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Linux Kernel 2.6.31 Released
diegocgteleline.es writes "The Linux kernel v2.6.31 has been released. Besides the desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support mentioned some days ago, there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, new tools for using hardware performance counters, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon KMS, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, gcov support, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire, new drivers and small improvements. The full list of changes can be found here."
there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA
That quote shows how much of a train wreck Linux audio is.
It never took off? I've only ever used firewire for networking once, and that was for the sheer novelty of seeing if it could be done.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
And that part is exactly what is being discussed here.
Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Or more properly, KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux.
You have it backwards, we want more drivers, otherwise we'll go back to the days of next to nothing working for any device you pick off the shelves. Kernels are boring, once you have file systems, memory managers, etc, there's little to get excited about, and even then, it's all under the hood. Devices are what real users use.
Enhancements should come as a part of the OS, not the kernel. The main function of a kernel is to get along with all the hardware devices on the system. Drivers should be given a high priority.
Face your daemons!
I personally think this is a real pity. So much time is being spent on getting drivers implemented that new features and other kinds enhancements are being pushed back.
I would assume that the people writing drivers and the people doing core stuff are not the same people, so there's no "pushed back". Ideally you'd have driver writers employed by all the various hardware manufacturers, while core stuff likely only interests a much smaller group of companies that live higher in the stack (probably just system and support vendors).
Well driver problems are the real problem with Linux. It always has been. When push come to shove comparing Linux with other OS's even the Linux Zealots admit that it is a driver problem. Most kernel features will not directly effect us like driver issues. Once Linux fixes its driver problems then it should focus on getting more features in... However in the mean time, the kernel should be improved on what the kernel is supposed to do Manage Hardware interface with software. And Drivers help with the hardware interfacing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What evidence have you got that suggests driver development means other development is pushed back? Do you think the EXT4 developers take time off to write device drivers?
Lots of driver development means Linux has lots of driver developers. That probably suggests that hardware manufacturers actually try to get their stuff supported.
I'd argue that drivers should be modular and have no business being directly in the kernel in the first place - but that's just me.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Great - now if I compile these lovely drivers will they work on my buddy's (or more importantly, a user's) system running kernel 2.6.1? 2.6.22? 2.6.31? 2.4.5?
Dividing the source and binary out into separate files doesn't make it modular. The infrastructure to move the binaries around needs to be in place so that a driver can be loaded with little regard as to kernel version.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'd argue that drivers should be modular and have no business being directly in the kernel in the first place - but that's just me.
I don't anyone ever argued that drivers should not be modular, in fact that's why there's kernel modules. I'm guessing you're talking about one of the two general flamewars:
1) Monolithic kernel or microkernel
2) Stable ABI for drivers
The first is about making the kernel into a big message-passing daemon, which it turns out has a performance penalty and ultimately doesn't have big enough benefits because a kernel panic and a major subsystem hang/crash both are ugly and if the hardware is left in a borked state it might not really help.
The other is a stable ABI, which has been suggested about 234,533,458 times to date. My only real comment to that is that seeing how crappy many Windows drivers are, do you honestly want them making blobs for a 1% operating system which will get about as much priority, support and bugfixes? Drivers based on specs or donated source almost always suck less.
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GNU 1984 ->
Linux 1991 ->
KDE 1996 ->
Xorg 2004 ->
GNU started it all. It provides the philosophy, the tools and the license. Linux is just a nice milestone along the way.
An open source person calls it Linux, while a free software person calls it GNU/Linux.
Keeping binary compatibility limits infrastructure improvements that can be made. You're limited in what you can do to the kernel because of drivers that are sitting out there that expect binary compatibility. If we have drivers that can be loaded with little regard to the kernel version, we get into the quagmire that is Windows, where devices over 7 years old have a low chance of working. My scanner hasn't worked in Windows since XP SP1. It still works perfectly in the brand-spankingest new Linux distros.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Far more likely is that companies will behave exactly like they do in Windows - not bother updating their drivers for new versions. There is a lot of old hardware that simply doesn't work in Vista etc because there's no incentive for the company to fix the drivers.
Whereas if it's in the kernel, all the drivers can be fixed at the same time.
Because he is. Everyone can't be expected to be running the same version of the kernel I'm not running 2.6.1, but I do believe that my home system is running 2.6.28. Tieing driver development to a specific kernel release is insane. Look at the hoops Nvidia has to jump through to get drivers out. On Windows I download a driver - it works. For the last 14 years we've basically had three groups of drivers - Windows 9x, Windows 2k/XP, and Windows Vista/7. Outside of those broad groupings a manufacturer could release a driver and have it work on most any computer. Linux drivers have to be recompiled for every kernel release. Very, very few manufacturers are willing to stay on that treadmill, and so we get stuck with reverse engineered open source drivers that fall short of what the manufacturers could usually write themselves (just compare the open source Nvidia drivers to the Nvidia provided ones).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Got to love when you can update to the new kernel, it's like Santa is coming but for Linux nerds
Insightful?! You couldn't be more clueless.
How do you propose to fix the driver problem? The only way that gets fixed is when every hardware manufacturer writes their own drivers. That would only happen if Linux attained something like 10% market share.
In recent history (the last year or two) the majority (50.1-60%) of all commits to the kernel are drivers/driver update.
Also you forget that there isn't some company that dictates what work gets done on the kernel. There are many developers who work on areas they are want to work in. Are you telling me that linux should reject the FS brtfs because there is a non-name piece of hardware that isn't working yet?
Most kernel features will not directly effect us like driver issues.
Wrong again, My new hardware which I bought off newegg last week works fine in linux (yes I do a quick google search to make sure anyone isn't bitching about something major not working, but anyone who uses linux knows to do that). Because it works, any feature such as a file-system, scheduler improvement, or desktop memory management in low memory situations will improve my experience much more than adding a driver that I won't ever need or use.
It's quite difficult to get decent performance from USB2, because the design of the host controller is such that the CPU needs to be involved in the transfer. If the CPU doesn't respond fast enough (perhaps because you're trying to do actual work with the machine), performance suffers. The problem is less with quad-core CPU's, since you can just dedicate a core to USB when doing transfers.
Firewire and SATA controllers can handle transfers pretty much on their own. Supposedly USB3 can do the same.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It would also mean that drivers would be stuck on 32-bit x86. Great.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
That would make it easier to manage as the number of them increases.
One of the great advantages of Linux is that improvements can be implemented for lots of devices at once.
I guess a lot of manufacturers will release binary-only drivers, but even if they are buggy, that doesn't leave in any worse state than we are already - those manufacturers aren't releasing drivers for Linux in the first place.
It means people will look at the packaging, notice that it says Linux support, and then find out that it doesn't actually work, and will then blame Linux. Manufacturer-written drivers are fairly universally crap.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Everyone can't be expected to be running the same version of the kernel
Why not? Upgrades are free.
Look at the hoops Nvidia has to jump through to get drivers out.
The only hoop they really need to jump through is opening their source.
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The article you're probably thinking of is State of Sound in Linux Not So Sorry After All.
Good article, but I've got to point out one really bad piece of misinformation this damn fool made...
"If users need remote sound (and few do), one should just be easily able to map /dev/dsp over NFS, and output everything to OSS that way, achieving network transparency on the file level as UNIX was designed for (everything is a file), instead of all these non UNIX hacks in place today in regards to sound."
<sigh> OK, let's break this down. First, you can't export a character device over the network via NFS. Or rather, you can export the character device file - but if you then attempted to write to a remote machine's /dev/dsp this way, you'd instead wind up writing to the local sound card.
Second, a naive approach like that doesn't do anything to manage the timing issues inherent with audio over the network. In some cases you don't care about latency but you do care about having the sound play uninterrupted - for instance, a "shuffle" sound in a solitaire game. /dev/dsp accessed over a network filesystem wouldn't do that for you - it would play part of the file as soon as it got it, and then, if too much time passed before it received the rest of the sound, there'd be dead silence in there. And then, consider the case of a video player: if a packet or two is lost along the way it's not a big deal, but what you care about is that packets are played in the order that they're intended. You need to strike a balance between latency and packet loss. /dev/dsp over the network isn't going to do anything like this for you, as all the packets are likely to go via TCP.
It's true that most people probably don't need network-transparent audio anyway (I don't) - but suggesting shipping out /dev/dsp over NFS is just brain-dead...
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