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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,
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?
what number is Vista?
666
LOL, 2.6?? We already have 9.0 here in the office.
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
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)
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.
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.
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
It'd be the best April Fools day ever.
Have a relaxing week-end with your wife and children.
Some of these features are genuinely interesting, though. For example:
OMFS stands for "Sonicblue Optimized MPEG File System support". It is the proprietary file system used by the Rio Karma music player and ReplayTV DVR.
In other words, it means I can open up certain embedded devices -- particularly that DVR -- and pull files off the hard drive. I suppose the OS X answer is that I should've gotten an AppleTV instead?
In this release, Ext4 is adding one of its most important planned features: Delayed allocation, also called "Allocate-on-flush". It doesn't changes the disk format in any way, but it improves the performance in a wide range of workloads.
Only way OS X is getting this is if it's an undocumented feature in HFS (unlikely), or if they port ZFS.
Kexec jump: kexec/kdump based hibernation
Reading through this, it looks like it's really nothing new, just slightly more flexible than before.
But what we had before allowed quite a lot of things not possible on OS X -- for example, diskless hibernation, or hibernation-as-snapshots, even to the network, etc.
There are, of course, a ton of them that cover problems Apple doesn't have. I would consider them nice problems to have.
Oh, and as to the original question: It changes absolutely nothing about OS X's position. People who like the UI, and can afford a mac, aren't going to complain about OS X being less efficient than Linux. Most of the more clever use cases are about as useful to an OS X user as ZFS is to a Linux user -- a curiosity, and maybe useful as a network-connected device, but no impact on what you use for a core OS.
Unless you count Xserves, but I'm not sure that was ever a good idea.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
Because it's a lot harder to do. Instead of following a spec, you now have to reverse engineer Windows and replicate its exact functionality, bug for bug.
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.
Because 'flamebait' does not mean 'false'.
<sig> </sig>
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.
But does the circuitry to do this live on the reader side or the card side?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
There is a noticeable difference in presenting information in a way that educates and informs the group at large of something that they may or may not realize, and posting the same information with demeaning and inflammatory statements that serve only to convey a false sense of superiority.
This is the latter.
While there might be a nugget of truth buried in there, it's obfuscated by the angry rhetoric.