promised, but there it is now,' began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, 'special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries.' There were numerous changes in this revision of the OS. The origins of some of those fixes is detailed in Heise's brief history of this kernel update."
Great. Now that the engine is all fixed, can we get a decent looking chassis with working accessories?
Running a pre-release of Fedora 9 on his wife's computer, Linus Torvalds was not able to view YouTube videos with Swfdec, leading him to send a comical error report in which he makes an ardent appeal for help to Fedora developers, "This is 'high' priority because the wife will kill me if she doesn't have her videos."
;)
LOLZ
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
http://kerneltrap.org/
no no they invented this new thing called modules, which you can load and unload. It's really neat! ;D
To boldly mod where no one has trolled before.
"Every time" as in .... ? Most of us don't load drivers into kernel space on a yearly basis. Correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds like a terrible argument against a monolithic kernel.
Under the kernel for Mythbuntu 7.10, that getting that remote control to work is next to impossible...even after tinkering with all sorts of text configuration files. To cut it short, getting the remote control to work was an exercise in frustration.
If this kernel fixes this, I will be happy.
Also kernelnewbies.org seems to be very slow at the moment. Here is a copy of the important changes section from their 2.6.25 changelog page:
1.1. Memory Resource Controller
Recommended LWN article (somewhat outdated, but still interesting): "Controlling memory use in containers"
The memory resource controller is a cgroups-based feature. Cgroups, aka "Control Groups", is a feature that was merged in 2.6.24, and its purpose is to be a generic framework where several "resource controllers" can plug in and manage different resources of the system such as process scheduling or memory allocation. It also offers a unified user interface, based on a virtual filesystem where administrators can assign arbitrary resource constraints to a group of chosen tasks. For example, in 2.6.24 they merged two resource controllers: Cpusets and Group Scheduling. The first allows to bind CPU and Memory nodes to the arbitrarily chosen group of tasks, aka cgroup, and the second allows to bind a CPU bandwidth policy to the cgroup.
The memory resource controller isolates the memory behavior of a group of tasks -cgroup- from the rest of the system. It can be used to:
* Isolate an application or a group of applications. Memory hungry applications can be isolated and limited to a smaller amount of memory.
* Create a cgroup with limited amount of memory, this can be used as a good alternative to booting with mem=XXXX.
* Virtualization solutions can control the amount of memory they want to assign to a virtual machine instance.
* A CD/DVD burner could control the amount of memory used by the rest of the system to ensure that burning does not fail due to lack of available memory.
The configuration interface, like all the cgroups, is done by mounting the cgroup filesystem with the "-o memory" option, creating a randomly-named directory (the cgroup), adding tasks to the cgroup by catting its PID to the 'task' file inside the cgroup directory, and writing values to the following files: 'memory.limit_in_bytes', 'memory.usage_in_bytes' (memory statistic for the cgroup), 'memory.stats' (more statistics: RSS, caches, inactive/active pages), 'memory.failcnt' (number of times that the cgroup exceeded the limit), and 'mem_control_type'. OOM conditions are also handled in a per-cgroup manner: when the tasks in the cgroup surpass the limits, OOM will be called to kill a task between all the tasks involved in that specific cgroup.
Code: (commit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
1.2. Real Time Group scheduling
Group scheduling is a feature introduced in 2.6.24. It allows to assign different process scheduling priorities other than nice levels. For example, given two users on a system, you may want to to assign 50% of CPU time to each one, regardless of how many processes is running each one (traditionally, if one user is running f.e. 10 cpu-bound processes and the other user only 1, this last user would get starved its CPU time), this is the "group tasks by user id" configuration option of Group Scheduling does. You may also want to create arbitrary groups of tasks and give them CPU time privileges, this is what the "group tasks by Control Groups" option does, basing its configuration interface in cgroups (feature introduced in 2.6.24 and described in the "Memory resource controller" section).
Those are the two working modes of Control Groups. Aditionally there're several types of tasks. What 2.6.25 adds to Group Scheduling is the ability to also handle real time (aka SCHED_RT) processes. This makes much easier to handle RT tasks and give them scheduling guarantees.
Documentation: sched-rt-group.txt
Code: (commit 1, 2, 3, 4)
There's serious interest in running RT tasks on enterprise-class hardware, so a large number of enhancements t
And a collective orgasm was released from the entire Lunix community.
"numerous changes in this revision of the OS"
Asking people to call it GNU/Linux is one thing, but it's not much to ask Slashdot not to call a kernel changelog an OS changelog.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It seems to me they should add a dns cname of slashdotnewbies.org.
those of you that use the nvidia driver from http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html will find the current release NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12.pkg1.run will not work with linux-2.6.25
.config from 2.6.24.4 and once i had my kernel built and rebooted and when i went to build the nvidia driver it failed so i reinstalled 2.6.24.4 which works run the nvidia driver without problems(waits patiently for a new nvidia driver)...
i built 2.6.25 this morning and used menuconfig to load my
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Has anyone noticed the forced CIFS migration warning yet? Do you have some links on how to do that? I mean just the obvious two things of being able to mount a remote windows share (preferably without being root), and setting up CUPS for printing to a windows-shared printer. All I see on Google are technical articles about the protocol.
Anyone else notice how far the network namespace work has come? Me likes the prospects of having virtual routing and forwarding in the mainstream kernel.
Ok, so is it still a big monolithic kernel that we need to recompile every time we need to load a driver into kernel-space?
You're the proof that time travel is possible.
I'm confused. I thought Linus worked on Linux, not Lunix
Was interesting - apparently it turns out that it's been there since the Sparse Memory Model was implemented but had never tripped before.
There was no range check on memory_present() so if you called it with a start/end range outside outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS it would overwrite areas of memory causing very weird and random effects during boot. Tracking it down was apparently a major effort by a good few people because the effects were so random.
Good that it's been found and cleaned up!
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Is it SO MUCH to ask that someone caches the links on coral cache before they get slashdotted? Just append .nyud.net to the hostname.
It's an option in your system profile (usually /etc/profile).
Just add 'exec true' in there, and it'll start using the prefetch code. OK, so it's not a huge performance boost, but I'll take a free 5-7% any day of the week.
I think you can do it as a non-privileged user by adding it to your 'personal' profile (.profile or .bashrc typically) but obviously it's not then affecting the core system processes.
Shit, you got any tissues?
When it comes to the remote control, I tried. Trust me. It just did not work. I know about lirc. I tinkered all I could but it did not work! There is community support for the WinTV-PVR-150 at http://ivtvdriver.org/ and I can tell you that it did not work for me. By the way, I am no Linux newbie but I must admit I failed on this.
Linux can now be used to debug your car's network - provided a hardware interface exists.
If it doesn't, I bet it will not be long before someone implements one. And since CAN is used in pretty much every automation in modern cars, who knows. "An open firmware for your Passat", anyone?
No one runs "just a kernel" on their phone. Look at OpenMoko, they use GNU libc just like Debian and Fedora do.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I thought I'd heard somewhere that the new (fully OSS) Atheros drivers were going into the kernel with 2.6/.25, but see no mention. Does anyone have any information on the Atheros/DadWifi kernel merge plans?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Never mind. Found it on kernelnewbies, under "ath5k", I was searching "atheros".
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=fa1c114fdaa605496045e56c42d0c8aa4c139e57
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If a shopper wants to choose between 3 wifi cards, do the Linux developers bother to tell the shopper quickly and concisely which of those will work??
The community of coders, sysadmins and other techies aren't even interested in TELLING Linux novices that an "Acme Inc" device is supported! So OEMs see little actual need for compatibility being expressed. No comprehensive and authoritative Hardware Compatibility List = no market pressure.
If Linus had one hairsbreadth of concern for a users' ability to discern compatibility while contemplating hardware purchases, then his group would have setup an HCL years ago. But instead he leaves that horrid little task of dealing with the unwashed to the distros, who produce pathetic nearly-empty HCL databases with some of the most unpleasant web-search design imaginable.
i hear the term 'trigger' from as educated circles as the Supreme Court
Trigger is a horse
Trigger is a causal construct
Trigger has dubious connotation
Precipitate is a correlation of a field and a force
Forces are expressions of an interruption of a
field's equilibrium
many fields can be contained, many cannot
many forces are introduced, many are arrived by
a stress around a contained field
a "trigger' is either directly linked or "acts" from a balance of links
a trigger is a node and behaves to a prioritized
link or balances input from many
either heirarchically prioritized or given equity
the variable of a trigger is clock timing...
how many times around a value will be "seen" and by what order
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
I remember this happening last year? or the year before when ubuntu was coming out a with a new release that the kernel was updated just a few days before hand. so they didn't have it in the release.
Linus is not "Linux creator"; he is just one of the many...
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
Linux is not an OS - it's a kernel, and to keep calling it an OS confuses people who don't know better and pisses people off who do know better.
Granted X11 has improved in the areas of 3d acceleration and such. But compared to OS X it is lacking
If Apple cared about 3d acceleration in OS X, they'd put decent graphics cards into their computers.
They don't.
In fact they sell you graphics cards which are crap for 3d applications, compared to what is available.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
.. not to see ipt_limit in this Kernel version. ipt_limit allows IPTABLES to limit connections per IP address. Currently this must be done via patch-o-matic.
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In order for the module to be loaded, the Kernel has to be aware of it. It isn't, it has to be patched.
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It would be interesting to know where Volkswagen use this in Linux. Can I buy a car "powered by Linux"?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Finally i can have suspend support for the sis 650 in my travelmate (yeah its acer crap but i couldn't argue with free).
Mayor Quimby: To make sure this wall is completely idiot-proof... Cletus! Try to dump something in the lake.
Cletus: Okay.
[tries to go to the lake to dump a possum but keeps hitting the wall]
Cletus: I can't. I - I simply can't.