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Linux Kernel 2.6.35 Released
eldavojohn writes "Linus has announced the release of 2.6.35 for people to download and test after he found not a lot of changes between this week and last. The big features to look out for include: 'Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables' as well as various performance and graphics improvements. Linus also praised the community saying that 'regression changes only' after rc1 improved this time around and gave numbers to back it up saying 'in the 2.6.34 release, there were 3800 commits after -rc1, but in the current 35 release cycle we had less than 2000.' Good to see the process is becoming more refined and controlled after the first release candidate — hopefully there's no impending burnout."
Wow. The future has arrived.
Way to double-check your article, Timothy.
I understand why, but there are a ton of people out there that think OSS is OSS. You wonder why corporations are weary of OSS it's because of this. I really hope this project goes somewhere or Debian's kFreeBSD project works as well as I'm hoping.
Reminds me of this joke:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a software developer standing on the edge, about to jump off. I immediately ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
"Like what?"
"Well ... do you develop Closed Source or Open?"
"Open."
"Me too! Are you BSD or GPL?"
"GPL."
"Me too! Are you GPL v2 or GPL v3?"
"GPL v3!"
To which I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.
Linus sez
So 2.6.35 is out, go check
it out.
in the other TFA so I suppose it is out.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well its definitely the year of linux so far down in the guts of your cellphone that you don't know its there..
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Troll Review:
Believability: 1/10. I would have given you a zero, except I notice one comment here that seems to think it's a legitimate point.
Humour: 6/10. The punch line was honestly not expected, and elicited a smile from me. But it would need a bit more work to truly be hilarious.
Anger response: 4/10. A fairly good natured troll. It does little to incite anger, but I think that if you worked on it a bit more and made the story more plausible, you could be a real contender, inciting hundreds of flames.
Overall: 5/10. A nice effort, but a little too obvious, and the punchline just wasn't enough, given the length of the post. The punchline could have been delivered in one simple paragraph.
Perhaps, in the same sense that "improved the reliability of the rear differential" means nothing to 99%+ of automobile owners.
Oh crap, did I just make a car analogy?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Were I in their shoes, I would realise that commercial software comes with no more of a warranty than open source. Despite all the money they extract from you, commercial vendors provide you no warranty whatsoever and you have to agree to these terms before they will let you use the software.
You can also buy commercially supported versions of open source, there are a huge number of such products available now.
If you want a system so critical that it flies a plane then you typically write it in house (there aren't that many places that actually build planes). you test it extremely thoroughly (far more so than any commercial vendor does), and then you have multiple redundant backup systems too.
The reality is that many decision makers in business and government simply don't understand very much when it comes to technology, they buy into propaganda that open source is bad but will happily buy things like cisco asa firewalls without realising they run linux.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The fix for World of Warcraft under WINE made it into 2.6.35, though it is not mentioned in the changelist above. WoW 3.3.5 crashed under recent Linux kernels because it apparently made use of the "icebp" instruction, whatever that is; the kernel stopped sending SIGTRAP for icebp instructions in an earlier 2.6 build for whatever reason.
Diff of fix
Source code of file, showing the icebp fix merged in (search for "icebp")
WINE compat page
Do we still have to talk about "burnout" every time we mention kernel maintenance?
Yep. It isn't a meme unless it gets repeated over and over.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
Unlike Microsoft or some other big softare company/project, Linux really has one controlling hand. If Linus goes kaput tomorrow, face in his wheaties, it would take a non-trivial period of time to get someone up to speed and filling his shoes.
Sure, there are other "non-current" linux developers/maintainers, and there are many others who have been doing the job in the past. But that's an entirely different development model than the 2.6 tree has been, and there's nobody who "fills in" for Torvalds when he wants to take a break. The man is 40; he's going to have to slow down sooner than later. He's certainly not keeping up his percentage of code commits, nevermind the level of code (though the quality, quite possibly). He's got 3 daughters and a wife; the man has to sleep at SOME point.
That said, I'm really pleased to see the decrease in regressions. I was starting to think that it was all open source OSes that were going down the shitter of late, but I am pleased Linux is still improving (though I do still consider the removal of the anticipatory scheduler a regression).
It just makes me uneasy that anything as big as Linux has such a small point of failure. It's possible I'm overlooking the importance of the distro kernel teams and other people who contribute, or overlooking something else, but as it stands now, his continued pivotal position makes me uneasy.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You have to admit, it's somewhat disconcerting that there's nobody in his coattails to take over.
There are at least a couple of good developers who could easily take over starting with the maintainer of the linux-next tree and if there were a huge disagreement then I'm sure the Linux foundation can step in if need be.
The lack of a unified "stable" kernel for distros to pull from (given 2.6s continued march) and at the same time the lack of a "real" development/next-generation kernel makes me likewise uneasy.
You would only say that if you haven't been using Linux long enough to remember when it was exactly the way you wish for. Back in the 2.4.x / 2.5.x days, people got so tired of features taking so long to be ready they started backporting the changes from 2.5.x to 2.4.x essentially making both branches unstable. For all of the whining kernel releases are a lot less buggy with fewer distro deviations from mainline. And as a bonus features actually get better testing now because fewer changes need to be tested at a time.
After having lived through that transition I never want to go back.
There are tons of places on the internet for that. Try monster.com. "Wanted: Linux kernel hacker."
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