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Linux 2.6.34 Released

Posted by kdawson on from the fresh-bits dept.

diegocg writes "Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version adds two new filesystem, the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware balloon driver, the 'kprobes jump' optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the 'perf lock' tool, cross-platform analysis support), several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (RFC 5082) and private VLAN proxy arp (RFC 3069) support, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements. See the full changelog here."

29 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. a filesystem for flash devices by deathcow · · Score: 5, Funny

    > a filesystem for flash devices

    here we go again, unless we stop supporting flash, Apple has refused to distribute dual-boot Linux enabled iPads

    1. Re:a filesystem for flash devices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      No. Flash support is in Linux and Apple indeed refuses to distribute dual-boot Linux enabled iPads.

    2. Re:a filesystem for flash devices by jo_ham · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm more concerned that this is a slashvertisment for Linux.

      Slashdot used to be about news for nerds, stuff that mattered!

      How far it has fallen.

    3. Re:a filesystem for flash devices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      One of the new features of 2.6.34 kernel is Woooooosh owerflow protection

    4. Re:a filesystem for flash devices by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, it's a kdawson post - he's notorious for posting Slashvertisements for the latest brand of rip off Snake Oil. I mean, "Linux", come on, what's that supposed to be? Some shoddy knock off of BSD/MacOS Unix? I bet it's just the periscope of a Microsoft patent submarine.

      --
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  2. KVM by VTI9600 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance

    KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?

    1. Re:KVM by IBBoard · · Score: 4, Informative

      Erm, quite a lot? Intel use it as one of their distinguishing factors between upper and lower tier chips (albeit one that they put in data sheets but don't make overly obvious).

    2. Re:KVM by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

      Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance

      KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?

      Xen doesn't get all the hype. From what I've seen everyone is ditching xen and redhat is leading the way. Not that I mean to imply that xen deserves to get ditched, it's great too.

    3. Re:KVM by VTI9600 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm sure you are disappointed that your 200Mhz Pentium Pro doesn't support vt-x, but the rest of the world owns (or will soon purchase) processors that do. To see what I mean, just go to newegg.com. 63 out of the 76 (83%) desktop-class processors they sell have virtualization technology built in. 78 out of the 80 (98%) of the server-class (ones that really matter) processors they sell support it.

      And, if you still don't believe me, check out this page on Wikipedia for a list of the Intel processors that support VT-X. Among the crapload of processors listed, you'll notice that 100% of their newest, i3, i5 and i7 processors have virtualization support.

    4. Re:KVM by icebraining · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, but then you have dick moves like my CPU supporting VT (AMD Neo) but being disabled by the Bios with no option to enable it. Thanks HP!

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    5. Re:KVM by ckaminski · · Score: 4, Informative

      KVM is not controlled by any company, and is done the "right way" according to Linus and friends.

      Whereas Xen is nominally controlled by Citrix.

      Either way, both are GPL and both are compatible with libvirt so it seems a moot point. Use whatever your distro comes with.

      What I really want is OpenVZ in the Kernel. Sometimes, I just want a lightweight VM...

    6. Re:KVM by oatworm · · Score: 3, Informative

      We have a bunch of HPs in the office that I thought had this problem too. However, it turns out HP hides the VT-X enable flag under the Security Options in the BIOS (I can only imagine how that makes any sense, but whatever), at least on their desktop machines. Could be worth a look.

  3. All Very Nice But... by mrpacmanjel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is the RT2500-based chipset working reliably now?

    The developers switched to a new driver model because it's "better".

    If "better" means once-working wifi chipset becomes grossly unstable, previous drivers are considered "legacy" hence will not compile on kernels later that 2.6.29 and current drivers are as stable as a "one-legged man playing football".

    A few years later and 2.6.34 is released - is it working yet?

    Considering the RT2500 chipset is present many wifi products the current state of "stability" is woefully inadequate.

    (and don't get me started on f***ed up i845 drivers for xorg! - worked fine under previous kernels & xorg an update later by both - graphics performance royally screwed and many crashes)

    Apart from that - happy Linux user for over 10 years!

    1. Re:All Very Nice But... by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is the RT2500-based chipset working reliably now?

      Here's how the dismal state of support for that chipset was explained to me.
      The answer is probably that mine has worked for years and yours hasn't. The really annoying thing is a lot of slightly different things have come out under that name and even under MS Windows if you don't use the driver that came with it you are stuffed - a driver for another undocumented variant won't help.

    2. Re:All Very Nice But... by HateBreeder · · Score: 4, Informative

      The problem is that the RT2500 chipset is proprietary, closed-source that's "maintained" by a Taiwanese manufacturer who doesn't care about his users at all and only wants to sell cheap hardware and as much of it as possible.

      Why would you get quality, polished drivers that are updated to support newer paradigms in newer kernels if the manufacturer isn't cooperating?

      I think it's magic that these drivers work at all.

      Next time, buy better kit with a reputable mfr that cares about linux support.

      --
      Sigs are for the weak.
    3. Re:All Very Nice But... by mrpacmanjel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem for me is that the "legacy" drivers were rock solid and I never thought about it until kernel 2.6.30 & greater were released.

      My wifi was ultra-reliable under the "legacy" drivers.

      Since the newer drivers were released I have had nothing but problems.

      What changed between old and new drivers?

    4. Re:All Very Nice But... by stsp · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem is that the RT2500 chipset is proprietary, closed-source that's "maintained" by a Taiwanese manufacturer who doesn't care about his users at all and only wants to sell cheap hardware and as much of it as possible.

      Well, actually, Ralink has for a long time been providing documentation to open source developers writing drivers for their devices, without requiring an NDA.

    5. Re:All Very Nice But... by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Informative

      Except they did work, and worked better, in the last version. The kernel maintainers swapped out the working version for a flakey version, and now have made enough changes that the working version won't work even if you compile it in manually.

      Did it occur to you to actually read the post you were replying to? This was in all there, not behind a link or anything.

      --
      Comment of the year
  4. Excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    With releases like these, it's no wonder M$ is getting worried. Been running this kernel a while now on our production servers (even from before it it was tagged release, I like running bleeding edge in order to get the most performance from my company's hardware investment) and save from a few data corruptions issues, it's been rock stable! I have to play with the new KVM support later on one of the servers with the least amount of customers on it (couple of hundreds), looks nice!

    Sadly... it looks like my company is looking at going with Windoze for a few important servers because of a few outtages. I know it was because of faulty hardware, because I had just compiled a custom kernel for those servers with just the right flags needed (I want to get the most performance!) but this must have triggered a hardware bug because the kernel worked fine on my work laptop. Sigh...

    Anyway, keep up the good work!

    1. Re:Excellent by 1s44c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You don't put bleeding edge or custom kernels on production servers without seriously heavy testing. You would not run production stuff on a windows beta release would you? It's the same thing.

      Stick to proper releases of good distributions and customize as little as possible. You will get a system many times more stable than anything MS has ever come up with.

    2. Re:Excellent by 1s44c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah... that's not going to happen. Not only am I good at what I do (seriously, how many system administrators even take their time to compile custom kernels nowadays for maximum performance?), but a very close relative is also the CEO. I bet people here even use us for their hosting :)

      There is a massive amount of difference between being able to compile a custom kernel and being in the kind of situation where it's the right thing to do. 'Good at what you do' doesn't mean technically brilliant, it means doing the right thing at the right time.

      Keeping your job because you are related to the CEO is the kind of nepotism that kills otherwise good companies.

    3. Re:Excellent by 1s44c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What, can't be. According to slashdot all Linux administrators are born as black belt Linux experts and Windows administrators are all people that got lucky bumbling through their MSCE exam.

      Noone is born a black belt at anything. You have to work at it. There are inexperienced Linux admins just like there are inexperienced windows admins. The ones who can't or don't want to learn end up on windows eventually.

    4. Re:Excellent by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because regardless of what the grandparent said, the above post is insightful. It's also interesting to those who know nothing of Linux but do know of Windows servers falling over because of a mandatory patch, for example. For essential systems, a working stable configuration does indeed make more sense than a cutting edge potentially buggy one.

      I hate to trot out Ubuntu as an example, but why do you think they have Long Term Support releases? High availability production servers are not expected to run Ubuntu Server 9.10; It has a lot of patches which may break features which worked in previous versions (just look at the list of dependencies removed when you upgrade). I would expect a significant number of those servers to be running 8.04 LTS, and to potentially upgrade to 10.04.1 when it becomes available (the LTS version of LL still being relatively new and untested).

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    5. Re:Excellent by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wow, two wooshes in one thread.

      Also:

      The ones who can't or don't want to learn end up on windows eventually.

      That's the dumbest fucking thing I have ever read in my life.

      You're seriously delusional if you think that Windows servers are inferior to Linux servers in any way. (Well, "any" way is an overstatement, but any practical way.) If you're doing communication, Exchange is great. If you're doing filesharing/single sign-on, Active Directory is also great. IIS is as good, or better, than Apache at all benchmarks, and has more features. Decent support for technologies like OLAP pretty much only exist on Windows at the moment.

      Nobody's going to argue that Windows is cheaper than Linux. But arguing that it's worse, that's harder to make-- unless of course you know fuck-all about Windows and just repeat FUD on Slashdot all day.

      --
      Comment of the year
  5. GPU switching by TheLink · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Some laptops have two GPUs, a low-power and inefficient GPU and a high-power and powerful GPU. Users should be able to switch to one or another at runtime. In this version, Linux adds support for this feature. You need to restart X, though.

    How do you restart X without affecting all your GUI apps? If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.

    For some people, "only having to restart X" will only save a bit of time over rebooting the whole laptop, reconfiguring bios etc.

    --
    1. Re:GPU switching by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Informative

      How do you restart X without affecting all your GUI apps? If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.

      If you are using something like Gnome or KDE, it can probably save your GUI session. Individual applications will have to deal with their contents, but many of them already do that. At least Firefox and Openoffice can restore their sessions after being terminated.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    2. Re:GPU switching by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Good question, but wrong project. The kernel is only responsible for initializing, suspending, resuming and lately modesetting of the hardware and it seems that is possible now. There probably needs to be some userspace code to pull information from one GPU and load it into the other but that's for the xorg server to do. They're probably working on it but it won't be in a Linux (the kernel) release announcement.

      --
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  6. The most exciting thing is by Advocadus+Diaboli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    that this kernel already got device IDs for next years Intel hardware. This is something completely new, since Intel so far had a much more closed policy and wouldn't have told device IDs prior to the chipset release.

    Now there is a really good chance that driver code will make it into the distribution kernels until the new hardware will be released for mass production. So the chances that brand new hardware will work without any flaws in 2011 are higher than ever before.

    Thanks to Intel for this change in their policy. This was a small step for Intel (since everybody "knows" that they will release new chips every year) but a giant leap for providing Linux hardware compatibility right "out-of-the-box".

  7. In reading kernel changelogs... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm always amused by at least one strange juxtaposition of the big-serious-enterprise-server stuff that the corporate devs are most interested in and the oddball hobby projects that can get included as well, so long as they follow the kernel process.

    In this case, I think it was all the "multi-petabyte scaleable filesystem, esoteric btrfs improvements, kernel virtualization networking stuff, gamecon: add rumble support for N64 pads" that did it.