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Linux 3.10 Merge Windows Closes

Posted by samzenpus on from the finishing-it-up dept.

hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 3.10-rc1 kernel marking the closure of the 3.10 merge window. The Linux 3.10-rc1 is the second biggest rc release in years and the closure of the merge windows means that the features expected out of the Linux 3.9 successor are chalked out. "So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go," Linus notes in the release announcement."

9 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Merge Windows Closes by boshvark · · Score: 5, Funny

    So Linux is finally merging with Windows... uh, that can't be right. I guess windows will now merge when you close them? No, that doesn't make sense either, so maybe it's a new Unity feature.

    --
    There's always money in the banana stand.
    1. Re:Merge Windows Closes by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, no, it says quite clearly that they're only merging with Windows 3.1, which is barely Windows by any useful definition. Didn't you RTFA? Jeez, the nerve of some people...

      --
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    2. Re:Merge Windows Closes by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is a phenomenon known as a Garden path sentence. The phrasing leads you to believe that windows is a singular noun, when it is in fact a plural noun with a different meaning. For anyone still confused: these are the windows to merge changes into source-control before release.

    3. Re:Merge Windows Closes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, the problem here isn't a garden path sentence, the problem is illiterate Slashdot editorial processes as usual. The right headline was "Linux 3.10 merge window closes" but the usual brain damage morphed that into what you see now.

      If there were several "merge windows" then that would be plural, but the verb changes to agree, that's how English works. So you'd get "Linux 3.10 merge windows close".

      You can write the sentence "Linux 3.10 merge windows closes" in English, but you need "window" to be a verb and then the "merge windows" noun + verb assembly becomes a singular compound noun which you can use with the verb "closes". You would probably never want to do this, and it's not what anybody at Slashdot intended, but it's a possible English sentence. Shakespeare used to treat "window" as a verb, so you wouldn't necessarily be in the worst company, but Shakespeare was a fucking genius, the people editing Slashdot can't even compete with those monkeys Mr Burns had working on A Tale of Two Cities.

  2. NVIDIA borken again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    They changed the kernel enough so that the NVIDIA binary blobs are börken (sic) again! Something about whether is a real 2.4 kernel and whatnot. It seems just to be a test, but its anal and börken! I understand that NVIDIA is a commercial company and as such cannot keep up to the rate of development of OSS developers.

  3. list of changes by ssam · · Score: 3, Informative

    For folk who even after RTFA wonder whats new in 3.10, the best source is probably LWN
    https://lwn.net/Articles/548834/
    https://lwn.net/Articles/549477/

  4. Re:Yes, nice. But why is this a story? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everybody concerned will already have this news from other sources.

    You are mistaken.

    I care enough to RTFA, and I got the story here.

    Why? I care about kernel development because it interests me, but I don't care about it enough to require absoloutely up to the minute coverage. So, slashdot is an excellent place to get it, and there are often useful comments to boot.

    Basically, you could say the same about any story: anyone who cares enough could get the news faster from a domain specific source.

    Everybody else does likely not care, also because typical users use distro-kernels and not self-compiled kernels from kernel.org.

    Huh? These features will make it into distros soonish, and secondly since when is slashdot only the domain of typical users.

    And this is not even the kernel release, but the closing of the merge-window,

    The two are equivalent from this perspective: the actual release will have no new features.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. mainline flashcache and bcache by Gothmolly · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are the things I care about - and I suspect most people do too, even if they don't know about it. The eed to transparently (or not!) accelerate spinning drives with SSD is a killer feature. I'm currently running a homebrew NAS on Linux and my VMWare hosts insist on doing sync mounts - effectively killing performance. By shimming some SSD in front of that, my IO latency bottleneck essentially goes away. (Lets leave ZFS out of this). "Desktop" distros will love this too - I see a simple "wizard" that asks "I see you have an SSD installed - would you like to accelerate access to your HD? Click yes and specify a maximum cache size" Presto - an instant increase in performing most tasks.

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    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  6. Re:3.1 vs 3.10!? by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Informative

    Am I the only one who thinks having a version number which is subject to getting rounded off is a terrible terrible idea?

    "Oops looks like this release has a trailing 0 on there... *delete*."

    Terrible idea? That's how version numbers work. They are not ordinary decimal numbers, so you cannot round them like that.