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Linux 3.4 Released
jrepin writes with news of today's release (here's Linus's announcement) of Linux 3.4: "This release includes several Btrfs updates: metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much better metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools. There are other features: a new X32 ABI which allows to run in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions, another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module."
As much as Linux is doing rather well despite the plethora of different versions and security risk from the open code base, using it is rather risky for legal reasons as well. Red Hat stole much of Linux from SCO's Caldera, and are distributing it without paying royalties, meaning users could be on the hook for several hundred dollars a license and casting the future of Red Hat's offerings in jeopardy.. Litigation is ongoing now, and experts expect SCO to win a crushing verdict any day now. Linux has some neat features, but there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the community about its legal future.
Checksumming, built-in RAID support, snapshotting, transparent compression, online volume resizing, et alia. Basically, a lot of stuff that is very interesting at the enterprise level and to serious nerds who like to do strange things with their volume management, but nothing particularly important to the average user. It's basically a non-Oracle-owned version of ZFS, if you know what that is.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
well comparing it to lvm ignores a significant amount of what btrfs is
you would compare it with the entire stack
mdadm + lvm +ext 3/4
btrfs gets you:
Checksums on data
mirrored metadata on a single disk
lots of flexibility (online resizing and reshaping(single disk to raid 1 to 0 to single disk (or some variant of it) ( additionally raid5/6 like systems are coming)
easy striping and mirroring across different sized disks
snapshots
and probably more go check https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine, PulseAudio as a sound server (mixer) and ALSA to talk to the hardware, the rest (OpenAL, gstreamer, OSS, ESD) are either obsolete or totally different stuff unessential to audio playback. Earlier problems related to closed source softwares (Flash, Skype) or badly written HW drivers are mostly fixed.
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Most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious Slashdot post.
The new x86-64 ABI with 32-bit pointers is cool because it allows you to get the architecture improvements of x86-64, such as extra registers and RIP-relative addressing, without increasing memory usage substantially due to larger data structures. Also, 64-bit operations will just use the 64-bit registers. The vast majority of programs simply do not need the extra address space.
One reason that this ABI works so well is that the majority of the x86-64 instruction set uses 32-bit operations. Some operations involving pointers can be done in one instruction without using a temporary register to load a 64-bit constant.
Windows actually also can support this, in theory, but you're on your own in trying to communicate with the Win32 API. The linker option /LARGEADRESSAWARE:NO causes the NT kernel to limit your program's address space to 2^31 bytes.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
It is something the FS should handle. The "Just fix the program," is a bad answer because while maybe one could change Firefox, you'll find another program that can't be changed because the nature of what it does requires many syncs.
The low level systems should be robustly written to do what apps need, they shouldn't be telling apps "You can't do that."
Sync (or fsync) is the way to ensure that files are committed to disk and not just cached somewhere. This is a precondition for reliable "restore session" and similar functionality. However, application developers cannot rely on the OS to sync data in the background, because e.g. on a laptop where frequent disk access is both expensive (battery life) and risky (physical motion), the OS will cache as much as possible. If FF did not sync, the OS might delay writes for hours, which means a computer crash leads to lost hours of browsing history for the user. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but I can tell you that it is infuriating as a user to see a browser say, "whoops, I lost your tabbed windows, hope you weren't using the WWW for anything important!". Not having looked at the source myself, I don't know if it's possible to optimize FF's sync behavior; but I do know that it's impossible to eliminate it.
>like RAID support that doesn't cover RAID5 /blah
Is on the way targeted for 3.5 (was held for the fast offline check code)
>no online file system check
btrfs scrub start
"Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes."
I'm sorry my friend but you must be insane. I don't go uncleanly powering off my boxes intentionally but it still happens a couple times over the course of a month for various reasons (power flickers and the like). In my experience ext2 will fsck its way back to functionality 4 or 5 times tops before it won't fix or the data lost in the fixing is something critical.
Linux was a fun toy and nothing more before ext3 because ext2 is the most destructible filesystem on earth. Don't get me wrong, I played with that toy but that is all it was.
Why is the GNU logo the one that marks this story, when it's specifically about the Linux kernel, and not GNU userland? Among the keywords, GNU shouldn't even be there for this story, and the logo for this story should have just been the penguin logo.
I still remember that message, on Oct 1991, from a guy by the name of Linus Benedict Torvalds on comp.os.minix
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote :-) "
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !