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.'"

Comments

Nice start...

[TheNetAvenger]

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.

Re:Nice start...

[644bd346996]

In Vista, the DWM prevents GDI commands from being accelerated, which represents a regression relative to XP. The compositing does mean that moving windows can be smoother, but when the contents of the window change, Vista is liable to be slower (in addition to using twice as much memory for that window due to a pixel format mismatch between DirectX and GDI). Thus, legacy applications are not likely to be able to draw any faster on Vista than on XP.

Compare this with Quartz 2d Extreme, now known as Quartz GL (and not abandoned as you say). Existing applications can have their drawing accelerated at the cost of a potential for glitches or performance problems (due to limited bandwidth from the CPU to the GPU), and new applications can enable acceleration at the discretion of the developer.

It's Christmas!

[Chris_Jefferson]

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?

Re:2009

[Shetan]

The moderators are drunk on Christmas spirits.

Best Christmas Gift, in the Kernel way

[DiegoBravo]

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.

Re:2009

[_Sprocket_]

It's because every year is the year of Linux. Its just funny that some people haven't realized it yet.

Re:To clear somethings up

[Anpheus]

Let me put it to you in a way that should impress you: Kernel modesetting allows things like the Windows BSOD and the Mac Kernel Panic, which means that when your kernel dies you can get a direct, immediate error message with details.

Those STOP messages in BSODs are pretty important for figuring out what's wrong with Windows, I imagine with the open kernel of Linux, you could have much more detailed errors.

Re:To clear somethings up

[Anonymous Coward]

That really does not impress me.

You're not supposed to be impressed, you're supposed to be able to easily fix your graphics (or any other driver/configuration) setup with more-or-less your expected setup. Non-expert users will be impressed by that. Or at the very least less pissed off by the problem they're experiencing.

Cry me a river.

Yeah, fuck all those people who don't want to learn X configuration file formats off-by-heart! But I bet you'll be the first person bitching and moaning when vendor X doesn't provide Linux drivers and vendor Y's software doesn't support Linux. Newsflash genius, it's the masses that bring the recognition and the cash to make the vendors take notice. If you ever want Linux to do all those things that "Year of Linux" spouters have been droning on about for the last decade you're going to have to realise that making Linux useable, maintainable, and fixable by average Joe's with as little fuss as possible is the only thing that matters to the long term future of Linux as a desktop OS.

Re:To clear somethings up

[Kjella]

This allows people who are not so technically proficient to fix their computer without having to resort to using a command line.

Cry me a river.

May you be forced to debug some WTF message without any browser but lynx to help you. Of course, you're probably among the 1% that knows that lynx exists and is able to navigate your way to google and find the answers without a mouse to click. Great that you're built that way, but l33tnix is over there ------------> and the rest us of would like a system that isn't more arcane and user-unfriendly than necessary.

Re:For me, it's something else

[Tubal-Cain]

With Linux, you first have to look for those Microsoft web fonts before you call a potential convert to have a look!

That's never been my experiance (I stopped installing MS TrueType fonts when I realized they didn't do anything for me), but there is <whisper>Red Hat's Liberation fonts</whisper>

Re:To clear somethings up

[Bert64]

Or you can use a LiveCD to fix your linux install...
While it's rare to require the command line on windows, this is primarily because the cli isn't powerful enough to make it viable for most tasks.
Most tasks in linux are possible without the CLI too, but when you ask an expert for advice they will often tell you the CLI way because it's usually easier to explain... Trying to baby someone through a gui where they might have changed the color scheme or moved things around is very difficult, telling someone "type this" or giving them some text to copy/paste is much easier, assuming they can read.

It's not uncommon to require registry editing to fix windows problems, a task which is more arcane and complicated than anything on linux... The CLI on linux has man pages and help flags for individual commands, and text files you might need to edit usually have helpful comments... What does the registry have? a bunch of arbitrary text strings and undocumented numbers?