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."

Comments

Wonderful. More Stable. ... So?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

Great. Now that the engine is all fixed, can we get a decent looking chassis with working accessories?

Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So?

[db32]

Right, and when you convince professional racers to give up their finely tuned gear shifters in favor of a stick shift with a chrome skull and glowing eyes you let us all know.

I truely don't understand this mentality of making everything stupid user friendly. Once upon a time you actually had to know a little bit about the tools you were using to make them work. Now instead of creating powerful tools that require some understanding we want to replace them all with stupid proof crippleware? And people wonder why well over 90% of all email on the internet is spam. People wonder why Windows infection rates are so high (aside from the security holes allowing the stupid user tricks, the stupid user still clicks on everything presented).

In this I propose that we place large concrete barriers along every major highway and paint tunnels on them with overhead messages like "Do you want a bigger penis? Drive here!" or "Get rich in this tunnel!" and maybe even "Protect your car from theives, enter here!"

Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So?

[at_slashdot]

When you've written something as powerful and stable as Windows Vista, come back and tell us about it :)

I like that one

[jackharrer]

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 ;)

Re:I like that one

[Arancaytar]

Dear Linus,
From all of us here at the Fedora Project we just wanted you to know we're very
pleased you're testing Fedora 9 and filing bugs. We also wanted to let you know
that we're never gonna give up fixing these bugs.We know when we do our best
we're never gonna let our users down. Sometimes it may feel like it but we're
never gonna give you the run around on these bugs, either. We don't want to
desert you nor you to desert us.

As frustrating as they are we hope we're never gonna make you cry.

Sincerely,
Seth Vidal
Fedora Project Board Member.

Re:I like that one

[superash]

I like the reply to the above comment :

The Board wishes it to be known that:
1. Mr. Vidal has, in the parlance of second-rate spy movies, "gone rogue," and has posted on behalf of the Board without the required routing through several committees, endless cross-posted discussion, and explicit approval, and therefore his pay will be docked accordingly.
2. He is clearly an enormous Rick Astley fan, although he attempts to disguisse this fact through paraphrase.
3. We love you, Linus! *scream*
4. We wish for Mrs. Torvalds not to visit pain upon us, and thus thank our community for stepping in and helping Linus get this bug handled.
5. Because it's Friday, things may get a little silly around here. Oh, and mind the gap.
Paul W. Frields Fedora Project Leader

Re:I like that one

[hey!]

Dear Mr. Torvalds

We appreciate your submission of a bug report for swfdec, and we have submitted it to the maintainers. However we are unable at this point to assign it "high" priority because it appears to be an interaction of a buggy ACPI BIOS with the Intel HDA audio codecs. We refer you to Toshiba for support details.

In the meantime, you may not be aware that the traditional SYSV "inittab" mechanism has been replaced in recent editions of Fedora with the newer "upstart" mechanism. Simply edit the "/etc/event.d/linus" file, specifying that under the appropriate runlevels you should be automatically respawned. This should effectively prevent you from being killed. At least permanently so.

-The Fedora Support Team

Re:Black monolith

[Doc Nielsen]

no no they invented this new thing called modules, which you can load and unload. It's really neat! ;D

Re:A better link to the post is...

[Daimanta]

Modding post -1, itsatrap

Behold! Thus sayeth Linus!

[Anonymous Coward]

And a collective orgasm was released from the entire Lunix community.

Re:Black monolith

[X.25]

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.

Re:Behold! Thus sayeth Linus!

[LingNoi]

I'm confused. I thought Linus worked on Linux, not Lunix

exec mode

[Sobrique]

I'm really looking forward to 'exec mode'. It's an awesome kernel feature that pipelines applications for faster execution. It's still experimental though, so you've got to enable it.

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.