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Linux 2.6.27 Out
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Linux 2.6.27 is out, OpenBSD 4.4 is in!
Trolling is a art,
Linux grumpy 2.6.27-6-generic #1 SMP Tue Oct 7 04:15:04 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux huh? has ubuntu been using early releases or something?
It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.
http://release.debian.org/emails/release-update-200808
Although, I guess they made the decision for 2.6.26 before they realised that a September release would be an impossible target.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
In only 3 months, all of this code has been completed and reviewed by multiple developers. This happens *every* three months. The pace at which the Linux kernel is moving and yet still maintaining quality is incredible. It is clearly the case that the Linux kernel has hit a new kind of critical mass and is now a form of software development that has never been seen before. The sheer number of people involved changes what is possible. If you suggested that every single change to the codebase be reviewed by multiple developers in a traditional proprietary software development house you would be, rightly, laughed at. There simply isn't the resources.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Excellent! Macbook & Pro users can finally have wifi support.
W00t lots of goodies in this one. So... about time to change from the 2.6.infinity_and_beyond scheme to something else. What say you? I think the 2.6.x should have been left behind when the scheduler changed.
Hmm, wonder if this new kernel will finally do something about power consumption in laptops...
Also, the kexec-based hibernation sounds interesting, hopefully new distro releases will start playing around with these.
Before you get all excited about running UBIFS on your USB drive, take note: UBI is not for consumer flash media. These devices already incorporate hardware to hide their flash nature so they look like a plain old block device to your OS. UBI is for pure flash devices that directly expose the quirks and distinct characteristics of the underlying media.
So what kind of flash hardware is this for? Embedded devices, apparently. But maybe as flash storage becomes more common, more devices will support raw access?
Last I saw they were on version Windows 2000. The Linux is never gonna catch up!
The periods are for book keeping, the real version is 2627. Much better than windows.
Also, what number is Vista?
what number is Vista?
666
From The Free Dictionary:
A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through an opening, as between rows of buildings or trees.
In other words: a freakin' work in progress made by people with obfucasted view. Personally, I prefer _stable_ version 2 dot somethin'.
LOL, 2.6?? We already have 9.0 here in the office.
What part of the original post do you consider incorrect or insincere?
He's right, you know. A project that large growing that quickly that still maintains the level of scrutiny and quality that the Linux kernel does is unheard of. It's unique. If all software worked that well the service part of our industry would be nearly non-existent.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I am genuinely curious.
Yeah, embedded devices definitely. It'll be awfully nice to see simple flash chips soldered onto a board rather than someone bolting an SD or compact flash socket onto them just so you can have a boot device.
Fragile, more expensive, and adds another physical item that can break. And not only that, but you can drop about 20-30 dollars worth of non-essential hardware from your design and still be on target. If you do any embedded work you know how big 20 dollars worth of hardware savings is. This new driver is *huge*.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Any chance that this will fix some of the ACPI problems with Linux? I recently had a terrible time trying to install Linux on a new Intel motherboard, mostly related to ACPI problems. I'm not blaming any of the Linux developers for this mess. I get the impression that ACPI is a disaster area and even Intel is unable to get it right on their own boards.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Though tubal-cain is joking, he's kinda right. Vista is NT v6 and the next version is NT v7, hence its current codename being Windows Seven.
If viruses were unique to Windows, we wouldn't have "root"kits. Instead, they'd be "Administrator"kits or perhaps "SYSTEM"kits.
I was kinda expecting to see news about ath9k and AR5007 found in some HP notebooks, among others. Currently using a very flaky ath_pci module.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If there were viruses on VMS (well, other than via DCL scripting in e-mail subject lines), I guess we'd be calling them SYS$kits.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are too many 'system' accounts in Windows. SYSTEM, Local System, Network Service..... and Administrator.
I'll stick to root, 'thank you very much'.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
You are clearly one of those arrogant assholes since you think there is such a thing as a pecking order in cyberspace.
As an arrogant asshole, you need to know you are one of the core reasons why Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance by the masses because you're too good to stoop to a "newbie's" level.
That being said...nah, you're still an arrogant asshole.
OS X is actually a variant of BSD. That is a little bit of a different animal.
Well, before we can say "maintaining quality" we need to let the kernel live in the real world for a little bit. Let's make sure motherboards aren't catching fire and disks aren't walking before we get too carried away.
Well, yes and no. The old LK dev model had unstable releases where bugs were expected. Now every release is stable, and bugs are truly anomalies.
You ALMOST make sense if this were in an entirely different context. The parent suggested that this version is not real world tested, so it's too soon to speak of quality. You make it sound as if this new development model eliminates all bugs from stable releases. To the best of my knowledge, they've simply stopped releasing "unstable" versions.
So...
They didn't "have unstable releases", they released what was KNOWN to be unstable, development snapshots - IN BETWEEN what were considered to be stable releases. They don't therefore release more stable "stable" code simply because they stopped releasing unstable "unstable" code. Nothing you said supports that concept. The parent incredibly obviously suggested that there may be UNKNOWN stability issues. Why wouldn't this be true?
WTF were these five people smoking, and why did you write this so retardedly ambiguous in the first place?
I know this is going to get modded as "off topic", but let's cover this...
SYSTEM and Local System are basically one and the same, and are almost perfectly synonymous with root. Network Service would be the equivalent of the "nobody" user - i.e. an account that you can use to run low-privilege services. Administrator would be the same as a user with administrative privileges in Linux (perhaps someone in the sudoers list). The trouble, of course, was that, until Vista/2008 came along, it was trivially easy for an Administrator to escalate to SYSTEM - you just had to run a scheduled job in interactive mode (think of a cron job with no password required) and you'd not only have root access, you'd also have access to the current user's console. For an administrator, this came in handy - of course, what was handy and convenient for an administrator was just as handy and convenient for someone else.
Will it run the HAL9000 series yet?
Warning: Do not feed the Twitter!
Make SELinux enforcing again!
You should probably learn the difference between a root kit and a virus before you post to Slashdot in the future.
A fair number of people here actually have a clue, and thus do know the difference.
Might I recommend digg so that - in context - you sound like you have a clue?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
They still present a block device to the kernel. At least all the ones I've seen.
It'd be the best April Fools day ever.
I'm baffled. Since when was acknowledging "Elephant in the Room" taboo?
^H^H^H
#Zero__kelvin@Slashdot>never-mind
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Opus the Penguin is out. Tux the Penguin is back in.
Have a relaxing week-end with your wife and children.
As per Linus' email, the list of changes in a human-readable format can be accessed:
here
I would, but April Fools day has been and gone!
Because I wrote the comment for heaven's sake, and it was meant to be funny not insightful.
Hell I can't figure out why it could be seen as insightful.
i've been running my girlfriends new laptop on ndiswrapper drivers for the past year because so far they have been the most painless. it's great to see the new atheros drivers integrated.
it seems these days it doesn't take long until a new driver finds its way into the kernel, and i'm not being sarcastic. one year between obscure hardware release and driver in kernel is fine.
Do not trust this signature.
I suppose you could think that, but also remember that the stabilizing "SP1" and "SP2", etc. releases come out in a matter of weeks rather than years.
But it like it that way.
Last time I looked about 9 months ago there were well over 3000 build options for the 2.6 kernel. Thats probably gone up a lot. I used to build my own kernels , anything up to 2.4 was do-able. But 2.6 is so complex with so many options which frankly mean nothing to me , that you would end up with a right dogs dinner thats far worse than anything the distributions could produce and you'll probably find you missed out some important functionality and/or dependency for something to work correctly and have to start again.
.. but in practice the OS has to deal with hardware in the real world. If the hardware is consistently off spec in a consistent way and Windows can handle this, then I don't see any reason why Linux can't handle it too. Just huffing and puffing about specs helps no one. Besides , its been done for other dodgy hardware in the past such as the pentium bug so whats the big deal with ACPI?
First I would just like to say thank-you to everybody that develops the Linux kernel, without it I would have been stuck with the "other" OS that everybody loves to hate!
Linux (through various distros) has been my OS of choice for about 9 years now, has enriched my IT life and quite frankly made IT actually interesting again.
But one thing has been bothering me!
I recently upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 8.04 then hit a problem - my wifi network connection became unusable (very weak signal and slooowwww internet access). I tried pretty much most fixes but it still wasn't working right (slightly better wifi signal but then would randomally stop altogether). If I booted into my "production" partition (Ubuntu 7.10) everything was fine and the "balance of the force" was restored. I had a spare partition on the hard drive and installed Fedora 9(? It may have been 10 - can't remember). This also exhibited "dodgy wifi behaviour". Of course, it was a kernel(2.6.22) driver problem and I need to find the time to download the latest drivers and compile. Thankfully I can do this but it still irritating!
I have gone back to Ubuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.14?) and it's been fine since.
My wifi hardware is based on the rt2500 chipset series and is quite common on most laptops and until recently were reliable. As far as I remember the drivers were being rewritten for the kernel - which is fine but if it breaks hardware (which until that time had been reliable)
then people should have been made aware of this or even work with the distos for a interm fix.
At least include the compiled legacy drivers with the distro and not force people to download them from the internet and recompile.
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
Factually correct =/= well phrased or polite.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Sorry you got no love for that. Slashdot sure has gotten less geeky the last couple of years.
Put identity in the browser.
Linux drivers are much easier to deal with.
Unless you're switching to GNU/Linux and don't want to have to buy all-new peripherals. To pick a random example from my collection of incompatible hardware, Microtek isn't helping the SANE project make drivers for its ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner.
Is this the silver-bullet that will make eee-pc's wired ethernet work out of the box?
I felt pretty alone when I couldn't access the internet after installing a distro on it different from Xandros.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
I actually pay a LCSE(Lego Certified Systems Engineer) $150 per hour to assemble mine for me, its the only way to be sure.
April fools you.
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
If it's as good as .25 and .26 I'll pass thank you. If I wanted random crashes and data loss, I'd use Windows. I think it's the SLUB allocator from the looks of it.
Use OpenSound OSS and you won't have that problem.
BSD, CDDL, and GPL licensed. More free than ALSA, better quality, etc; I could go on but I do this about once a week. Drop that ALSA crap and get a real sound system.
Uh oh, Twitter's gone off his meds again.
This is to save on these massive downloads required these days, also to allow for faster development of both kernels, and drivers.
One requirement of this, would be to build out driver stubs, so that there would be standardize the communication between the kernel and the drivers.
- Some of the benefits would be to have faster development schedules.
- Reduce the downloads.
- Provide a method for Hardware modules to communicate with the kernel. Allows for commercial modules to be used, and to provide a method for the kernels to be developed without kernel specific code.
- Removes the requirement for kernel specific modules. Some hardware doesn't have even upto date drivers because of changes with the kernel. (VMWare has this problem with the VMWare-Tools, considering the code hasn't changed that much there is at least 2 #ifdef's for the 2.6.* kernels).
- Allows for urgent updates of individual drivers. eg. e1000
- Distributions would upgrade more frequently, instead of back porting some fixes.
- Reduced bandwidth requirements, don't have to download a 50-60M tar.gz for the kernel, or 17+M for the kernel.
- Ultimately, it would eliminate a person from making a change in an area of the kernel, that affects many other modules, which results in changes in those modules or bugs in those modules.
All of this would allow for greater development speed, improved security, reduction of bugs.
As a newbie, you need to know that Ubuntu is the Linux equivalent of Windows.
As a moron, you clearly need to know when you're talking out of your ass.
Mandriva is rock solid.
Never before have rocks felt more dishonored about their solidity.
When is the next stability-focused version (like 2.6.16) due out?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Really?
NT 6.0 Windows Vista
NT 6.0 Windows Server 2008
NT 6.1 Windows 7
I always did like Microsoft's naming scheme.
Although, I suppose technically it is the 7th home distro. If you count the orignial NT's and don't count things like windows 2000, and XP64 and Home Server, or pre-NT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases
--gmxgeek
Nonsense. The reason Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance (if it's gaining any at all) is that people even have to consider asking for help with it on web forums and mailing lists. That's the big barrier right there.
Irrespective of how helpful the responses are, if you have to ask the Internet for help in the first place, it's too difficult.
To be fair, most distros don't require you to compile kernels. The kernel itself gets updated at various intervals as a package, and then the package can be downloaded along with a shitload of loadable modules.
Rolling your own is more for if you want cutting-edge, or perhaps for some oft-unused module that wasn't available in the distro's current kernel offerings.
What does Vista do differently? It doesn't sound like a bug that being able to 'sudo' can mean that you can become root...
Can you give an example of what Administrator wouldn't be allowed to do, but what SYSTEM would be allowed to do?
Have they fixed the aacraid driver yet? The new kernel doesn't do me a bit of good if all I get on boot is a continuous stream of:
aac_srb: aac_fib_send failed with status: 8195
and my disk array is not recognized.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/12/365
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450444
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233364
http://bugs.centos.org/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=2911
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=122166454808377&w=2
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2008-10/msg02493.html
>M$
Your entire post has been invalidated. 0/10
The problem, at least in NT to XP, was that you didn't have to 'sudo' - there was no password required to escalate your permissions. Consequently, any process running under your account could trivially escalate their permissions to SYSTEM, which made it impossible for the Administrator to kill the offending process (Can you kill a process owned by root without being root?). Even worse than that, though, was that SYSTEM processes could hijack user profiles, provided they were run "interactively", leading to key loggers, numerous pop-up ads, and so on... all without any means for the user to do anything about it, short of wiping and reformatting.
Vista fixed that by breaking "interactive" mode - now, SYSTEM processes are no longer allowed to listen in on user profiles or display information on user consoles. This means fewer keyloggers, less pop-ups, and so forth. Of course, this doesn't mean no keyloggers, etc.; malicious processes are still free to run under user accounts.
I'm aware of the difference - however, at least in the Windows world, there is a very clear relationship between the two, in that viruses will frequently install rootkits after infection, and rootkits will frequently download and install viruses that, in turn, download and install more rootkits, etc.
:-)
Plus, I was trying to be kind of cheeky.
I should have written "based on BSD", rather than "variant of BSD".
This bug could've been a showstopper. It essentially ruined your intel e1000e ethernet card, by overwriting the firmware. They've not patched it, according to LWN:
What does that mean? Obviously, it should not ruin your ethernet card anymore, but will e1000e work very well with this kernel? Or what?
Since this is a pretty high-profile bug it's strange it ain't mentioned in the summary. E1000e is a very popular gigabit ethernet chip from Intel, and actual hardware corruption is serious and (luckily) rare.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Seacrest Out!
Wait a sec. There are as many online forums for Windows products as there are for OSS products, if not more due to the ubiquity of Windows. Are you saying that Windows is too difficult?
Method of processing duck feet
Because you did it in a bad way. Let's see how to explain this...
Every Linux user was a Linux newbie once. Being new to Linux does not make someone a bad person, nor does being confused by piles of jargon or the 20 different version numbers you have to face to understand the OS.
What you're doing is like going into a preschool and yelling, "Call that writing? You're such a n00b!" and then slapping the kids. It's not pleasant, necessary or acceptable, not even on the internet.
Besides, I'm not even sure the poster was even wrong, he may have just been using a weird terminology (Ubuntu 2.6.27 for the version of Ubuntu to use the 2.6.27 kernel).
In essence, you've not broken taboo, you've just been arrogant and uncivil. I suggest you break both habits forthwith.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
Yes he is but just is as it is unfair to judge Linux users by this bozo.
Actually I have had very few problems with Ubuntu so I have no idea what he is talking about.
If you are interested in Linux and stability and security I suggest you look at CentOS.
I find it a good combination of ease of use, install, and package management. I find Ubuntu release versions to be also very good and have more cool stuff than CentOS but also just a little bit less stable.
I tend to use Ubuntu for my desktop and CentOS for servers but that is just me.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Which presents it's own problem, windows has the "system" accounts for security, those accounts, at least ideally, should be locked down to all end and are by default, the security flaw is between the keyboard and chair. Having everything run as root means that if one of those services has a flaw the entire system is compromised.
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
Yeah, Flash works (Adobe produces a Flash player for Linux), and there are games.
I always say that once one gets in it invites several hundred of it's closest friends over and they have a keg party on your machine.
"what number is Vista?
666"
Per Heinlein it is really 6^(6^6)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
That's *exactly* my mentality these days, and yet sometimes, I almost feel guilty about it.
Honestly, I've worked in I.T. long enough now that I'm just kind of "burnt out" on what used to be the "thrill" or "challenge" of figuring out how to make an OS perform some function or other it claims to support.
I love Linux for the same "core reason" I loved it when I first started using it. It's great at consistently and reliably performing a task or set of tasks over and over again without failure. The downside is, the "pain" is usually all up-front, in hammering and prying everything into shape so it does what's required.
By contrast, an OS like Windows (or let's be fair here, even OS X Server) promises a lot of functionality that's just "a few mouse clicks away". And often, you can get some fairly complex thing up and running in minutes that way, but the "pain" comes unexpectedly, at random points in time down the road, when things don't *quite* work as expected, or some automatic update changes its behavior unexpectedly, or ??
But if I could have a "perfect world" of operating systems, I'd want one that has the "just click a few options to configure" ease, with the Linux-type reliability. I don't think we've ever really gotten there on the server side of things. On the workstation side, I think OS X is closer than anything else I've used - but again, it may never get 100% there with as many random possibilities a workstation user comes up with throughout their use of a "desktop" PC.
Interesting. I had been wondering about whether to give ath5k a go in place of madwifi. Now that I know it works for someone out there, I'm going to play with it.
Found some decent instructions here. Since the current 2.6.26 kernel on Fedora 9 has ath5k, it seems like this should be a cakewalk (famous last words)...
No, Linux is harder than Windows in some ways. Often on Windows, aside from the shitty software (like Windows itself) that often plagues it, when something goes wrong, the fix for it is often a few clicks away to solve the problem. In Linux, it often takes knowledge of the command line, knowledge of permissions, knowledge of compilation, and other barriers that make it more difficult for users to fix issues. What Linux needs to fix this are cross-distro binary packages so that Linux is targetable as a platform. This way, you can actually put out a Linux patch, like you would with Windows, and it will actually be easily installable so end users can troubleshoot their own systems without the required rank of guru.
As soon as software accessibility is improved, making free software truly free software by the average non-geek, Linux will be a much more viable OS. Not to mention, it will also allow non-free stuff to be easily installed, so we could finally get a lot more Linux games make for it, which will further help adoption.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
What would hypersensitive egalitarians do without the arrogant assholes? I mean you'd have no one to give you that "outsider/underdog" perspective that people seem to think is so insightful even though it's been said roughly 5000 times a month since 1995.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
*ahem* As an anonymous coward who doesn't post anything for ego or mod points or whatever, let me say:
Shut the hell up, you fucking noob!
Whoa! My network card (Atheros) and webcam might finally work out of the "box"! New FS for flash memory sounds great too. Some awesome improvements there.
Regarding speed and power optimizations (Intel apparently has focused on this a lot recently with apps like powertop and latenytop), how much of that has been added to this version of the kernel? And what did the "start in 5 seconds" experiment yield for this version?
I am not devoid of humor.
I know what you mean about the guilt too, we're always told that geeks are interested in overcoming every challenge they face. And it's true that solving new problems is fun because you're always learning. There comes a point though, where there isn't too much more to learn and you're just going through the motions. That's when it becomes 'work'. That point for me came after 3 summer jobs and a year or two of full time IT support and sysadmin work, with occasional programming. The servers were working pretty, breaking very little compared to when I was working over summers (with someone else in charge of IT), I had run out of programming tasks and was only left with crappy little driver problems and people who didn't know how to operate a computer.
I knew I wasn't getting the same kick out of it anymore, so I was either going to have to get a different job, or set new goals and priorities for my current job so that I kept learning and facing new challenges. I chose the latter, and my employer was pretty good with considering which of their systems could be improved by converting them into applications, even letting me choose what languages and platforms I wanted to use for development, as long as I provide adequate documentation. I've written most stuff as web apps - which I used to find quite dull compared to fully fledged GUI based apps to be honest - but they're great when applicable because they're completely cross platform if you do them correctly (which is preparing the company for the inevitable move over to Linux.. mwahahahaaa!!)
I think things are converging like you say - Windows Server is getting more stable with each release, and likewise Linux is getting easier to configure through wizards and other automated processes. There will probably always be unforeseen issues with software updates breaking compatibility, and issues with bad user configuration messing things up. So things will never be perfect, but they should be constantly improving - ideally at a logarithmic rate.. ever approaching perfection, but with the human element still getting in the way.
which is totally what she said
That's strange because back when I was a linux noob it was *Mandriva* that was the linux equivalent of windows. I doubt anything has changed.
Yeah. Nobody could have predicted that a Debian release would be late.
Yeah it's just the way those sweet Debian guys are. You know, always striving for the impossible, even when people say it can't be done.
It's like, when the crowds were all over KDE 3, and Debian had something like KDE 0.1.2-9573-release73 and people were saying like "WTF?! KDE 0.1.2, that just can't be real!". Boy did those Debian guys sure prove those fanbois wrong!
http://codeandlife.com
Unfortunately, he's still an arrogant asshole.