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LTSI Linux Kernel 3.4 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the penguins-with-boosterspice dept.

hypnosec writes "The Linux Foundation has announced the release of Linux 3.4 under its Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), which will be maintained for the next two years with back-ported features from newer Linux kernels. Based on Linux 3.4.25, the LTSI 3.4 is equipped with features such as Contiguous Memory Allocator – which is helpful for embedded devices with limited hardware resource availability; AF_BUS – a kernel-based implementation of the D-Bus protocol; and CoDel (controlled delay) – a transmission algorithm meant for optimization of TCP/IP network buffer control."

5 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. AF_BUS -- a[n] implementation of the D-BUS" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    which may or may not materialize in the mainline.

    Backporting uncontested features, those which will go into mainline is fine, but I don't get this.

    Caveat emptor.

    1. Re:AF_BUS -- a[n] implementation of the D-BUS" by GrievousMistake · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hadn't heard about AF_BUS before...
      I found the rationale, and a summary of the argument against.

      I get that doing multicast in userspace isn't optimal, but I'm a bit mystified what people are doing with D-Bus that would require any kind of performance. Wasn't D-Bus supposed to be a simple pub-sub system for notification of events and the like?

      --
      In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
  2. Re:Good, I suppose by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There can be many distributions, but there could be one reference distribution, which the likes of Steam, Quartus and MATLAB could target and have a sanely supportable platform.

  3. Re:Stupid question by DeSigna · · Score: 3, Informative

    The view that the kernel has of memory allocations is somewhat different to what the application sees - most of the work is done in the libc, which directs the kernel to map regions and size the heaps that it malloc()'s from.

    Usually, you'd have GC handled by other libraries, for instance the Boehm-Weiser GC. If you're using C++, Boost also has a few wrappers and implementations of garbage collection algorithms for a variety of use cases.

    From memory I believe the kernel CMA is mostly related to in-kernel allocations, so drivers and kernel threads.

  4. Not very long term by Myopic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why is two years considered Long Term? In my short career I've worked with many machines which have run the same version of an OS for a lot longer than that. I would think ten years would be a *minimum* threshold for "long term support". Ten years from now, yes, some machines will need that critical security update. No, we can't expend six months every two years to re-test the systems to make sure they work with the new kernel.

    There's a sliding scale of how reasonable it is to keep backporting bug fixes but two years? Two years doesn't seem long enough. Even my laptop has a three-year-old version of OS X on it.