Slashdot Mirror
Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
Haven't read read the article yet but it does it require doing things differently in drivers or user-land software?
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
...welcome our old Unicode-challenged Slashdot. BÃrk bÃrk bÃrk!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"charset=iso-8859-1"
Welcome to 2000. :|
""We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager," Kroah-Hartman said. "This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had."
The video improvements in Linux also extend to power utilization for graphics. Red Hat Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields told InternetNews.com that the 2.6.28 kernel enables reduced power consumption across the video driver subsystem in the vertical blanking routines, which will be helpful to mobile users."
That is all that is mentioned (above quote) about the state of 'the new graphics' in the new kernel.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I heard they were going to include RieserFS but they killed that idea because it would be murder to include it. The developers said they would have to butcher the kernel in order to get it to work.
Not quite Vista's WDDM abilities in dealing with GPU RAM, but a nice start that people other than MS are actually taking GPU RAM allocation seriously beyond simple context swtiching.
2009 will truly be the year of Linux!!!
GEM is short for Graphics Execution Manager, it is a graphics memory manager for the kernel written by Intel.
If graphics device drivers want take advantage of GEM, then they need to add some code for GEM in the device driver.
A memory manager for the graphics memory is very useful because it allows direct rendering and direct redirected rendering and such.
This means you can now do things "the real way" which have previously either not been possible, or been done using some dirty hack such as indirect rendering.
When it comes to Linux, for me it's the other stuff the Linux does not do very well right now.
Let's agree: "Linux" as implemented by the many distros right now is ugly out of the box! Compare that with Apple's OSX or even Windows XP out of the box. With Linux, you first have to look for those Microsoft web fonts before you call a potential convert to have a look! Sad indeed.
Multimedia handling is still wanting on Linux. To make matters worse, even Linux advocates will prefer to create video files on Adobe's [proprietary] flash instead of .ogg! This makes you wonder which master Linux fan-boys serve. Heck, we can't even eat our own food?
One positive thing for now: KDE 4.2 is very very promising when to take a spin of it. Great work is being done as I write this. Gnome on the other hand will get there but the pain will be quite a lot before it does.
I can't help but wonder who'd care enough about this topic to be writing serious thoughtful comments on it on christmas eve! I mean, this Thinkpad runs Linux, and my hacked up Cisco NSLU2 which I'm about to use to back it up to runs Linux, and I'm typing this in my study which is also my bedroom which is also lined with 20 year old computer magazines and comics; and yes, yes I admit it, I live with my parents and I'm 40!! Now I'm not proud of this record of social inadequacy, but the point is that even I am not spending christmas eve thinking about the next 2.6.28 release notes?!
It's Christmas! Be sure to go to bed, get up, and spend the day with friends, family and food. Do you really need to update your kernel today? Why not let other people find out if there are some terrible early bugs in it?
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
If you haven't been following every commit's short log, you may find http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28 useful. I for one, would like 2.6.28 for Christmas.
It is also another open source project OpenGEM based on the original DRI GEM. GEM was a Windows like 16 bit interface for DR-DOS and MS-DOS like Windows 3.X was. Apple sued them and they had to change their look a feel, and Atari used GEM as a GUI for TOS.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I was hoping someone was bringing back GEM from Atari ST and IBM PC to Linux. Oh well
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Heck Bill Gates has his OS way past Windows version 2000! The Linux will never catch up.
The changelog is available aswell...you might aswell have waited a bit to the final release!
But why does it seem like every new kernel update has all these awesome new features that will change everything, but when you ask how they will affect people who USE the operating system, people are like "what do you mean? who cares?"?
I'm not an idiot, or someone who never uses computers, but what does the user of linux GET from these thousands of man hours?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/24/105
It doesn't really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you're
celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement,
without any holidays or friends, I bring you a tiding of great cheer: you
can now download Linux-2.6.28, and compile it to your hearts content!
Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an
all-new kernel - and I'm sure that if your computer could smile, it would
have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in
your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.
In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless
toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they're
asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated
computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa
crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all
good boys and girls.
Ho, ho, ho,
Linus "almost Santa" Torvalds
A new and single sound stack (valid for the next 10 years); with the added promise of discontinuing (deleting from the main tree) all the others by 2010.
exchange sync the first time over wifi, had to cable up for that.
Forgive me for being a cynic -- I am going to wait until others have really tested & debugged ext4 before I trust it with my own data.
I'm an [atheist|Buddhist|otherwise-non-Christian,Jew,African] and don't celebrate Christmahanukwanzika, you insensitive clod.
Im not so sure about putting graphics stuff in the kernel? Why? Why not make it a part of X and thus platform independant. Now we will have a class of drivers locked to linux. Great, just what we need, incompatabilities.
"Let's agree: "Linux" as implemented by the many distros right now is ugly out of the box! Compare that with Apple's OSX or even Windows XP out of the box. With Linux, you first have to look for those Microsoft web fonts before you call a potential convert to have a look! Sad indeed."
When I go to use one of the newer Start buttons in windows that is all "mapped out" instead of a nice, simple, list, I don't know where anything is. Very frustrating. And what about Macs? Because stuff gets BIGGER when I mouse over it, that makes it easier to understand!? I hate the way KDE looks, but I don't pretend that Gnome is any better. It is my opinion.
Your whole argument starts off like a statement of fact when it is really only an opinion.
I hear the next one is 7. I think this illustrates why they should not be in the OS business, they can't even put simple integers in the right order let alone do complex calculations.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I looked over the Wikipedia article for Ext4, and it mentioned that Ext4 uses an H Tree for directory indexing. I looked over the H Tree article, but it is sparse, and I wasn't sure how it differs from a balanced B Tree. Could someone more mathematically inclined explain, or point me to some better information?
Thanks in Advance. (o:
Love sees no species.
Remember the howling that ensued during the Windows NT 3.51-4 switch, when 4 moved a bunch of graphics code into the kernel? :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Whatever happened to "stable" and "development" branch? Why do I have to install new bugs in order to get old bugs fixed?
Religious people tend to always find a religious meaning, let me be the first to give a secular reason to be thankful for this season. However slight and insignificant, Linux has gained ground this year. More hardware and applications work this year than last year, and once again, I am preparing my yearly X-mas LAN war like so many other years before. (Hey, I don't believe in religion/God, but I do find this time of year wonderful for partying. And thats exactly what I will do.)
I'm starting to re-evaluate my dire forecasts for Linux's future. In 2005, and 2006, I was fairly certain Linux users were in the edge of the Abyss. Linux may never become a huge player in the desktop market, but maybe just this once, the hundreds of thousands of rabid Windows and and to a lesser extent OSX users that are all hounding for the death and mutilation of the Linux OS and the charter it represents are held back for the time being.
Now, Linux user must not grow complacent or overconfident. But for this season, for this year and this next few days, we can all be a little less afraid than we are normally.
Perhaps more interesting is simply the release scheduling issue. I'm getting slowly ready to do a real 2.6.28, but I don't think anybody really wants the merge window to be around the holidays. So the question is really whether to (a) just make the -rc's go on a few more weeks, and do 2.6.28 after xmas I like this, because alledgely people are debugging things, and we'd get a more stable 2.6.28. or (b) release in a week or two, but just allow for possibly extending the merge window due to people being drunk on eggnog.. I like this because let's face it, we get more and better bug information after releases, and everything _should_ be ready for merging *before* the merge window anyway. or (c) some other crazy scheme that somebody comes up with in a drug-induced stupor. So I haven't quite decided on that thing yet, but I'm open to suggestions. Linus
wow. i've often looked at linux and thought the programmers must've been drunk while writing it. now we know.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Hi everyone,
Ever since 2.6.27.x came out I have not been able to compile from source and have the internet connection work correctly at all.
Basically I try to take old source configs and run them in the new kernels, but I get the same result.
Even binary Ubuntu kernel builds fail to run internet connections correctly...
Apparently this item may be related to it:
http://git.kernel.org/gitweb.cgi?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=fd6149d332973bafa50f03ddb0ea9513e67f4517
(regarding the reordering of TCP options... how do I fix it?)
Any advice very gratefully appreciated ...
M
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
should put a red and white dress as well as a white beard!
Oh oh oh oh!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Hmm, works for me. Börk Börk Börk!
Maybe you are both pressing the wrong keys. Try again.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
yes its probably always avoided the 'installer script', but you did have to download the file yourself to avoid issues with licenses. now i think emerge (the gentoo package management system) will download the files for you too
I hope this fixes the two annoyances I have with Linux:
Deleting a multi-gig file such as a TV recording locks up the OS so badly that other apps freeze. If mencoder is recording TV it will fail to keep up with the stream. AV sync is lost, ruining the rest of the recording.
2000? What operating systems / browsers didn't support UTF-8/16/32 in 2000? More like welcome to 1993.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Um, there's something seriously wrong with your machine.
cd /usr/share/doc; time ls | wc -l
real 0m0.021s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.004s
That folder contains just under 2000 files/directories. Repeating on /etc (with about 500 files) gives similar results.
Likewise deleting files shouldn't take so long
That's interesting. I got a doc dir time that, while not quite as fast, was still under a second.
I don't think I've got something fundamentally wrong. This computer has a recent kernel, and 4GB of RAM.
One likely cause of the ls slowness I reported is the large average size of the files in that directory, which I think requires inode chains to be traversed. Will ext4 speed this?
The other possible cause is the software RAID1 I've got that ext3 fs (/dev/md0).
I'd be interested to see how long it takes for other systems to delete a 10-20G file, and its effect on other processes.
Well, at the moment we don't really have the command line as a failsafe. When the X server crashes it seems to lock up the keyboard so Cntl-Alt-F1 doesn't switch to the VT (though I can usually ssh in, and restart X, but then I could also ssh -Y and restart X with a remote GUI, so the "commandline" doesn't really help here).
The problem is the currently we have three different things that can directly mess with the video hardware: The framebuffer, DRI and the X server, and so any of these can cause trouble. This can lead to worse than triple the number of bugs because interactions between these can cause trouble.
Its similar to how having a database server tends to be more reliable than having clients directly accessing the database files. Yes, the database server adds a single point of failure, but that is better than having 20+ nodes each of which can horribly corrupt the database files. While in principle GEM could fail, so could the hundred other modules in my kernel. And a bug in GEM is unlikely to be as serious as a bug in ext3/4.
So, Mac is technically years behind. Yet the user interface serves the needs of the users better. I find that slightly amusing - usability was again more important than technology.
Whilst there are good and worthy new features here it's going a bit far to call it innovation. Incremental improvement is more like it, and that's no bad thing.
I also have raid 1, but it doesn't take longer than a 10th of a second to list a few thousand files
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does that just mean the addition of new drivers or a revamp of the existing? I have some no name wifi usb that uses zd1211rw and it's pretty easy to make it fall over.
It works, but if I copy numerous small files it'll stall in quick order, but with one large file it's usually fine. Same with a movie, streaming it and just playing is fine, but skim through it too much and it'll drop the connection.
I use ubuntu intrepid, in the last version, not only would it drop, but a lot of times I could not bring it back to life without a reboot, even removing/reloading the module would result in errors.
So it's a little better, but it's still pretty unreliable.
I hope this fixes the two annoyances I have with Linux:
AFAIK Adding directory name indexing should solve that (other than if you have a laptop and need to spin the disk up before listing).
that's cool =) I'll try to update tomorrow and convert my /home/ to ext4
=)
Lynx / Links are real browsers, the problem is that ATI don't give a shit about accessibilty. Not only that, the same level of incompetence displayed by their web team was evident in their linux drivers a few years back.
××z× ×©×oe×s ×(TM)×××(TM)×××"
Loosely translated: Your mother.
One of the things I dislike about Unicode is that it lets my countrymen use their mother tounge.
Is this for a first fetch or for a cached fetch? I certainly get very quick directory listings while they remain cached.
I ran dumpe2fs /dev/md0 | grep features,
and the dir_index option is enabled.
Bummer, I guess I am stuck running on VirtualBox with my Intel BadAxe2 system until they decide to unfuck the Marvell SATA driver bug they threw in a few versions back. Since they hosed the Marvell driver I can't even boot to a live CD on this system. Oh well, at least there's always Mint or Fedora on VirtualBox or Ubuntu on my laptop until then.
First fetch
You probably want to turn directory indexing on. This is the default for newer versions of mkfs.ext3, but you have to switch it manually for older installations.
You could also switch to ext4, of course.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
On my system (FWIW reiser3 with indexes):
echo 3 >! /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
time \ls /usr/share/* > /dev/null /usr/share/* > /dev/null 0.06s user 0.01s system 3% cpu 2.224 total
\ls
echo 3 >! /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
~ % time ls /usr/share/* > /dev/null
/bin/ls -h -N --color=auto -F -v /usr/share/* > /dev/null 0.02s user 0.36s system 2%cpu 16.000 total
Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) was the 1st PC (non-apple) Graphical Desktop but DRI lost again to Microsoft and Windows 1.0 despite a great GEM development environent that included a true multasking, multitreaded real-time scheduler in the DRI FLEX-OS GEM. Gary Kildall was a great guy and it was a shame he lost to Bill Gates in the early PC days. >>>GEM/3 Desktop Release 3.11 Copyright (C) 1988 - Digital Research, Inc. November 3, 1988