Linux 3.5 Released

diegocg writes "Linux 3.5 has been released. New features include support for metadata checksums in Ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with systemtap/perf, a simple sandboxing mechanism that can filter syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Here's the full changelog."

Comments

Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Teresita]

Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Kjella]

Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.

As usual it was Apple coming in doing something people have done before, only much better. I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first - and unusable. It was just like a PC, except with a stylus instead of a keyboard which we all know is so efficient. Lately I've been a bit surprised though because Apple has taken real technological leadership in some areas, like the display on the iPad 3 and the retina MBP. Things where you can truly say that there hasn't been anything like that offered ever before. Makes me both want to love their gear and hate their walled in garden.

Re:Ha ha he he

[mikael_j]

There are plenty of Linux "on phones and tablets" fanboys. They are sometimes derisively called "fandroids". And some of them are quite obnoxious...

Re:Ha ha he he

[cpu6502]

Linux would still have failed if it had not been backed by google. Right now we'd all be discussing Apple iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, plus some ubuntu-derived distribution that only the engineers know how to install on their phone.

BUT along comes Google and they used their resources to make Android Linux a success, by selling direct to manufacturers. Now we just need Google to consider porting Android to AMD/Intel desktops.

Re:Ha ha he he

[TwinkieStix]

A group of people inside of a sub group of a subgroup are quite obnoxious. Sounds like some Slashdot commenters. Wait.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we just need Google to consider porting Android to AMD/Intel desktops.

Why? To have a Linux competitor to Windows 8?

There are plenty of Linux distros to fill just about everyone's needs.

What I would really like to see is someone do something about the mono-kernal.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

The display in the Macbook Pro isn't produced by Apple.

Re:Ha ha he he

[El_Oscuro]

Also on ereaders. According to Wikipedia, almost all of the major brands run Linux.

Re:Ha ha he he

[siddesu]

Now we just need Google to consider porting Android to AMD/Intel desktops.

Android runs fine on x86. You can even download it and compile it yourself, if you're into that kind of BSDM.

Re:Ha ha he he

[jones_supa]

Yes, but Apple has the power to choose the components, which makes a difference to what we see on the marketplace.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS (which is BSD based) runs the majority of phones and tablets in use, while Android has the majority of the rest.

Citation? I smell an Apple fanboy.

http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/screen-shot-2011-06-21-at-6-28-47-am.png

Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with a majority of smartphone owners (51.8%) using an Android OS handset.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494

For tablets, Apple has a lead, but the numbers are quite low for total number of devices.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/android-reaches-39-tablet-os-market-share-standing-on-amazons-shoulders/

So overall, Android is king in marketshare. Not sure how you got "apple runs majority of phones and tablets". Maybe "only tablets, for now, because of headstart".

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Google would have failed if it had not been for Linux.

Re:Ha ha he he

[zixxt]

Linux has not won any kind of OS battle, much less on phones or tablets.

Linux is the Major OS of Servers, Super Computers, Television Sets, the God Particle

iOS (which is BSD based) runs the majority of phones and tablets in use, while Android has the majority of the rest.

Tablets yes, Phones not even close!

While it's true that Android phones tend to use a Linux kernel, that's not really a requirement. It's just convenient. Android could run on any kernel. BSD, Windows, Hurd, whatever.. And all Android apps would continue to function.

Android is the OS, not Linux. Linux is just the current kernel, and has absolutely no bearing on Android as a platform.

If Android can run on these other kernels as you say then why is not being done? Android outside of Linux is released under a permissive license, if any other kernels could do the Job Linux does I'm petty sure Google would of chose it, but alas no other kernel is up to snuff.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

got your feelings hurt?

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS (which is BSD based) runs the majority of phones and tablets in use.

Wrong.

On phones, Android currently has the largest percentage, having overtaken Symbian for the lead in early 2011. It has had twice as much share as iOS since late 2010 having overtaken it in early 2010. (Refer to Gartner and IDC figures for sales and shipments). Android currently sits in the 55-60% range with iOS in the 20-25% range.

For tablets, yes iOS leads with about 60% with Android just under 40%; however, noting that there are more smartphones in use than tablets and combining tablet with phone use percentages, iOS most certainly does NOT "run the majority of phones and tablets in use".

Android on tablets did not start strong; however, I fully expect Android tablet use to overtake iOS tablet use as well.

Re:Ha ha he he

[larry bagina]

There are three parts to retina graphics. 1. Is the hardware. Apple doesn't manufacture it, but they do select it. 2. Is the Operating system. The physical pixels double but the virtual pixels stay the same and the OS displays double-sized (@2x) images if available or pixel-doubles existing image (and they look like a bag of ass). 3. is the software -- it needs to provide double-sized (@2x) images.

Samsung or Dell can use a high-DPI screen but they're limited on OS modifications and convincing third party software to support it. Maybe android is better about scalable graphics, but Apple still has the advantage of synchronizing the hardware and software.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual Apple came much, much later than others and thus could use newer technology.
Funny how times have changed. Apple was utter shit back in the early days of personal computing when it took more than a rounded rectangle to be innovative.
Praising Apple like they've revolutionized anything is a slap in the face of those who actually did pioneer.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD would have taken its place.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Google would still have failed if it had not leveraged Linux. Right now we'd all be discussing how Microsoft killed off a small startup that couldn't pay the licensing fee for Windows server, plus some Mac-hosted search engine that was only useable to those who could afford it.

  BUT along comes Stallman, Linus, Linux, OpenBSD enthusiasts and a whole cadre of hobbyists, engineers and others contributing to a powerful platform enabling all kinds of experiments to go mainstream and develop into hugely popular and successful companies and projects.

Now we just need software patents to be invalidated and let the natural competition and drive of the market to resume it's aggressive buildup of new software technology.

Re:Ha ha he he

[sjames]

Of course, IOS would have failed were it not backed by a big pile of corporate cash as well.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.

We still haven't gotten rid of the Microsoft tax. We are seeing a lot of patent licenses from Microsoft for folks running android:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/microsoft-collects-license-fees-on-50-of-android-devices-tells-google-to-wake-up/

According to charts in the blog post, 55 percent of Android devices by worldwide revenue are subject to patent license agreements between Microsoft and original design manufacturers, such as Compal. Moreover, 53 percent of Android smartphones by unit share in the United States are subject to patent license agreements between Microsoft and original equipment manufacturers, such as Samsung and HTC.

Re:Ha ha he he

[John Bokma]

Yeah, and the interwebz too, right? I really don't understand those "what ifs". There's no way to prove if you're right or wrong. It's more a religion thing that anything else.

Re:Ha ha he he

[roc97007]

I think Microsoft to a certain extent left themselves flapping in the wind, by pursuing late, and insisting on pushing a desktop paradigm on other devices even when it's apparent that it wasn't a good fit. They seemed to think that "it's Windows" was a good enough selling point that it didn't have to be useable. And that allowed other approaches to run away with the market. Even with Windows 8, they're still insisting on the same interface everywhere, this time, it appears, by dumbing down the desktop, in the interest of uniformity, to something that works on a smaller touch device.

Re:Ha ha he he

[ZosX]

Android scales graphis just fine IMO. if you run something like an older game that was designed for a lower dpi device, it just scales it. Generally you have the option to allow it to run smaller in its native resolution as well. Many of the android games use vectors for sprites, so asides from backgrounds looking pixelated, the sprites generally look pretty decent. I dunno, I went from a phone with an 800x480 display to a tablet with a 1280x800 display. If you ask me, android, at least ICS and beyond, handles high resolutions very well. It will scale the UI to match the dpi of the phone. I don't think apple has any real advantage here.

Re:Ha ha he he

[ZosX]

yeah, but will all the arm optimized apps that run native code work? android on mips faces the same problem.

Re:Ha ha he he

[epyT-R]

and if you buy that gear, you support their garden of eden. knowledge is verboten.

Re:Ha ha he he

[epyT-R]

increasing display resolution by itself isn't new technology, nor is it apple specific. personally i'd prefer having more desktop space, but I guess most people are too blind to handle anything 'virtually' larger than 1440x900..

Re:Ha ha he he

[cheesybagel]

Android not only supports different resolutions but also different aspect ratios. There is a reason why Apple keeps selecting the same aspect ratio over and over again...

Re:Ha ha he he

[siddesu]

All apps I've tried worked okay. Even hardware extras like bluetooth and USB storage get recognized without any problems. Maybe I simply haven't hit any apps that use native libraries, but then I think very few do.

Re:Ha ha he he

[grouchomarxist]

Android already runs on Intel, but it would take some work to make the UI work properly for the desktop.

However, at this point Google is more interested in making Chrome OS the desktop OS.

Re:Ha ha he he

[grouchomarxist]

No, they have to be rebuilt for Intel.

Re:Ha ha he he

[elashish14]

Yes, I agree... our Android vs iOS discussions are impressively civil!

Re:Ha ha he he

[Tough Love]

Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.

Proving conclusively that the only thing keeping Microsoft in business is their illegal market control of PC makers. Which is showing signs of cracking. Dell is offering Ubuntu preloaded again, this time on ultrabooks. The last half dozen machines I have bought all came with Linux preloaded from various vendors, and in no case was a Microsoft tax paid on any of them.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Runaway1956]

You have one way of looking at it. Some of us have another view of the matter.

Anyone who does NOT want to rely on Mac or Microsoft, is going to choose - what, exactly? There are several Unix-likes out there, so Linux isn't a shoe-in. What is it about Linux, that made Google choose it over any other Unix-likes?

My money is on the pervasive GPL. The GPL fits Google's agenda better than any other licensing scheme, and that's pretty much the end of that story.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Runaway1956]

Thank you. Religion. The same people who scoff at Christians, Jews, and Muslims for believing in a God, are blind to the fact that they are zealots of another sort. Thank you.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anachragnome]

"Android is the OS, not Linux. Linux is just the current kernel, and has absolutely no bearing on Android as a platform."

Just testing this out... Test #2 (hiding in a negatively modded post/no title mod)
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/censored-slashdot-post.htm [cryptome.org]

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you use Binary Translation with SW as the currently shipping x86 phones do.

Re:Ha ha he he

[countach74]

Linux has not won any kind of OS battle, much less on phones or tablets.

Linux is the OS of choice in many different areas. A more accurate statement would be: "Linux has won almost every kind of OS battle."

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, linux works perfectly for what I need to do on my computer, but Android is pretty much the worst phone OS.

Re:Ha ha he he

[man_of_mr_e]

It has been done. Why would you think google would choose another kernel? Today, Linux has the best hardware support, so naturally Linux is the best choice. But that doesn't mean it has to always be that way.

My point is that there's nothing about Android that is Linux specific, and they could port to any other kernel that they wanted to without affecting any client applications. Android is the OS in this case, not Linux.

http://bsdroid.org/tiki-index.php

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think of it as "free as in beer." Think of it as "providing free labor for multi-billion dollar corporations to use as part of their hardware development process."

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

The "microsoft tax" nonsense sounds less and less convincing with each point of market share that apple picks up in the desktop market. The reality is and was that linux on the desktop has always sucked. Pick your distribution, I don't care. It has always provided a crap user experiene and this is why it failed. The office suites available sucked. The graphics tools available sucked compared to photoshop. Interoperability between apps was a huge problem. Upgrades were a huge problem.

So, sure, scurry off to lame "microsoft tax" rationalizations, but the reality is that linux on the desktop would cost employers more money than it would save even without 'network effects.' It sucked because linux fanboys are of the delusion that usability design menas glossy icons and is something that programmers can do in their off time. Linux on the desktop, despite being free, has failed because it sucked.
     

Re:Ha ha he he

[sonamchauhan]

The Linux desktops of old got transformed into Linux server, were gratefully used by Google for their server infrastructure.

Then, as mobile phone hardware began to resemble the desktops of yesteryear, Google went "hmmmm..."

And so it flows.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Barsteward]

yes, but those other zealots probably believe in something that is tangible and not vapourware like a god

Re:Ha ha he he

[icebraining]

Its funny that in a post criticizing the critics of religion, you call all Christians, Jews and Muslims "zealots".

Re:Ha ha he he

[Teun]

Without Android the Nokia version of Linux might have taken off quite well.
There were and are plenty of consumers not endeared to the Apple ways and MS was never a contender.

Considering Nokia stopped official development of their Linux system around the time of their engagement with MS the N900 and N9 are even now still remarkably useful phones.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Zontar The Mindless]

The same people who scoff at Christians, Jews, and Muslims for believing in a God, are blind to the fact that they are zealots of another sort.

You, like lots of other Abrahamic religionists, are projecting. Lack of belief in the Abrahamic Deity != belief in some deity named "No Deity".

It's like the mediaeval assumption that, if you didn't worship God, you worshipped the Devil--and it's no more true today than it was then. Unfortunately, it's true that some people cannot accept the idea of not worshipping, so they adopt this false dichotomy instead, and try to back it up with circular reasoning.

It also implies that agnostics and atheists are Satanists, which is preposterous, since Satanism is simply changing the name but not the core tenet of the Abrahamic religions, and agnostics and (especially) atheists are not theists.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Teun]

The MS tax is a reality, be it the payments Android manufacturers make or the fact you can hardly get a laptop without Windows pre-installed.

The office suites available sucked. The graphics tools available sucked compared to photoshop.

That's obviously crap, sure we all like to drive a Mercedes S-class but every other modern car will get us safely and reliably to our destination.

For the vast majority of computer users Libre Office and The Gimp are quite adequate.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Teun]

I'm fairly sure during the past few weeks I've seen an article about this subject though it might have been based on an other article.
Or I'm confused with some other site that published it.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

It's not funny, it's what they should have been aiming for the entire time.

Why is Android doing so well? Lack of competition. They were trying to "beat" Microsoft in a field owned by Windows, and let's face it, Windows will own the desktop as long as there continues to be a desktop, and Windows also owns most of the server market. Windows is just too good, because they have no real competition, either on the desktop, or as a network operating system, and they're also extremely competitive in the server market, and continuously getting better than their competition.

Anyway, that's why Teh Lunix should have been focused on the mobile market. Phone OS was a mess, it was just something slapped together to ship a product out the door. The only smartphones were Palm (which was dying), and Blackberry, which wasn't very interested in being a programmer's platform (BB is a great mobile messaging device- their downfall was losing focus and straying from that niche; their competition still isn't better, the problem is BB's customers have lost confidence in them as a company. IMO Microsoft should buy them out eventually, because BES is far superior to MS ActiveSync).

So now, finally, Linux is on mobile platforms... but the problem is the same. Just like how IBM is the "sugar daddy" for Linux competing with Microsoft on the desktop, now Google is the "sugar daddy" for Android Linux, and oh wow, it's once again a pawn in a tech industry war against Microsoft.

The tragedy is Linux is always looking for someone to sell it's soul to in order to "beat" Microsoft. Had they focused on just being a good OS, they would have been far better off, and still had it's soul.

Re:Ha ha he he

[BanHammor]

I'd advise to pick and choose a little, and turn about with a distro that is always stable for you. I'm fine with Mageia/KDE.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck did this get modded "insightful"? iPads and iPhones already have different aspect ratios (1.33 vs. 1.5).

Re:Ha ha he he

[arkane1234]

Sure it's produced by Apple.
It's manufactured by someone else, however.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone simply scoffs at them for being stupid, that's all.

Re:Ha ha he he

[arkane1234]

Take a look at those global warming nuts again

Hoa boy, here we go with the religious nutjob bs again.

Re:Ha ha he he

[arkane1234]

... the same goes for iOS & OS/X...
Not sure of the comparison.

Re:Ha ha he he

[arkane1234]

They are sometimes called "homosexuals".

Why, because you keep getting fucked by them?

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much of this is timing. When MS did their tablets it was years ago, and they did it on the hardware available at the time. It was bulky/heavy and expensive. With time comes cheaper/faster/lighter hardware...

Re:Ha ha he he

[Zappy]

Windows CE/WindowsMobile did this mostly correct and almost transparant to the software supporting VGA displays when QVGA was the norm on smartphones years before apple invented the smartphone.

Re:Ha ha he he

[ZosX]

That's what I was thinking too. The IQ level of slashdot is rapidly diminishing.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Dr Modesto]

What you say is true, however I believe a significant part of the Android's success not just that it was an alternative, but that it was not tied to a manufacturer.

Re:Ha ha he he

[ZosX]

What?? There are x86 phones?

Re:Ha ha he he

[cheesybagel]

Actually I think that if Android never showed up the possibility of WebOS or MeeGo succeeding would have been much greater.

Re:Ha ha he he

[cheesybagel]

They only need to add fat binaries to Android for it to work. Besides eventually the bytecode language will be fast enough. There are already a lot of people using Javascript for a lot of things you wouldn't think of using a language like that a couple of years back and it is much harder to make a language like that go fast than the Java like code Google compiles to run on Dalvik.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.

Smart Phone manufacturers who base their products on Linux still have to pay the "Microsoft tax", so I don't know what your point is.

The only company that has refused to pay up so far is Google, but that may change if Microsoft ever decides to risk taking them to court.

Re:Ha ha he he

[grouchomarxist]

There is at least one, the Lava Xolo X900 released in India: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/

Re:Ha ha he he

[gbjbaanb]

I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first - and unusable. It was just like a PC

and now, with Windows 8, we have tablets that are just like the PC... only now its the PC that's unusable :)

Re:Ha ha he he

[gbjbaanb]

Linux always succeeded - only not anywhere you can see it.

Linux still runs 80%+ of the world's internet, Linux runs a vast majority of embedded devices. This is the reason Google got into it - it already was there when Google appeared and started to think "what web OS do we use for our HPC system" - it was pretty obvious to them to use the market leader in those arenas - Linux - and when they decided to go for an embedded phone device, they again chose the market leader in that area - Linux.

Linux made Google big, not the other way round.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, Linux has the best hardware support, so naturally Linux is the best choice.

Actually, mobile phones and tablets are probably the only place in the computing world where that argument isn't relevant.

Mobile phones run almost-entirely customized hardware. That's why my Galaxy Tab 10.1, which has been out for over a year, still only has full hardware support from the official Samsung ROM. (The camera doesn't work, and I think hardware acceleration only came fairly recently.) It's stupid, and it's wasteful, and there's no reason it has to be this way. But my point is that almost none of a modern phone's hardware is supported by core Linux. Basically, the CPU is supported, and that's it. The reason none of this stuff makes its way into core Linux is that it changes completely from one phone -- and even from one version of a phone -- to the next. So while you might be able to integrate all the drivers you need for a Nexus One into mainline Linux, it doesn't get you anything, because the Nexus S uses totally different hardware, and the Galaxy Nexus uses totally different hardware, and the Nexus 7 uses totally different hardware, and the Nexus Q uses totally different hardware. And I'm deliberately choosing Google-sponsored products where the drivers actually are released; as NVIDIA and AMD (if nobody else) have taught us, you can make drivers for Linux and get around the requirement of releasing the source.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, sadly that's the price you have to pay for the influx of all these Apple fanboys. It was markedly better when we had only Linux fanboys...

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not because of the GPL. It's because of drivers and the general availability of software. Linux is the Windows of the UNIX world. "Everyone" uses it and it has the most support, most work done on it, and most hardware support.

Re:Ha ha he he

[DrXym]

Android support different resolutions just fine, but as a developer I can tell you what a gigantic pain in the ass this is. Layouts may look fine in one layout or resolution and terrible in another so you spend an inordinate amount of time fine tuning them to cope, or you multiply your pain by implementing specific layouts for specific device formats. When tablets turned up, the existing ldpi, mdpi, hdpi model proved inadequate so Android lets you write layouts that only fire when resolution is horizontally greater than some amount or other criteria but this only works in 3.x+. There are things you can do to keep the pain down (e.g. decompose layouts so you can reuse stuff) but it's still pain. Testing time also increases since you must test frequently in different devices and profiles to ensure it works.

You can get a flavour of the pain by reading what Google suggests to make apps run on the Nexus 7.

Apple has the advantage of owning the hardware and the software so there are a fix number of resolutions to support. I think if they start producing half-way house designs like larger iPhones or smaller iPads that they'll run into the same problem.

Re:Ha ha he he

[DrXym]

It's kind of strange that Google aren't using LLVM to abstract away architectural differences without compromising performance. They use LLVM in Renderscript but not the NDK. It's a bit strange. It would be in Intel's interest to sponsor the work.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is the OS of choice of the lazy.

Re:Ha ha he he

[marcosdumay]

Wow, there are plenty of A/Cs on this thread claimming that Linux did X, or Linux did Y, or that it should have done Z...

When did Linux gain sentience and started to write its own code? Did I miss the Singularity?

Re:Ha ha he he

[equex]

Why do you think it went from 2.6 to 3.0 so suddenly ?

Re:Ha ha he he

[rubycodez]

no, the choice of the lazy is Microsoft Windows. Engineers who pick Windows for their SCADA system, enterprises who pick Microsoft for mission critical systems, they aer the lazy.

Re:Ha ha he he

[rubycodez]

all desktops on the internet run Linux. You use google or a dozen other huge internet services, you are using Linux.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

"would of". fucking retard.

Re:Ha ha he he

[maestroX]

What is this Nokia you're talking about?

Re:Ha ha he he

[petermgreen]

What is it about Linux, that made Google choose it over any other Unix-likes?

It's better known, tends to have better hardware support and the GNU tools tend to feel more modern than their BSD equivilents.

My money is on the pervasive GPL. The GPL fits Google's agenda better than any other licensing scheme, and that's pretty much the end of that story.

I don't think it's the GPL that attracts google to linux, look at andriod for example, the kernel is GPLv2 but IIRC the rest of the stack is non-copyleft.

Re:Ha ha he he

[socceroos]

Unfortunately, I don't think that the Linux kernel is going to go micro any time soon (read: never). I love Linux for its open nature, but operating systems like RIM's QNX are technically superior in my opinion. Not to say that Linux doesn't have it's place - you could theoretically tune a monolithic kernel to be speedier than a micro kernel - but there is more to computing than being able to process the most bits in my opinion.

Re:Ha ha he he

[shutdown -p now]

As I recall, ever since Intel had started pushing its x86 chips for mobile (Medfield for phones and Clover Field for tablets), they've put a lot of attention to this problem, and teamed up with Google. IIRC, if you're using a recent Android NDK, and try to build something, it's set up to build and package x86 binaries by default. They also have binary translation implemented, akin to Rosetta, though I don't know if there's some hardware component to it such that it might not work on your random desktop Intel CPU.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

You worship your ability to reason.

Re:Ha ha he he

[FlippyBoy]

I'm not sure why this was modded down. I think people that value their rationality above all else are just as much fools as those who value their beliefs above all else. Sometimes things in this world aren't rational, and to ignore the human factor means missing as much of the picture as if we ignored the facts of the situation.

People who worship their own ability to reason are often blind to obvious truths/realities in front of them.

Re:Ha ha he he

[makomk]

The iPad has a different apect ratio from the iPhone, but that means that every existing application needed to have iPad support added explicitly in order to work well. Apple managed to get away with that since phone app UIs don't tend to scale too well on a 10-inch tablet anyway.

Every iPhone still has the same aspect ratio as the original iPhone and every iPad the same as the original iPad, though. Not only that but Apple had to delay increasing the resolution of their devices until they could get displays with double the pixel density, whereas Android manufacturers could use intermediate screen resolutions, and apparently driving all those pixels has been killing battery life and GPU performance.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Newton?

How young are you?

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this insightful? Did you even read the link you gave? That doesn't seem painful at all.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Ginger Unicorn]

You're just doing the same thing again. The word "worship" has lost all meaning in this context. "Regard as reliable" is not the definition of "worship".

Re:Ha ha he he

[DrXym]

Er, anyone who has done it could tell you what a pain it is to maintain multiple versions of a layout.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

But it sure as hell is produced to their specifications. No other laptop manufacturer is using 16:10 screens any more so I'm pretty sure Apple's paying for the exclusive output of that production line.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux already has been ported to a micro kernel.

Apple ported Linux to run on top of their microkernel in the mid-nineties. mklinux. 68K macs only. Can't recall the project, but their is another (contemporary) one of these ports of Linux to an ARM based microkernel.

Yeah, I know it not what you meant.

you could theoretically tune a monolithic kernel to be speedier than a micro kernel

A microkernel based system has many more layers, and, in some instances (minix), even drivers run in userspace. microkernel = overhead = slower. Speed is not one of the advantages of a micorkernel. Just as a C++ prog with a ton of classes + templates is not going to touch a straight C prog's performance, if both are written by competent coders.

Re:Ha ha he he

[socceroos]

Yeah, you're correct - you're not going to beat a well-done monolithic kernel for speed, at least, not in many instances. Wasn't aware that Linux was ported to run atop Apple's kernel....why did they do that?

I personally like the design of well done micro kernels for their reliability and robustness. I'm trying my hand at building one (very slowly, I should add) and enjoying it so far.

Re:Ha ha he he

[funky_vibes]

Microsoft was NOT the first to have tablets, I don't know who was, but clearly Apple made the Newton in 1993, which to this day outshines all tablets (including ipads) in several areas.
It was even able to recognise ordinary handwriting with no training at all, which at the time was an incredible feat.

Not that tablets are of any consequence, since they seem to have evolved into a pissing contest of who can sell the shittiest hardware, with least available software, for the most outrageous prices.

Re:Ha ha he he

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

It's funny. The Linux community put so much effort into trying to win the OS of the Desktop with so little success, but secretly won the battle of the OS on phones and tablets with hardly a fanboy.

Linux may not have won the desktop battle but it has won the battle on small devices like car controllers, smart devices & most handheld machines that required an electronic brain. Windows is nowhere along with Apple...

android-style opportunistic suspend

[twistedcubic]

Now this looks interesting. Hopefully it works as described on the net (http://lwn.net/Articles/479841/). Automatic suspend would be wonderful.

Re:android-style opportunistic suspend

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that and the TCP restore are the two most interesting things mentioned in the article.
Strangely almost no one mentions them here.

minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[richlv]

even though i'm logged in, kernelnewbies page says "Immutable Page" - so maybe somebody with write privs can fix "makes impossibles" ;)

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Tastecicles]

I'll have a word with Sergei.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

Btrfs is stable enough for real data, if you run current releases (latest 3.4 or 3.5 kernel and btrfs-progs-19 current). I use it in both single drive systems and raid1 configurations with Fedora 17. Prior to converting the systems, I ran extensive failure testing (e.g., pulling power / data connection during active writes, system crashes, using a failing drive with media errors as part of a raid1, etc.) for about a month. I never lost a single byte of data in any test, confirmed by checksum scans on all data (against a backup) after each test cycle.

I actually trust btrfs now more than ext4 due to the ability to scrub the data and confirm integrity, which I do daily or weekly depending on the system.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

Crap, replied to the wrong thread.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Tastecicles]

wow. I'm still using 2.6.37 (OpenSuSE 11.4 vm image). What can I say, it ain't broke so I've never bothered fixing it :)

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[bzipitidoo]

What about performance? I tried btrfs on an older machine (Pentium 3), a few kernels ago, before the recent big performance improvements. Firefox didn't do so well on a btrfs partition. It was the second biggest CPU hog, after the btrfs processes. Switching back to ext4 was a big improvement.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

It depends on your definition of 'broke'. You don't have any of the functionality in the newer kernels (tens of thousands of patches to current), so if you want to use any of that it certainly is 'broke'. :)

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

With the current implementation and just the 'autodefrag' option added to default, there is no perceptable difference in performance compared to ext4 for any of our machines, with any application. Recent testing at Phoronix (with 3.4) has btrfs getting closer to ext4 (running without lvm2 and md raid); I'm curious to see how its numbers look in 3.5. However, because btrfs integrates the functionality of lvm2 and md raid in a much more usable manner, as well as providing much more functionality, a small performance tradeoff would be acceptable (to me).

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Anonymous Coward]

nah - i'd talk to Wladimir if i were you.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[sjames]

So you're saying an orphaned inode ended up referenced by the wrong directory entry?

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

No, just that I shouldn't try to respond to posts from inside the little box in my feed reader.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Anonymous Coward]

With the current implementation and just the 'autodefrag' option added to default, there is no perceptable difference in performance compared to ext4 for any of our machines, with any application.

Are the nightmarish performance issues with anything that issues lots of fsyncs, like dpkg, finally solved?

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[rl117]

I lost a Btrfs RAID1 setup due to a SATA drive cable becoming unseated. Both drives were unrecoverable, and even oopsed the kernel when trying to mount them. Good job it wasn't important! Compared with the md RAID1 on the other half of the same drives (which automatically resynched without error), it was not particularly encouraging.

This wasn't the latest kernel I admit, and things have definitely improved, but I would personally still be reluctant to rely on it for important data until it's more proven.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

Yes, the patches (1,2) were merged back in May.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[arkane1234]

I'd consider not updating the kernel, "broke".

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[macemoneta]

This was a bug that was corrected (it was a problem in cache flushing). All my testing occured after the bug was addressed, and pulling drive data cables while actively writing, as well as pulling drive power cables, was part of my testing. No data loss occurred in any test. The btrfsck and btrfs scrub/balance were able to correct all errors that resulted following the drive recovery.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[arkane1234]

Exactly. I rank Btrfs up there with Reiserfs in the fact that people have had problems with it, yet others say it works fine. There's never been any conclusive multi-scenario real-life situations ran to see if a mysql db writing frantically to the FS when the cable is pulled would destroy the fs or not. (or anything like that)

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but btrfs sounds like bit rot filesystem.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[Tastecicles]

I've yet to find myself in the situation where I wish I had functionality absent in the kernel I'm using which is present in a newer kernel. My kernel=not broke.

Re:minor typo - "makes impossibles"

[bill_mcgonigle]

merged back in May

heh, figures - I gave up on BTRFS after a year, in April.

Kudos to Josef - everybody else was telling me, "too bad that Firefox is so stupid, btrfs needs to work this way."

Sounds like it's time to try again!

Ext4 metadata checksums

[Peter H.S.]

Ext4 metadata checksums. I like that. Note that it isn't data CRC checksums, just metadata. Still, I like the way Ext4 keeps evolving and getting tuned. Btrfs sounds really great, but it may still be some time before it is stable enough for my data storage needs.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[macemoneta]

I accidentally replied to the wrong thread. Repost:

Btrfs is stable enough for real data, if you run current releases (latest 3.4 or 3.5 kernel and btrfs-progs-19 current). I use it in both single drive systems and raid1 configurations with Fedora 17. Prior to converting the systems, I ran extensive failure testing (e.g., pulling power / data connection during active writes, system crashes, using a failing drive with media errors as part of a raid1, etc.) for about a month. I never lost a single byte of data in any test, confirmed by checksum scans on all data (against a backup) after each test cycle.

I actually trust btrfs now more than ext4 due to the ability to scrub the data and confirm integrity, which I do daily or weekly depending on the system.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Anonymous Coward]

Btrfs may be stable in the sense that it currently works, but it isn't stable as far as development is concerned. Neither is ext4, apparently. Personally I feel more comfortable using file systems which are experiencing a minimum of change. I'd rather see the Linux developers start a new branch of the ext tree for new features and call it ext5, rather than tacking more niffty things onto ext4.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[dAzED1]

I've been in a couple Fedora FUDs, and I'm running Fed17 while typing in this little box thing to reply to you. That said...."real data" isn't stored on a box running Fedora. Sorry. I mean that with lots of love to the entire Fedora community (well...most of it...) but...I'm pretty sure most of the community wouldn't claim it's a production server OS anyway.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[macemoneta]

You may be surprised to learn that the definition of 'production' is very much locally defined. To some companies I've dealt with, ancient stable software that gets no maintenance for years is the way to go. To others, driving the leading edge means competitive advantage. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the parent poster was saying people should use Fedora for production. He just stated that his tests of Btrfs were done on a Fedora box. You can run Btrfs on plenty of other distributions. Heck, I don't think Fedora 17 even supports Btrfs at install time, it needs to be added later. Other distros would make testing and using Btrfs easier.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Anonymous Coward]

Btrfs needs a lot of work in the userland/tools area. The fact that you can't get an accurate basic free-space report from "df" is annoying. Having to use "btrfs fi df" and view that confusing output is even worse.

Trying to create small test raid-1 setups resulted in btrfs crashing with Fedora 17. With bigger loopback devices, it worked.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Anonymous Coward]

The on-disk structure of ext4 is stable, even if the code is changing. The updates are both forward and backward compatible with the earlier versions, so it would not make sense to branch ext5 right now. You'd only do that if you needed to break compatibility for something.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[bejiitas_wrath]

What about XFS. How does that compare?

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Teun]

Since around February a run one /home on btrfs and have not seen any issues.

At the same time I also installed / on it but then found out it is not yet supported during Grub updates.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[macemoneta]

Grub2 (I'm using grub2-2.0-0.37.beta6) supports a btrfs root (/). I have two machines running that way.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Peter H.S.]

It is not that I doesn't drool over Btrfs. I also think it is very stable, but if the Fedora committee decided that Ext4 was the default FS for F17 I think it is better for me (who doesn't compile my own kernel any more, but a cheer to those that still do that like you) to wait for at least Fedora 18.

And advanced filesystems are really really hard to get right, I will be really surprised if some corner case bugs doesn't show up when Btrfs is deployed on a large scale. There is also the various support tools to consider, like Btrfsck that wasn't fully production ready last I checked.

But you got a point with the added benefit of data CRC checks and scrubbing, these features are both highly desirable and makes me feel much more confident in changing to a new filesystem since the dreaded "silent data corruption" is what I fear most.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[macemoneta]

The normal installation on Fedora 17 doesn't support btrfs, however, you can use a kickstart from a Fedora 17 liveCD/liveUSB to install onto btrfs. For example, adding the following to your kickstart:

zerombr
clearpart --all --initlabel
autopart --type=btrfs

This is how I set up our desktops. By default, the above will make the root (/) btrfs, and place /home in a subvolume.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[MMC Monster]

I wonder what's the fascination in running btrfs on /.

The benefits of btrfs are in large partitions and places wheredata changes are both critical and frequent. I don't see that in / on any sane system.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Teun]

It's relatively new and I am curious.

That's all.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Teun]

Thanks, good to hear.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Electricity Likes Me]

Snapshots.

Being able to snapshot your whole FS before you do system changes, and easily rollback should be a big draw card.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Gaygirlie]

I wonder what's the fascination in running btrfs on /.

The benefits of btrfs are in large partitions and places wheredata changes are both critical and frequent. I don't see that in / on any sane system.

You're just not thinking about it enough. Btrfs for example offers limitless amount of snapshots, meaning that you can just make a snapshot of your whole root-partition, install stuff that you're not certain if it's worth keeping or stable, or just to try something out, and can revert back to the earlier snapshot without any hassle whatsoever. It could also be used for testing updates, it can be used for development, and so on. Doing a snapshot of your system will also make it extremely easy to create backup-images, even from a running system.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[ultranova]

Grub2 (I'm using grub2-2.0-0.37.beta6) supports a btrfs root (/).

Why should Grub2 care about your (/), as long as your (/boot) is readable?

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice trick to get twice the karma, eh? ;)

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[macemoneta]

Grub2 (I'm using grub2-2.0-0.37.beta6) supports a btrfs root (/).

Why should Grub2 care about your (/), as long as your (/boot) is readable?

It needs to know how to probe and reference btrfs subvolumes.

Re:Ext4 metadata checksums

[ultranova]

It needs to know how to probe and reference btrfs subvolumes.

Sorry, but this doesn't make sense. If your "/boot" is in a dedicated partition (as it should be) with a Grub2-supported filesystem (such as ext3), and Grub2 can thus read the kernel image into memory, why should it have any further requirements?

Seriously, why do you want to deal with advanced filesystems in the bootloader? What do you expect to gain from that, other than putting completely pointless limits to their complexity? Just accept that you'll need to sacrtifce about 100MB or so for a boot partition (about 0.01 percent of a typical 1 terabyte hard disk) and you don't need to worry about whether Grub knows about btrfs subvolumes or not.

Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux, the kernel developed and distributed by Linus Torvalds et al, contains software that is included without source code, with obfuscated or obscured source code and code under non-Free Software licenses. Linux-libre removes these parts.

http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Teresita]

A GNU/Linux kernel that is libre, there's a redundancy if I ever heard one. Like Sun Solar company.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

When referring to the kernel, it's just Linux, not GNU/Linux.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[dbIII]

GNU has nothing to do with the kernel at all. The LiGnuX and then later gnu/linux renaming suggestions were for entire systems that contained software written as part of gnu projects and not a totally different project such as the linux kernel. The gnu kernel is called hurd.
The point of the renaming was stated to be to "advertise" gnu on the back of a higher profile project, but personally I think it was just petty MIT staffroom politics that escaped out into the world. "But what have you done lately Mr Stallman" turned into pretended ownership of linux which certainly has the above poster and a pile of journalists fooled.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Gaygirlie]

Linux, the kernel developed and distributed by Linus Torvalds et al, contains software that is included without source code, with obfuscated or obscured source code and code under non-Free Software licenses. Linux-libre removes these parts.

http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

So, you're saying it is a lot, lot less functional, possibly even to the point of uselessness. Hmm. Doesn't sound like my cup of tea.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is the GNU/Linux kernel, because its the kernel of the GNU/Linux system

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

This. The FSF folks, especially Stallman, never grew out of their awkward grad student phase.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if you think removing the non-free bits makes it a 'lot, lot less functional' then it is not your cup of tea. It functions just fine for me.

Other people use their computers in a way that is different than the way you use your computer. Care to explain why we should give a fuck that it's not your cup of tea, or was your comment just a shout for solidarity among the like-minded?

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[marcosdumay]

The point is to give a name to the overall system, so people wouldn't confuse GNU/Linux with Linux systems that don't run GNU.

This point was made moot recently, as Androind made a precedent, and now it is impossible to use the name "Linux" for anything that isn't GNU/Linux. We settled at the most confusing nomeoclature that isn't ambiguous, but at least, it isn't ambiguous.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

The blobs he is referring to and that linux-libre removes are generally firmware and microcode that are uploaded to devices on boot. Yes, some devices don't work without it. Some devices work partially. But I would definitely not say it is "a lot, lot less functional".

If I'm not mistaken, Debian already removes these blobs from their kernel package, but they can be installed with a separate package.

Hell, even OpenBSD (who are perhaps the most zealous of the BSDs) accepts firmware blobs, as long as they come with a license that allows free redistribution.

Re:Linux-libre is the real deal

[Gaygirlie]

Exactly the kind of a response I was expecting, thank you ;)

Bufferbloat

[ternarybit]

...new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat...

Does this feature work transparently and automatically, or does one need to enable it?

Re:Bufferbloat

[Anonymous Coward]

More details to the CoDel network queue management http://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/a-milestone-reached-codel-is-in-linux/. Lets hope that the next generation of routers (most home routers are linux based and then some) make fq_codel the default. So far Codel is not default (if I understand correctly), because it is new.

Re:Bufferbloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this feature help with ADSL modems having their internal buffers overflowing when the data gets too much for the up or down channel bit rate?

Re:Bufferbloat

[arkane1234]

That's the modems problem and not the kernel.
Nothing could help that, other than throttling the bandwidth below the amount of data the buffer can handle before it overflows.
Or a better modem is used.

Desktops were also locked down under

[Burz]

the politics of old school Unix hackers. It is the kind of politics that keeps distros from really standardizing on a GUI, and also results in oddities like the Linux Foundation having an SDK for mobile, but none for desktop. Likewise, Android has an SDK but Ubuntu (and all the other desktop distros) do not.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[MrHanky]

It's got nothing to do with politics, people with different preferences just happen to build different things.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

That is fundamentally what politics is about: getting people who want different things to act together in a useful way.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Burz]

It's got nothing to do with politics, people with different preferences just happen to build different things.

Politics are about group preferences and group identity. It's got a heck of a lot to do with politics: There's no rational reason to offer standardized frameworks under an SDK for mobile, but avoid doing so for desktops. One of the irrational reasons behind the disparity is that the hacker and sysadmin culture view PCs as immediate kin to web servers hardware and regard any standardization or vertical integration in the stack that caters primarily to "luser" needs as a threat to their freedom and efficiency.

The overall 'distro' mindset causes each and every initiative to become hamstrung with idiotic assumptions, such as:

- Each application should be broken down into between 2 - 20 different pieces and scattered around one's hard drive.

- Changes for most system components are handled in exactly the same way and with the same priorities as high-level applications, and apps get to make dependency demands on the inner workings of the system. There is no clear distinction between system and apps for anything being updated, added or removed.

- Anything other than the kernel = "application", and this type of system-hacker nomenclature must be observed by everyone or they will be ridiculed as 'n00b'. The result is a kind of blindness to real issues that arise around interactions between apps and system.

- System coders > App coders, so we will just get Miguel and some of the ol' gang to whip up some applications that will put Microsoft and Adobe to shame (i.e. we'll draw from the pool of Linux system enthusiasts to write user-facing apps instead of creating a feature-stable environment with an SDK to attract both newbies, and experienced app coders who are only newbie to 'our' system). But the reality is that the particular hacker culture and general feature-instability act as a corrosive acid against the kind of userbase and developer community that a personal computer needs.

- More than 10 people like to manage their PC software within a paradigm designed for servers.

- Fewer GUI admin tools are better b/c people will just want to hit the CLI anyway. Avoid the GUI when describing solutions, even WRT office/productivity if possible.

- A myriad different admin tools for basic network connectivity are OK because people want 'choice' (esp. when they call up tech support for their ISP or application and the technician can't figure out what specific steps to tell the user).

- Each year, desktop users must learn to recognize "Linux" by the current and past iterations of the 4 or 5 desktop environments that are officially supported by each distro.

- App developers like to design their apps for a disembodied desktop environment, instead of viewing the OS layers underneath as equally accessible tools. They also like testing their app in several other desktop environments to ensure that it "plays well" with them.

- App devs love having to test and package on multiple distros, and they look forward to having many camps of distro maintainers telling them about app "bugs" that mean you have to help them fix the same issue in their systems over and over again for a number of years. They also love having maintainers pepper and berate them over wacky compile switches, setting defaults, patches, etc. and they way they like to refer to app devs as "upstream" instead of "author", as if "Linux" coding automatically entailed some sort of demotion.

- If one is an ISV (distributing a proprietary app as 3rd party), devs love being regarded as an oddball instead of the norm, and love being reminded constantly that so many of the compatibility issues with (untargetted) distros they keep having to read about could be automatically resolved if, gosh, the author would only release their app as open source so they could be merged with repository nirvana.

- App devs love hearing they should leave behind all the PC stuff and

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Billly Gates]

the politics of old school Unix hackers. It is the kind of politics that keeps distros from really standardizing on a GUI, and also results in oddities like the Linux Foundation having an SDK for mobile, but none for desktop. Likewise, Android has an SDK but Ubuntu (and all the other desktop distros) do not.

Nothing a Unix could solve. The issue is not technical in nature. It is business. IBM was the defecto standard that decided which platform app makers should use and what software customers should buy. They were a monopoly and business does not mind being locked in unlike consumers.

DOS was the only way to run the software being made and the software being made had to run on DOS to sell. Because that is what everyone else used. Everyone else only used that because everyone else used it!

Steve Jobs himself when he returned told Apple that the Mac is dead and Microsoft won. Time to milk the mac for all its worth and focus on newer things. Fastforward today and he did that pretty well as the next logical conclusion after microcomputers were phones. WinCE didn't have the requirements for compatibility PCs needed so Apple won by making a superior product. Android makes a great product too and is going head to head.

Sorry Linux guys Bill Gates and IBM beat you too it many decades ago and that is the bad news. The good news is like the mainframe tablets and phones are replacing it and this is where a winner has not been standardized yet. Just HTML 5 and the platforms that container the web applets.

Linux and Unix did take over the minicomputer market though. VMS is all but gone except for some legacy systems that are very old.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Doctor_Jest]

It's funny, I've got a generic Dell PC I got for $300 from their outlet (Athlon etc etc.) Not a powerhouse, but not a shrinking violet either. I used my Mac Mini to download Debian Squeeze... and in 2 hours, with less interaction than a Windows install... I had a completely functional Linux desktop PC without doing anything in your list, except pick Debian. Back in college, I never got my et4000 card settings right for X on Slackware 0.99 (on floppies no less), but with screen and a familiarity with Amiga's CLI and DOS... I didn't miss it. (Plus that is the first time I got hooked on Nethack...)

Now, in the dim past just about everything was more difficult, to be sure... Getting games to run in DOS was also a magic trick. Then there was the myriad of other things that the CLI (which is where the computer originated) made easier for some, harder for others. Hell, Windows had a devil of a time keeping stable with the myriad of 3rd party drivers out there for Video and Sound cards alone.... Let's not forget NICs and so forth... And let's not diminish the fact that Windows used to be a graphical shell over DOS... for many years it was "hiding" DOS from the user...

Linux is a tool not everyone should use. There are idiots who shouldn't use a computer too. The fact that Linux has thrived in spite of Windows and Macintosh speaks more about the users and developers than it does about the drones who buy iPads and iPods because they're "hip". Those people don't use computers... they use appliances.

Here's a tip, though... if you hide everything from the user (a 'la original MacOS and returning to that I might add) it doesn't make them better at using a computer... it just makes them think all computers are magic. Which, in some people's case... I think should remain that way. :)

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Doctor_Jest]

Sorry Linux guys Bill Gates and IBM beat you too it many decades ago and that is the bad news.

I wasn't aware there had to be winners and losers in the game. Computing thrived with diversity, heck if it wasn't for diversity, we'd all be using some pablum invented by Bill Gates in his dorm... Thank goodness he was chasing rather than innovating... I shudder to think of the alternate universe that would've made.

Linux didn't "lose"... it's free. Linux is doing fine and several companies make a good bit of coin off it. I see Microsoft's "victory" as nothing more than eating a bit more of the pie than the other guys. Apple's got a huge market cap and tons of cash in the bank, yet they aren't even 20% of the PCs sold worldwide... So in the realm of "winners and losers"... we have to be a bit more objective, or at the very least, define what "win" means. Market share? Revenue? Mind share? Brand Loyalty? Whatever you pick, you end up with a different "winner." :) But I applaud Microsoft and Apple for really bullying everyone else for so long.. it makes me feel good that giant corporations want to actively screw me over and sell me the tools to do it with. I'm talking about both Apple and Microsoft in this regard.

As long as there are people who like to do it themselves... there will be Linux. Computing trends come and go, but revolutions stick around...

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux pretty much kicks ass if you're an engineer though, because all of the things that make it horrible for end users give you enough access to pick your project apart down to assembly.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of funny how Linux was trying to "win", and now that it's obvious such will never happen, you claim it's not possible for Linux to lose.

This is the primary problem: you guys whine that Apple and Microsoft "bully" people in to not using Linux... therefore, it lets Linux off the hood and absolves it of all the reasons it's not able to compete.

There's a great reason why the people who switched to OSX during Apple's "Switch" campaign were primarily Linux users- they just got fed up with all Linux's problems and the litany of excuses. As far as getting Windows users to switch, it was a really huge failure. If they kept hammering it might have worked, but they had to end the campaign because of the OSX Leoptard debacle, which proved to the new OSX users that it's not the problem-free experience they were promised. Plus, censoring the tech forums and denying there are any problems isn't going to make the customers happy either.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip, though... if you hide everything from the user (a 'la original MacOS and returning to that I might add)

They're not really hiding anything these days. They're mainly locking everything down, which is much worse. And fwiw, the original Mac OS didn't hide that much. You had to use ResEdit rather than emacs or vim to look at the internals of most stuff, but it's not like the average user knows what the /etc directory is, let alone what to change there (or even how to get sudo rights to do so, if the editor doesn't contain built-in functionality for that)

One big problem with classic Mac OS was that everything was way too accessible, resulting in people installing tons of extensions and control panels that changed the behaviour of the system, often resulting in instability. That was of course compounded by the lack of memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking, since every change to system behaviour affected everything, all the time. But a lack of use-accessible system customisation is definitely not how I'd ever describe the classic Mac OS.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic comment. Sums up desktop Linux's flaws perfectly.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of funny how people think that operating systems are like wives and that you shouldn't have more than one.....

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[ultranova]

Changes for most system components are handled in exactly the same way and with the same priorities as high-level applications, and apps get to make dependency demands on the inner workings of the system.

As opposed to what? Apps that don't make any demands on what API calls and libraries are available or what they do?

There is no clear distinction between system and apps for anything being updated, added or removed.

Truly, it's horrible to have just one update daemon, rather than one per application.

These maladies are the main reason why "desktop Linux" didn't succeed.

Actually, it seems to have succeeded just fine, judging by the continued existence and development of several desktop Linux distributions.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[MrHanky]

Wow, that's a lot of misguided nonsense you've got there. Sorry, I just can't bother to criticise it all. But where the hell did you get "Anything other than the kernel = "application"" from? Make it up yourself? It's factually untrue. If you don't bother with the most basic facts, the rest of your "analysis" is necessarily going to be wrong. Also, tl;dr.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[MrHanky]

Yes, and by that definition, free software is fundamentally politics-free, quite the opposite of what the GP believes. You can't have a standardised GUI because if a few people dislike that "standard", it will simply be forked. Asking for one is just misguided: you won't have it. Ever.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment exemplifies the typical willful ignorance of the Linux community.

The thing is, Linux package management systems totally kick ass. However, because of this, the zealots are completely unwilling to discuss how the packages are actually managed. There's this wonderful infrastructure but they've built a complete clusterfuck on top of it.

User: I just want to install this app, why do I need to upgrade half my system?*
Linux Asshole: If you don't like it, either compile it yourself or go back to M$ Winblows!!

(* note even Eric Raymond of all people had this problem.)

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[rubycodez]

Linux did win, it runs the internet, is 60% of smart phone market share in the USA, is eating Unix(tm)'s lunch in the enterprise,

sorry you missed it.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Burz]

Linux pretty much kicks ass if you're an engineer though, because all of the things that make it horrible for end users give you enough access to pick your project apart down to assembly.

That can't be denied... but then "Linux" is a concept an engineer can readily grasp: It's a kernel, usually with the GNU userland and toolchain, and with a whole mess of options at a higher level than that.

The thing is, there's no good reason why messy Linux and something (like Android) that is better-defined and grasped by a consumer can't both coexist in the desktop market. IMO, the "Linux" moniker sets up a raft of expectations that are incorrect for the desktop market. I think its no mistake that Android is not billed as "Android Linux", and thank goodness.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Burz]

The last straw for me was at the point where Linux could be said to work with virtually all power management hardware on laptops. And it *still* didn't compete with Windows in terms of battery life or the ability to suspend and resume properly. Suspend is also important on desktops because they are relatively power-hungry: As of 2 years ago, the ability to properly resume a desktop was crap.

So I got another Mac and relegated Linux to use on servers (and then Apple started acting like the Devil, but I digress).

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Decker-Mage]

Every point dead on and I see from the replies, they actually validate this as well. Nice to know I have company.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Decker-Mage]

Actually the same place I've seen it stated repeatedly: In the context of Linux security. Whenever a security hole in any complete Linux system is pointed out, no matter where it exists in the stack, it is always the 'applications' fault. Actually, I should qualify that. It's only in 99% of the cases. Antithetically, whenever such is found in Windows or, God Forbid!, OS/X it's always the operating systems fault.

Before you become all hot and bothered, I've been doing systems security work for over thirty years now, mainframes to embedded and across a rather bewildering array of operating environs now that I actually tally them up. And by systems I mean all systems, physical, network, and computing. I have zero interest in evangelizing any operating system or its tool chains. Oh, I also have gigs of security data and especially ones relevant to operating systems, network systems, and applications.

Sorry, that dog don't hunt.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Decker-Mage]

Just like computer languages in that respect. Thinking back I never used the same one twice in a row when creating applications and that's over a forty year stretch. Similarly, I don't use just one operating system and, aside from my videos directory, VM's sure make up the overwhelming component here and I don't do duplicates! I grab the tool to suit the problem, not wildly wield the wrong tool for the problem.

When someone asks what hardware they should buy, I sit them down and find out what they want to do with their computer, especially gaming or multimedia, what their skill levels are, any compatibility issues, with work for instance, and finally their budget. Especially their budget. Then advise to suit the situation. A lot of people end up with Macs if they aren't heavy gamers. [The only Mac here is a VM on a PC-compatible.] Too many people invest their self-image in their tools much like guys and their (dream) cars. And we are definitely seeing that exhibited in this article-discussion.

[Actually /. as a whole but we won't go there. Ya'll can put away the tar and the feathers, please.]

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[MrHanky]

So you have done security programming for 30 years, but still make up statistics on the spot, and use sock puppet accounts on Slashdot. From the number of Linux kernel vulnerabilities I've seen reported (and some rather moronic configuration error in Debian's libssl -- a library, as opposed to an application or a kernel; know the difference), I can only assume that you're a liar.

Also, pretending to be an expert while proving you're not just makes you look like a giant failure. Why do you bother with this? Making up years of experience when you evidently have none.

Re:Desktops were also locked down under

[Doctor_Jest]

It's kind of funny how Linux was trying to "win", and now that it's obvious such will never happen, you claim it's not possible for Linux to lose.

You have to define "win." Market share? Market cap? Most recognized logo? What does it take to "win" in this little contest? Seems funny to me that when people want to talk about Linux, in a negative way, they think it cannot compete with Windows or Mac. I don't see why not, and considering the proliferation of companies that were once "Windows Only shops" returning again and again to pre-loaded linux machines, I think we're seeing that yes, Linux can compete, but compete to be better than it was yesterday and to be a viable alternative to the costly commercial OSes. It has "won" on both of those counts.

Linux's problems are no different than Windows' problems or Mac's problems in terms of their nature. What _is_ different is how they are dealt with. Nothing is covered up, swept in the corner or "censored" on forum posts in the land of Linux. You can't say that about either Microsoft or Apple. So, come to think of it, Linux did win. It showed the world that open source works. And it showed the world that free things aren't always shit.

checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[manu0601]

Anyone knowledgeable can tell me what is "checkpointing and restoring TCP connections"?

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Anonymous Coward]

It re-connects your dropped connection when the lousy Linux drivers for the Broadcom cards drop you. Or, am I joking?

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell honestly.

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a way of transferring TCP connections to another server (along with transferring the IP address). That way, you could do hardware maintenance on the physical machine without losing anything because you've migrated it seamlessly to another machine. Of course, you have to transfer and restore everything else over too (running processes, memory, etc).

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[sjames]

It's part of the larger project for process/system checkpointing in general.

That is, saving the entire state of a process to storage such that it can start up again where it left off and not know the difference.

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Anonymous Coward]

http://criu.org/TCP_connection

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[manu0601]

saving the entire state of a process to storage such that it can start up again where it left off and not know the difference.

But what is the point to save and restore a TCP state? While local endpoint sleeps, the remote endpoint does not receive any reply. After a while it will reset the connexion, and the local endpoint will not even know. Or is it just for connexions to localhost?

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Mikaelk]

saving the entire state of a process to storage such that it can start up again where it left off and not know the difference.

But what is the point to save and restore a TCP state? While local endpoint sleeps, the remote endpoint does not receive any reply. After a while it will reset the connexion, and the local endpoint will not even know. Or is it just for connexions to localhost?

One use case that comes to mind is to restore the state on a different machine. For failover or live migration.

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[sjames]

The only case I can see is for things like MPI where both endpoints of the TCP connection are being checkpointed at the same time.

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Degats]

From the release notes:

As part of an ongoing effort to implement process checkpointing/restart, Linux adds in this release support for stopping a TCP connection and restart it in another host. Container virtualization implementations will use this feature to relocate a entire network connection from one host to another transparently for the remote end. This is achieved putting the socket in a "repair" mode that allows to gather the necessary information or restore previous state into a new socket.

Also, some other potential uses: http://criu.org/Usage_scenarios

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Electricity Likes Me]

Faking out Samba would be another.

While many apps might detect a failure, most will wait a few seconds before giving up - which if everything's working, should be more then enough time to migrate.

Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it is needed for future work to migrate processes to another machine.

BTRFS

[dnaumov]

So, is this thing finally usable in production or is everybody who actually cares about data still stuck with ZFS?

Re:BTRFS

[Anonymous Coward]

So, is this thing finally usable in production or is everybody who actually cares about data still stuck with ZFS?

Data is safe with btrfs, but I'm still stuck with ZFS due to the lack of a raidz equivalent.

Re:BTRFS

[Bengie]

I'll be using ZFS myself. I don't know what kind of trade-offs it would entail, but I would like to have something like the Win8 StoragePool where the software raid sits on-top of the pool instead of underneath it. Assuming it's not a huge trade off, the idea of "slabs" sounds good in theory.

I'm glad BTRFS is still getting love. Otherwise ZFS seems to be the only option in town for large manageable storage.

Re:BTRFS

[Bengie]

They use clustered file systems which have nothing to do with EXT/BTRFS/ZFS. If you're looking for a easy to manage, resilient, local filesystem, ZFS is about the only game in town.

Re:BTRFS

[jarfil]

I've been using BTRFS in production since 3.3.1 with zero problems.

Before that, I did experience a partial fs meltdown on 3.2.x while stress testing a high number of snapshots with several million files/dirs and intense db activity. Then, the same test on 3.3.1 went flawlessly.

So I wouldn't recommend using BTRFS with anything below 3.3.1, but 3.4 or 3.5 should be fine.

Re:BTRFS

[arkane1234]

Funny, I've used EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 for nearly everything production for 15 or so yrs and never lost data in a datacenter. (Disk death on a single-disk workstation is another issue...)

Re:BTRFS

[arkane1234]

ZFS is just another choice, it's not the only choice in town.

Re:BTRFS

[Bengie]

The only local filesystem choice with snap-shotting, bit-rot protection, and end-to-end data-validation, with an enterprise track-record.

Re:BTRFS

[Electricity Likes Me]

ZFS seems like it could end up being a rather sad story - a very full featured, ahead of its time filesystem killed off by restrictive licensing.

Had ZFS been licensed under GPL, I suspect it would've been rolled part and parcel into Linux, and instead of losing Sun developers to btrfs, we'd have seen a completion of block pointer rewrite which would give ZFS the last basic features it really needs for end users (that is, ability to shrink filesystems online, reshape RAIDZ vdevs etc.)

It really is excellent - for a while I was running XFS+mdadm RAID6, and still managed to end up losing data because mdadm doesn't checksum and so would happily kick devices due to a bad sector here or there, and before you know it you're running with no redundancy and anything more it finds is a dead loss.

As it stands I suspect I'll roll on with ZFSonLinux until btrfs picks up something akin to RAIDZ3 and then migrate on over, but it really will be just a reinvention of the same featureset.

Re:BTRFS

[Electricity Likes Me]

I suspect ironically enough that the individual user use case for a filesystem is much more demanding then any conceivable datacenter use case.

Datacenters have a budget, online redundancy, backups, and many levels of power and hardware support.

Individual users have whatever they're willing to part with, and are trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible. We all know we should have backups, but it's not always practical or justifiable - we may have just the extra machine we use to backup our main machine, or just the extra disk.

Making sure those limited resources stay reliable with a limited budget to maintain them in time and money, is a much bigger ask.

Re:BTRFS

[Bengie]

all I want is mirroring :P BTRFS may become what I need by the time I create my file server. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Congratulations "Penguins & crew"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm impressed... no really (even though I am a known "Windows fanboy" around here): I've tried KUbuntu 12.04 recently, & am impressed, but moreso w/ the Linux kernel circa 3.3 onwards (no known security issues I am aware of at least - not even LOCALLY exploitable ones, & that's pretty damned good, unless others here can show me otherwise to correct me with more current information...).

* Thus, I only expect Linux to continue to excel based on that foundation...

APK

P.S.=> I've said it here before here on /., & I might as well again now too:

Linux is proof that the people of the world CAN & do work well together to produce something pretty cool of their own freely given time & effort... without having the "taskmaster's whip" applied to their back (in other words, for work alone to support their families but not really because it'd be what they'd want to do or be doing possibly - just a means to the ultimate end, supporting you & yours).

Linux = what I call a "socio-technological phenomenon" & proof that humanity has good going for it (even though I am convinced the world's messed up large overall)... apk

Re:Congratulations "Penguins & crew"

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea you were capable of being so... sweet.

Kudos.

Re:Congratulations "Penguins & crew"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I like him better when he's off his meds.

Re:Congratulations "Penguins & crew"

[Anonymous Coward]

You should take your meds and quit projecting.

Look better

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

As usual it was Apple coming in doing something people have done before, only much better.

Apple's implementations "look" better than the competition. It's kind of like having a beauty contest where the winner isn't the brainiest but the cutest kid on the ramp. Example: the lack of a built-in hardware keyboard on the iPhone.

Re:Look better

[arkane1234]

You'll notice that lots of phones in todays world are like that.
Thanks though.

Re:Look better

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

True. Apple is better than most at starting a trend. So now suddenly hardware-based keyboards are seen as less cool, at least as far as smartphones are concerned.

Yes but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they bring back QIC support :)

Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays

[billstewart]

Matt Blaze tweeted that Apple doesn't support the full resolution of the Retina display on the MacBook - the most you can set is 1920x1200, and it scales it from there. He also reports that there's a workaround which will let you get the full resolution.

But still, SRSLY? You'd think Apple could get font scaling correct, especially since they've been selling big desktop displays for years.

Re:Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays

[Hawke]

Kinda off subject here, but ...

Your standard app was not written for silly-high DPR. You could show this on linux too: take your desktop, and crank the DPI to 300 or so, so that the X server thinks your screen is only 5" across. Now move far enough away from it that a 12 point font looks reasonable, and then look at how stupid apps look. Icons are microscopic (because they're defined in fixed pixel sizes). Layouts between menubars and borders look stupid (natural spacing was defined in fixed pixel sizes).

So Apple's approach here is to tell the application that the screen is 1440x900. Any primitives that can be scaled ("place the string 'pants' in font 'Helvitica', size 12pt, at X,Y". "Draw this 2kx2k pixmap in this 500px x 500px space") are then rendered to the screen's native resolution. Things that can't be scaled aren't ("draw this 96x96 pixmap here, in this 96x96 space"). Some apps then look horrible, some look great.

I personally would have rather they just let apps look like crap, and told people to fix their darn apps, but I can understand why they didn't.

Re:Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays

[shutdown -p now]

This doesn't actually make sense. OS X does support the full resolution of the Retina display on new MacBooks. It just happens to also scale all UI 2x on those displays. So higher resolution in this case means finer, more precise graphics, as opposed to more content fit on the same screen. But either way the same number of pixels is used to render things.

Re:Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays

[shutdown -p now]

I personally would have rather they just let apps look like crap, and told people to fix their darn apps

Microsoft has had 20 years of track record with this approach, and the results are meh. Eventually Vista had to change the rules by requiring the apps to tell the system whether they are DPI-aware, and if they don't do that (e.g. all old apps), do bitmap scaling on them. Even so there are still quite a few apps written after Vista which do tell the system that they are DPI-aware, but then don't properly handle anything but the default 96 DPI.

Re:Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays

[exomondo]

But still, SRSLY? You'd think Apple could get font scaling correct, especially since they've been selling big desktop displays for years.

That still annoys me about OSX, you can't set the system font size.

What do you mean?

[billstewart]

Back when I was running X Windows versions 10.x and early 11s, there was no requirement that I use TWM. And while the Sun 2 came with SunView, the Sun 3 could run either SunView or X, and you could get Grasshopper Group's implementation of NeWS if you preferred, which drove your screen in Postscript. Among other things, that meant that if you wanted to change the font size to match the size of your monitor and your eyesight, you just did it, and What You Saw Was What You Wanted. None of this "need a third-party developer's hack to use the full resolution of the expensive Retina Display you just bought" nonsense. But even if you were running X, you weren't limited to Motif or OpenLook; you could run whatever window manager you liked with it.

As far as "Ubuntu [does] not [have an SDK]" goes, you can use the Gnome SDK or KDE or LXDE or several other fairly full-featured SDKs.

Flame Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the flame wars begin! lolZ! Linux will never be an alternative for the desktop PC. The average computer user wants Windows!

Putting that aside, the TCP checkpoint could be pretty useful if you run a sever, It is probably similar to a kernal shadowing script but for all TCP/IP related stuff.
As far as the checksums for go, it will not do much unless most of your computer is primarily processing metadata.

As for the Core changes, they added a few useful things such as the: /proc//task//children entry if you are doing lots of restores.

The CMA thing is also kinda cool, as far as I know (which I wouldn't LOL) linux didnt have good memory allocation support :/

-- SnappleX

What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[billstewart]

AFAICT, Linux-libre takes the standard Linux distribution and removes all software that doesn't have source code, most of which is device drivers, and also removes applications that don't have politically correct licenses. I'm not too worried about applications (apt-get easily fixes that), but I'd rather not load it on my hardware and find I don't have device drivers for the screen or the audio card or whatever. Does using Linux-Libre mean I can't use AMD graphics sets, or NVidia, or both? What about Intel chipsets?

Re:What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel has complete free software graphics drivers, they work very well, 3D and all bells and whistles.

Nvidia doesn't have free drivers at all but the driver has been reverse-engineered by the nouveau project and some cards work fairly well, with 3D.

AMD doesn't have free drivers either (the firmware is proprietary to be exact) and the support is fairly lousy. You get working 2D with some artifacts.

It's easy to test how well your hardware is supported by free software, just burn a live CD or live USB of e.g. Trisquel (a fully free distro) and give it a spin. Graphics (esp. 3D) and Wifi are the most problematic areas.

Re:What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[icebraining]

Firmware != drivers. And where exactly can one download Intel's open source firmware?

Re:What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[BanHammor]

Intel Graphics and "bells and whistles" should not belong in the same sentence. 3D on AMD works... somehow. I can run Xonotic.

Re:What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

3D on AMD works... somehow. I can run Xonotic.

That's Mesa, software emulation. Nothing to do with the AMD card.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics)

Re:What drivers is Linux-libre missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

A free driver is completely useless with a non-free firmware. Whether firmware is hardware or software or part of the driver is irrelevant.

For the intel firmware, see http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

Ironically enough, while intel is the only manufacturer making free graphics, its wifi is notoriously proprietary. And usually if you get one, you will get the other as well. And to add injury to insult, many vendors have a very short whitelist of approved wifi cards you can swap in... (can be cracked but takes effort and is not guaranteed to work)

When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[billstewart]

Any ideas when Ubuntu will support the 3.5 kernel? Real Soon, or not until 12.10?

Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could probably build and run it yourself without too much trouble. It's actually pretty easy.

Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, officially?

If unofficial builds are ok for you: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds

Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[billstewart]

Yes, I probably could build it. I'm asking when it'll show up as part of the regular updates.

Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[mcgrew]

I have an old HP running kubuntu that only has 750 meg of memory, and its BIOS probably won't support more than a meg. Flash quit working after the last update, and I strongly suspect that some extra bloat in Flash makes 750 meg insufficient. I wonder if he new Linux kernel will ease the memory problems or make them worse?

Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?

[Anonymous Coward]

12.10 will have it or later kernel version Ubuntu does not "Backport" major changes to shiped versions.

Re:torvalds has some serious issues.

[epyT-R]

some of us prefer blunt honesty over passive-aggressive politically correct doublespeak that dominates 'professional' interaction nowadays...those of us with spines, skin, and self-confidence anyway.

Yeah, you're right!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the Linux kernel has nothing to do with GNU at all. Oh, except for the license which is the GNUv2 license. Oh, and that it is built with GCC and relies on GCC extensions (Gnu Compiler Collection). Oh, and that one of the reasons many corporations contributed to it and poured resources into it, as opposed to say BSD, was the license. Yeah, nothing to do with GNU whatsoever.

Re:Yeah, you're right!

[arkane1234]

Dude, the license is GPL, not GNU.

Re:Yeah, you're right!

[Bengie]

Relative to the market size, BSD has about the same amount of resources getting poured into it from corp. Licensing has little to do with it.

shenanigans, shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

PC desktops have never been "locked down". You could always modify the software and hardware as much as you want. There are not very many phones for which that statement is true. No, hacking the hardware you bought (jailbreaking) does not count. In fact, look at the other non-wintel desktops. Apple restricts what can be done and unix workstations often simply had little other compatible options than the original OS. You couldn't be more wrong about wintel PCs being "locked down". Their openness is really the whole reason they were successful.

Re:shenanigans, shenanigans!

[arkane1234]

It was locked down in the aspect that the choices weren't there.
You bought a computer with MS-DOS, or Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/2008.
You could not go in say "ya know guy, I think I'd much rather put Novell DOS on there instead of MS-DOS." unless you bought a copy of Novell DOS as you bought your computer. Then, you had a license to MS-DOS & Novell DOS.

There, you see the problem.
Since we're talking about PC, I'll play the field that everyone seems to play and simply say that it's WinTel, not Apple.

Re:shenanigans, shenanigans!

[Decker-Mage]

Excuse me? You are definitely living in some kind of reality distortion field. While enterprise businesses and governments (mostly) bought their operating systems, that certainly was not the case when it came to smaller enterprises and especially small-to-medium businesses, small-office/home-office, nor the home user. They almost always just installed whatever suited their fancy from work or a 'friend'. I know since I'm the one the come to to fix their machines which, with very rare exception, running stock whatever. They don't buy it, in the words of Microsoft and the rest of the software firms, they steal it. They certainly steal the updgrades! And applications, with exactly one exception (a grandma), are nearly always stolen.

So in terms of costs, Linux is free, (PC/MS/Novell/Free/there's-many-more) DOS, or Windows, they might as well be considered free as well. Now you could almost make a case for apps, but you run into the brick wall of compatibility at work issue, so you are back to enterprise adoption and they'll adopt when they can make a total-cost-of-ownership case and not one second before. Free ain't really free when you have to factor in your IT staff (especially pay levels, since Window flunkies are dirt cheap) nor the training costs of your staff as well.

One last nit. I constantly run into people that can't grasp system administration chores but are complete at ease in using the latest jailbreak, application/operating-system crack, or other means of getting what they want at zero price (not cost mind you which involves other consideration such as time). This used to be true of music until the price came way down. I do notice that MS has the upgrade to Win 8 Pro pegged at a much lower price so it'll be interesting to see how many cracked machines I run into after its release. In any case, come back to me when you turn off the reality distortion field.

Even the FSF disagrees with you

[dbIII]

True, and it was an Intel chip, IBM PC, etc, etc, the list goes on through a lot of connections and will eventually involve Kevin Bacon. I think the connection is far too tenuous to name it after gnu and at least a few years ago the FSF agreed with me, suggesting calling linux the kernel and gnu/linux a distribution.

Microsoft not first or inventive with tablets

[spage]

I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first...

Except they weren't, maybe you mean "they came before". Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing was a ripoff of GO's PenPoint from 1991, right down the the notebook metaphor in their promotional slides. PenPoint launched on tablet computers from IBM and NCR before Microsoft was able to cobble together their first demo. And before GO there were attempts such as Pencept and Momenta to interact with an LCD screen with a tethered pen.

- and unusable

Stylus computing works great for annotating existing content (cue AT&T's "Some day you will fax from the beach" ads) but handwriting recognition remains terrible, even 98% successful recognition means you stop every few words to correct. PenPoint and software written for the O.S. won awards but never got traction, just like Windows for Pen Computing never went anywhere. A web full of content to consume didn't exist and there were only a few vertical markets of doctors, insurance adjusters, and construction supervisors to mark up existing documents (and fax them from the beach).

It was just like a PC, except with a stylus instead of a keyboard

Yes, Windows for Pen Computing just added an ink layer to the desktop. It was the other companies that rethought interaction: besides GO, the later Apple Newton and Palm PDA innovated. PenPoint provides a huge trove of prior art for direct screen manipulation, tap and drag, other gestures, and novel metaphors for a bookshelf, notebook, and page-turning, which is why Apple hasn't been able to broadly patent IOS features.

Nice trekwords

[Osgeld]

why would I care?

as a non super geek linux user, quickly drifting away, here is what it means to me

something gets more error correction over a filesystem, some background process that actually eats a little more cpu, more sandboxing so when I actually want to do something I hit a soft bumper asking me if I am ok after that bump, network something, restoring some crap that caused all hell to break loose in the first place causing more issues, some other TCP thingamajig, suspend that doesnt work ... again , stats on a serial port I really dont care about, even though thats one port I use constantly , and shoehorning a hardware/software interface everyone stopped using 15 years ago, and even then it was niche, over hardware/software interfaces that are either superior or,outside of 7 year old macs, obsolete ... and for some odd reason wont support a monitor sleep mode on my toshiba laptop without crashing the entire OS into a blank screened zombie, cause I left it for a half hour.

woot woot, go linux!

Re:Should call it "lin-FAIL-ux"

[Anonymous Coward]

You are like those trolls in comp.os.linux.advocacy who keep on trolling daily for over a decade. I just can't figure out why...

I could probably understand finding it funny two or three times. But what's the appeal in repeating and repeating the same crap over again and again?

Re:torvalds has some serious issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me judge you by the way you abuse the English language. You don't need a double-spaced gap after every sentence or two. The first word in a sentence starts with a capital letter. You are a disgusting, uneducated buffoon. Your posts are not worth reading.

Networking Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use two boxes that I believe are Linux based, 1) my Ubuntu machine and 2) my WDTV Live.
If I select a network device too quickly, BAM, that's it - the network doesn't seem to recover, unless I reboot the device/machine.

As this is such a fundamental and obvious failure in Ubuntu and the WDTVLive, has this been fixed yet? I'm about to change to Linux Mint because I dislike Unity so strongly and am tired of waiting or Canonical to see the error of their ways - but i'd still appreciate knowing if this is fixed.

Re:Networking Better?

[Electricity Likes Me]

A word of warning, Linux Mint really needs to fix up how their installer drops X onto the system. The LiveCD will run great, but then you get all sorts of corruption till you get the right drivers installed.

It's a great distro - running it right now in fact - but oh god does that ever need to be fixed.

Re:Networking Better?

[johnw]

As this is such a fundamental and obvious failure in Ubuntu and the WDTVLive, has this been fixed yet?

If you want a useful answer to this question you'll need to clarify it a bit.

What do you mean by "select a network device too quickly"? The only thing it brings to mind is going into your local computer bits store and grabbing the first NIC on the shelf.

Likewise, "BAM, that's it". What sort of problem symptoms do you observe?

Keen to help, but more information needed.

LOL "Microsoft Tax"

[Anonymous Coward]

As Munich's failure proved, there is no MS tax. Windows truly does allow enterprise networks to do more with less, as promised.

Munich tried ripping out all the MS products, and all they did was cost the taxpayers millions upon millions they wouldn't have had to spend otherwise, as well as literally destroying their network just because they bought in to all of Slashdot's anti-reality Freetard propaganda.

Re:LOL "Microsoft Tax"

[arkane1234]

MS Tax means you have to pay for it, because it's forced on you when you buy the computer and auto-rolled into the price of the computer.

Now that you know what it is, try to say it didn't exist. I admit I know dell is offering Linux with their computers now, but that's very recent.

Re:Should call it "lin-FAIL-ux"

[BanHammor]

Customers? You are really making a fool of yourself.

Re:Should call it "lin-FAIL-ux"

[yahwotqa]

Please mod parent funny. :)

An odd-number release?

[Anonymous Coward]

How could an odd number be a "release"? I thought an odd number, like 3.5, would indicated a test version and the release version would be 3.6

Re:An odd-number release?

[diego.viola]

That's no longer the case.

Just telling it how it is/the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen is all - Especially the security part. The other improvements (the bufferbloat one especially considering Linux's "main role" out there's typically a server as far as PC desktops + Servers combined) are good too.

(I.E.-> Still - NO known exploits, & again: NOT EVEN LOCALLY EXPLOITABLE ONES, that I could see @ secunia.com so far on kernel build level 3.3 & doubtless the SAME from 3.5 now I'd wager? That is excellent... thusfar, @ least!)

That is pretty impressive imo @ least... as we ALL know how "bad" it is out there nowadays with the "hacker/cracker" types "running wild"...

APK

P.S.=> Granted, there's more updated/current places to look than secunia for "bugs", like US CERT, but then again - Secunia's not usually too far behind either from being current on those either, so there you are...

... apk

Subjective

[Anonymous Coward]

You gave us the subjective definition. Objectively, politics is about deciding who wins the game of coercion.

Re:Linux is not

[jellomizer]

I thought the odd number minor number meant it was for the beta version for the next kernel. Has this changed.

Re:Linux is not

[johnw]

Has this changed.

Yes - a long time ago.

off topic question

[Anonymous Coward]

but isn't the fact, that intel will not sell only their cpu, but the whole cpu-north/south-bridge, grafic and wireless to a system builder, a kin to microsoft pushing only internet explorer?

Re:Should call it "lin-FAIL-ux"

[rubycodez]

bhahaha, Android market share has risen to 60% in the USA and climbing.

Apple phones are for the style-conscience, it's like those who spend $120 for a $30 pair of athletic shoes because the asian maker had license to slap a big name like Nike on it.

server high availability

[Chirs]

Your system is getting indications that it's about to fail (or you want to take it down for maintenance). You migrate all the currently-running tasks to another server (without the clients even knowing about it), then take down your server and do your maintenance.

Linux would still have failed?

[dgharmon]

"Linux would still have failed if it had not been backed by google .. and they used their resources to make Android Linux a success, by selling direct to manufacturers

That's incorrect, the reasonGoogle succeded was that the Android OEMs didn't have a special relationship with Microsoft. Which explains MS going after them in court with the 'Microsoft Tax` ...

He never said that. You're the one projecting.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious that you are not only a zealot, but that you are the one who has failed to transcend the Abrahamic concept of One God. If you reread the comment you hastily replied to, you will see he makes no such statements and you're the one who just pulled that all out your asshole.

You might as well be one of those LaVeyan Satanists - in your attempt at "rebelling" against the church, you just did the same damn thing they do.

You fucking clown.

Nice new features... how about getting USB working

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure these new features are wonderful... but how about getting simple USB file transfers working? Sorry, but 3mbs transfer speed (USB2) after all these years is just rubbish. Surely these guys writing the kernel use USB, and can see the problems. Head out of sand guys!

Caught a known bug in kernel 3.3x... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"the Linux kernel circa 3.3 onwards (no known security issues I am aware of at least - not even LOCALLY exploitable ones, & that's pretty damned good, unless others here can show me otherwise to correct me with more current information...)." -

Well, I should've KNOWN BETTER that any of you "Linux Penguins/Fanboys" would expose what I was actually looking for, so, I went looking for myself:

http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-2133

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

---

"Overview

Use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel before 3.3.6, when huge pages are enabled, allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly gain privileges by interacting with a hugetlbfs filesystem, as demonstrated by a umount operation that triggers improper handling of quota data."

---

* Well... there you go - Guess the 3.3x kernel build wasn't as "solid" as I thought (& secunia didn't have the information, as they're my usual source & *FAIRLY* current, but not like NIST or US-CERT are as I noted earlier in my init. post I am replying to now...)

(Bright side is, it appears to be a LOCAL EXPLOIT, not a REMOTE one (worst kind) - might even be patched by the time you all read this hopefully, & I didn't "dig that deep" to make sure admittedly, so, there you are!)

APK

P.S.=> Let's hope that kernel build 3.5x (which this article's about) & beyond corrects THAT, because otherwise? It's looking thusfar to be a solid "bugfree & bulletproof" (as I call it) kernel... however: I do DOUBT it will remain thus, but it's getting there (hopefully)... apk

Re:torvalds has some serious issues.

[epyT-R]

well then if the cursing is irrelevant, why get upset about it? focus on the content of the message, if it has any.

uh? what? cursing is supposed to show other people that you have self-confidence? quite the opposite.

not necessarily. I was talking more about the insane overreaction modern society has to it.

in many parts of the world, showing your anger (and that includes cursing) will cause you to lose face and lose respect.

that exposes a fundamental problem with most of the world. it focuses too much on presentation and not enough on respecting content, to the point of ignoring truth when it's too uncomfortable to swallow. 'saving face' is just social mechanism to hide behind for those with no rational criticism to a position they don't like. these people are welcome to not respect content they don't like the look of, but if that content is truthful, they're not causing the messenger to lose face, they're spiting their own.

In this case, torvalds is expressing public criticism and frustration at nvidia for their policies. Sometimes a simple 'fuck you' sends a much clearer and more meaningful message than passive aggressive corporatespeak. he wants them to feel his frustration.

Thanks!

[billstewart]

Thanks.