Linux 3.12 Released, Linus Proposes Bug Fix-Only 4.0

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds announced the Linux 3.12 kernel release with a large number of improvements through many subsystems including new EXT4 file-system features, AMD Berlin APU support, a major CPUfreq governor improvement yielding impressive performance boosts for certain hardware/workloads, new drivers, and continued bug-fixing. Linus also took the opportunity to share possible plans for Linux 4.0. He's thinking of tagging Linux 4.0 following the Linux 3.19 release in about one year and is also considering the idea of Linux 4.0 being a release cycle with nothing but bug-fixes. Does Linux really need an entire two-month release cycle with nothing but bug-fixing? It's still to be decided by the kernel developers."

Comments

Bugfix Pause always welcome

[icebike]

There have been so many fast and furious features added over the last couple releases, not only to the kernel but also the various and sundry major components (like systemd) that taking a breather isn't going to hurt anything. There is nothing huge waiting in the wings that everyone needs next week.

Take the time to fix everything you can find.

Yes, it is needed.

[Frobnicator]

The kernel's bug database shows almost 2500 open bugs right now.

All projects slowly accumulate those hard-to-fix bugs, or the "maybe later" bugs, or the "not interesting right now", bugs. Periodically every project needs to have that cruft cleaned up.

Spending two months fixing those bugs might be a minor annoyance to some of the kernel maintainers but would be a godsend to people who have been waiting a very long time for low priority and low interest kernel bug fixes.

Don't confuse iOS (hipster) with OSX (UNIX)

[raymorris]

iPhone's are for hipsters. OSX is certified UNIX running on rock solid, high performance hardware. Don't confuse the two.

I used Linux exclusively for fifteen years. I've contributed to many open source projects, including the Linux kernel, and I'm the maintainer of Linux::LVM and other projects. In other words, I'm a fan of Linux. From one fan of Linux to another, don't dismiss OSX just because the same company makes overpriced toys as well. It's a solid UNIX which will run all of your favorite FOSS software, and do it well.

Re:Don't confuse iOS (hipster) with OSX (UNIX)

[FireFury03]

iPhone's are for hipsters. OSX is certified UNIX running on rock solid, high performance hardware. Don't confuse the two.

I used Linux exclusively for fifteen years. I've contributed to many open source projects, including the Linux kernel, and I'm the maintainer of Linux::LVM and other projects. In other words, I'm a fan of Linux. From one fan of Linux to another, don't dismiss OSX just because the same company makes overpriced toys as well. It's a solid UNIX which will run all of your favorite FOSS software, and do it well.

TBH the biggest problem I'm seeing in the wild with the latest software from Apple, Microsoft and Google is the lack of sensible exception handling.

In the old days, if something broke you got an error message telling you that something broke and giving you enough information to figure out what (hell, even if it was just "Error 2312 happened" you could at least look it up). Then they (primarilly Apple it seems, but the others are not blameless) decided that telling people what broke isn't user friendly so you got totally unhelpful "something broke" error messages with no indication as to what - many times I've have to trawl through a tcpdump capture to figure out what went wrong, and often it's that the remote server returned an error message - giving the user an easy way to see that error message would be really good!

Now, increasingly I'm seeing new software simply not producing any error messages at all - it just sits there looking like its waiting on a remote server or something when in fact it's doing nothing because the remote server threw an error back. Added to that the fact that a lot of software is now becoming an asynchronous background service means you don't even know *when* its trying and failing, all you know is it just isn't working (stuff like iCloud - all you know is that your calendars / files / whatever aren't syncing, no indication as to why or when it failed).

I get that the majority of people aren't going to *personally* find debugging information useful, but when they take it to a professional to figure out why it isn't working it would be damned helpful for the professional to be able to get at some information about what's going on - if you want to keep the error dialogue boxes tidy, just hide the debugging information in an "advanced" button.