Slashdot Mirror
Is the Stable Linux Kernel Moving Too Fast?
darthcamaro writes "Yesterday the stable Linux 3.10 kernel was updated twice — an error was made, forcing a quick re-issue. 'What happened was that a patch that was reported to be broken during the RC [release candidate] review process, went into the release, because I mistakenly didn't pull it out in time,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. The whole incident however is now sparking debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing List about the speed of stable Linux kernel releases. Are they moving too fast?"
3.10 is the next LTS kernel by Linux standards. The existing long term kernels are 2.6.32 (as used in RHEL6, Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu LTS 10.04), 2.6.34, 3.0, 3.2.50 (used in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), and 3.4.59.
You need to do some more reading on how Linux works.
So do you.
Linux is sort of a hybrid kernel now. Some hardware drivers are in ring 0. Quite a lot are no longer. libUSB for example allows userspace USB drivers. They work great. FUSE allows for user space filesystems which work great where absolute top performance is not necessary (eg sshfs, ftpfs etc).
A good fraction of the bluetooth stack, for example anything above L2CAP (the Bluetooth world equivalent of the IP stack's SCTP) , such as ATT and GATT is all userspace (and the non kernel side sucks donkey balls by the way). That means I could (if it didn't suck massive donkey balls) control all the various profiles with the majority of the code in userspace.
All the printer drivers are mostly in userspace (yay).
The graphics (X11) is largely in userspace for now...
Sound has a large userspace component and all the complex stuff like routing, mixing, and figuring out what to send where is in userspace (pulse or Jack).
The Linux kernel as-is is more than capable of running a mouse driver in userspace.
SJW n. One who posts facts.