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Bad Lockup Bug Plagues Linux
jones_supa (887896) writes "A hard to track system lockup bug seems to have appeared in the span of couple of most recent Linux kernel releases. Dave Jones of Red Hat was the one to first report his experience of frequent lockups with 3.18. Later he found out that the issue is present in 3.17 too. The problem was first suspected to be related to Xen. A patch dating back to 2005 was pushed for Xen to fix a vmalloc_fault() path that was similar to what was reported by Dave. The patch had a comment that read "the line below does not always work. Needs investigating!" But it looks like this issue was never properly investigated. Due to the nature of the bug and its difficulty in tracking down, testers might be finding multiple but similar bugs within the kernel. Linus even suggested taking a look in the watchdog code. He also concluded the Xen bug to be a different issue. The bug hunt continues in the Linux Kernel Mailing List."
It is a Genuine Advantage!
It is, they can and do.
I don't care why you're posting AC
That's why having a bug is worthy of a news item.
It is... that is what they are doing right now. In comparison, Windows has had hard lockup bugs in every major version of the OS that I have used from Windows 95 to 7, and those have never been and will never be fixed.
The fact that this is even brought to the spotlight shows the miracle of open source.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The last mail in the thread, dated the 26th of November, explains that the Xen bug was a Xen bug and that the lockup was something different and traceable once the chap experiencing the bug managed to get a kernel backtrace.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
I thought open source software was supposed to be better because everyone could see the code and spot problems.
Too often when I find a bug (even investigate the actual reason as well as I can) and talk about it in a mailing list or bug tracker, it's just crickets chirping. No one stands up and properly takes responsibility of the issue. I very well understand that this might be due to lacking developer resources, but it still results in bad software.
I have started wondering if modern software is simply too complex to be developed in high quality with the resources (manpower and funding) that open source gets.
This is not unique to open source software. Closed source code also is complex, and lacks developers. Bugs that aren't reported by big customers are easily ignored.
I have started wondering if modern software is simply too complex to be developed in high quality with the resources (manpower and funding) that open source gets.
Consider how your experience differs from commercial software. Most of the time there is no channel for reporting bugs unless you are a multi-seat corporate customer! And you statistically never get direct access to their bug tracker; yes I'm aware that some corps open those up but they are far and away in the minority.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Linux support in a nutshell: blame the user.
You must be an idiot then. Windows is "dumbed down" for idiots that can't think.
I don't want to switch to *BSD..... and buy a Mac.
So which is it? I got introduced to Linux because I had a Mac. I first started messing around with Terminal.app and it's gone from there. After a botch attempt at Linux on a generic laptop and hating having to deal with finding GNU Tools for Windows I'm thinking of going back.
It has a UI that "just works" and I don't have to dick around with settings. Even IPv6 is very easy to set up with a lot of brokers straight from the Network settings. But it also has gcc, clang, make, etc that makes life easier for doing development.
In my experience, closed source software comes with much less bugs to begin with. With OSS, even some essential features can be glitchy or partially implemented.
While I'd agree that much open source software is just hacked together and shipped when it does everything the developers care about, most of the bugs in our software (not open source per se, but our customers get all our source so they can modify it if they want) are caused by third-party, closed-source libraries that we use because licensing them was much cheaper than writing the same code from scratch. I haven't seen a single crash in a year that wasn't due to third party, closed source code.
And, financially, it still makes sense, because developing workarounds for their bugs is still cheaper than writing the code from scratch.
It's not systemd related, you can check by opening a termin
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Can confirm it happens in 12.04
If the user is rolling their own operating system with a linux kernel? Yup.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
> First got into it ... because Linux was totally stable
If stable is your top priority, Fedora is approximately the worst possible choice. Fedora is essentially Red Hat Beta. If you want stable, the devel / beta branch is not for you. You'll probably be much happier with Red Hat or its twin, CentOS.
Also, you mentioned that you did an "upgrade" to Debian Unstable. You didn't mention any _reason_ for doing that. If stability is a top priority for you, don't upgrade just because you can, don't fix it if it aint broke.
Mac OSX may indeed be a good choice for you also. It is certified Unix and if you use the commondand line in Linux you'll find that day-to-day tasks are the same on a Mac. System internals are different of course, but bash, sed, awk, grep, and vim work just like they do on Linux.
So are you saying they failed your genuine advantage check?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Check out Mint 17.1 Mate, it's about Ubuntu LTS (where you don't really need to leave to default repos for the most part) and still refining Gnome 2.
Linux is sadly stuck in endless cycles of waiting for better software and better drivers, that will never end even though we might find a (temporary) sweet spot sometimes.
There once was a cycle of well supported, just works, ever improving releases. Ubuntu 8.04, debian lenny, Ubuntu 10.04, debian squeeze (ignoring some debates about the 8.04 launch). I'd say Mint is about the same and the 17.x series is about staying on LTS with a bit more hardware support and desktop features/stability each time.
I love the assumption that this isn't happening in the corporate world.
It is. It just happens behind closed doors. Thus, patches.
Get an operating system whose kernel works. OpenBSD.
There seems to be a big chasm opening in the Linux world. Not to worry though, there is stable Linux out there. There are two forks of Gnome and a large variety of alternative desktops to choose from. You can still install Jessie without systemd and Devuan, Slackware, and Gentoo intend to keep that option open.
As for the lockup bug in TFA, in most projects, the kernel versions in question would be internal release only. The outside world would never see them. For example, my debian system is on 3.16 even when I enabled the backports repo.
The final bit, not all soft lockups are fatal. They are never a good thing, but they sometimes just indicate that something is taking longer than it was ever expected to and it needs to either be speeded up or broken into more manageable pieces so something else gets a chance to run.
So your claim is that the bug you are talking about is unknown? That you haven't seen it? My, that's quite a problem in logic, isn't it?
A couple of months ago I saw the entertainment system on a 777 reboot and noticed a 2.6 series kernel...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Actually we can't be completely sure. How this thing works in Ubuntu, is that they chose the 3.13 kernel for 14.04, but they still selectively apply newer patches from upstream on top of that. See the most recent changelog. Of course they include only conservative bugfixes and no cutting edge stuff, which makes it unlikely that the lockup bug has slipped in there.
The difference is that Windows won't let you roll back to a version that is known not to have the lockup bugs.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So it may be a "bad" lockup bug in the sense that nobody knows exactly what causes it, but it's not "bad" in the sense that people should worry overly.
Why?
Dave Jones sees it only under insane loads (CPU loads of 150+) running a stress tester that is designed to do crazy things (trinity). And he can reproduce it on only one of his machines, and even there it takes hours. And it happens on a debug kernel that has DEBUG_PAGEALLOC and other explicit (and complex) debug code enabled. And even then the bug is a "Hmm. We made no progress in the last 21 seconds", rather than anything stranger.
In other words, it's "bad" in the sense that any unknown behavior is bad, but it's unknown mainly because it's so hard to trigger. Nobody else than core developers should really care. And those developers do care, so it's not like it's worrisome there either. It just takes longer to figure out because the usual "bisect it" approach isn't very easy when it can take a day to reproduce..
I'd say in general, stay away from the 3D accelerated desktops (all of them) if you aren't 100% sure you have the right graphics and driver. Better safe than sorry, then you only have to worry about the other issues.
So what?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
What does the E in RHEL stand for?
Since I've got your attention & while we're at it, how about the second S in OSS?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I blame systemd anyhow. The growing use of systemd is also the primary cause of global warming, and the declining honeybee population.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Have you ever compared enterprise class software (I also count Windows 7 Enterprise) with OSS Software? Windows does not even reliably support STR and resume. Using multiple monitors is a PITA.
Suspend and multiple monitors have always worked great in Windows for me. Under Linux, they have also worked fine in some machines, but I have also occasionally experienced serious problems with those areas. During recent times I have found out that even laptop screen brightness adjustment cannot be expected to work reliably out of the box under Linux.
Since when did sloppy software keep people from making lots of money? The market has consistently shown it usually values features over high-reliability/quality.
Table-ized A.I.
> OS X may be stable but it has a short shelf life. You might find your hardware unsupported in 3 or 4 years
I don't know if that might be true of some iOS mobile devices or where that FUD comes from, but my six year old Mac from 2008 is going strong and I just installed an OS update. My employer wanted to replace it, but it's a quad core with16GB of RAM - more than sufficient for today's software. Bureaucracy said the budget had to be spent on computer equipment, so we upgraded one of the four drives to an SSD. The old RAID was fast enough, but I guess the SSD will save a few minutes per week. Later we used the budget to add a Macbook Pro. It will probably make sense to upgrade my desktop in 2015 or 2016, when it's seven or eight years old.
That's the perspective of a guy who isn't even paying for the upgrade. It's free to me, but if I can run the latest OS and multiple IDEs and browsers open on four monitors with no noticeable lag, why would I replace it?
Or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Mate, without the Mint middleman ...
I think the answer to that one is "all over the map". Certain aspects of open source are done with excessive attention to niche functionality because there's either funding or the kind of geeky details that have nerds jumping all over it to implement. Other features, particularly features you'd use if you're a... less than tech-savvy user, tend to be ignored. Obligatory XKCD. On the bright side, it's not like code actually rots so the resource problem can be rephrased as how quickly does the environment change with new hardware and languages and libraries and standards and protocols and so on. Not to mention input paradigms like multi-touch versus keyboard and mouse. Eventually it has to slow down. PCIe has existed longer than any of the standards that preceded it. USB has lasted longer than than the standards that preceded it. H.264 has lasted longer than any of the standards that preceded it. Now we've got computers that can fit into the palm of our hands, how much smaller and different could they get? I guess sci-fi isn't out of ideas yet but if keyboard and mouse has gotten us through the last 30 years I expect touch to last longer and what follows touch even longer.
Another perspective is simply considering if the users' needs are going to rise infinitely, which I suppose is a special case of the above. Just because Photoshop continues to add features doesn't mean that people need photo editing of infinite complexity. It might simply be that once you've reached a certain level of functionality open source is good enough for most people on a fairly permanent basis. I know at least a few tools that I more or less consider "done", like just recently I installed Babaschess which was last updated in 2007, it's abandoned yet fully functional. I have QuickPar installed, which hasn't been updated since 2004 yet I also consider "done". With open source people like to fiddle with it but there as well there's software which has been essentially unchanged for years. The pace might be glacial at times but ultimately I think open source will win out. Just look at Linux/BSD, Windows is the only one with a homegrown kernel and I suspect that's mostly history. I doubt Microsoft would start writing another kernel from scratch today.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Funny, I'm moving in the opposite direction, but reach the same conclusion. Working with (most) modern IDEs just seem like masochism after you've used VIM.
The learning curve for vim is horrible. I can understand anyone who gives up before reaching reasonable productivity levels. Once you've gone through it, however, the IDEs are just no competition.
Shachar
This is but the price we pay for not dedicating an entire core to systemd. If systemd did not have to share a core with the other processes, then it would be free to seek out and steril...correct these trifling kernel issues and the ones responsible.
Wow, I must just be imagining running VLC on my Android tablet to play files on my NAS server. And Google must be quaking in their boots at the threat from Windows tablets and phones.
As for a few weeks of uptime supposedly being impressive, we reboot our Linux servers once a year, just because (or when we upgrade to a new OS release). I reboot my Linux desktop every few months because, by then, it's got a few kernel releases out of date. Damn it's a crappy OS.
Who's the middle man making the theme and wallpaper then.
Well, I'll certainly have to try it but if it's like the old days of totem player as default, "warning : do you want to install the mp3 codecs" and no flash plug-in, it's not my kind of thing anymore. On the other hand Ubuntu is excellent if you "roll your own" (between quotes as every installation of everything is brain-dead easy and automated) : use the pxe or netinstall installer, get the base command line system (that has most everything for such an environment) and add what you want. It's about a better debian. I only wish it had a clean state "ubuntu + lxde" iso as debian does, because I am not fond of what lubuntu does (theme and additional software)
I don't know if that might be true of some iOS mobile devices or where that FUD comes from, but my six year old Mac from 2008
Well, I guess if Yosemite runs on YOUR six year old Mac you must be right, and anything anyone else says must be FUD.
Then again, OSX March was released in 2013, and dropped support for early-2009 13-inch Mac Book Pros.
So, just to make it perfectly clear to you, they've ALREADY dropped support for a laptop that's a year NEWER than your computer, being dropped by OS that's already a year and a half old.
Mavericks (and Yosemite) also dropped support for any Xserve's older than 2009 (so server class hardware got dropped after just 4 years of support), and any mac mini's older than 2009 got dropped as well.
Millions of Macs from 2008s stopped being supported over a year and half a go. You got lucky.
And should I add, this is mostly about trivialities. I welcome you pushing Ubuntu LTS Mate. Even Ubuntu Unity has some qualities (seen friends running it on their own, it is made for the 1366 by 768 laptop)
Since every bug this year needs to have a catchy name for the headlines, I propose we call this one "Davy Jones' Lockup."
Even then, the market will show that it prefers a well advertized heap of shit over a buggy piece of software with more supposed features.
I feel they are really different tools for different things.
I would hate to do much of my Python scripting or fortran-barely-beyond-punchcards wrangling with an IDE, which in the first case would force me to setup hundreds of little "projects", and in the 2nd case would fight me every step of the way because nothing is really standard. Sometimes, all I want is a good editor, and for me, emacs is exactly this (and vim/sublime/ed/notepad.exe/whatever for other people - whatever floats your boat).
On the other hand, for large and reasonably standard structured projects, IDEs are great.
I was most recently using Debian, but my computer got messed up after I did an update and that SystemD thing got installed.
Yeah, Debian totally jumped the shark with Jessie. A bunch of stuff broke on my machine - I suspect it was systemd. Couldn't go back to Wheezy though - I bought a new MoBo, and Wheezy didn't even support the *wired* LAN connection out-of-the-box.
I haven't been happy with other developments, either. I used to love GNOME 2, but I tried GNOME 3 and it was like using Windows 8. It's just a bad and dumb experience.
I never even tried G3 - the screen shots and reviews were enough to keep me away. I switched to XFCE at that point, and I've been pretty happy with it. The file manager is only adequate - but then there are no really good graphical file managers in Linux, and I've learned to live with Thunar's limitations. (Dolphin came close to being as good as Windows Explorer when I dialled down the K-Bling - but that was back when you could still install a small part of KDE without getting stuck with the whole damned ugly fat-filled lot of pseudo-dependencies).
I don't know what to do at this point. I can't keep using Linux if its stability is crap, and the other major open source software is caca these days. I don't want to switch to *BSD. I don't like Windows at all. So I think maybe I'm just going to sell my computer, and buy a Mac.
Although I cringe at the thought of Apple and its walled gardens, I hear you and I feel your pain. The Linux landscape seems more homogeneous and less 'choiceful' than it did even a few years ago. But at least give Xubuntu a try before you decide to give up on Linux altogether. And FWIW, I haven't experienced any crashes at all, (fingers crossed), and my installation is as up-to-date as automatic updates can make it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
And I've seen steward(esses) use iPads for work. So what?
Wow, a few weeks of uptime! My RHEL workstation - which sees a very varied use and high loads of loooong times, with lots of pheripals - regularly goes for months...
I've been a Linux user continuously through out that whole period, and I get what you're saying. For the last couple of years I've found Linux a lot less stable. Sometimes the culprit looks like the graphical environment/drivers, sometimes maybe not. But it's been really frustrating and I've not know where to begin hunting it down. Bug reports sure, but when your bug stays open for 18 months.....
There's an imbalance in development. Under windows, every hardware manufacturer does all they can to ensure their hardware is good - investing a lot of money in developing and testing the drivers. Under linux, the manufacturers usually don't care - aside from some server hardware, there just aren't enough resources to justify it from a business perspective. So development falls to three-man team on a side project, and sometimes it's down to community volunteers working from reverse-engineered specifications.
When I saw the article, I'd assumed it was systemd related. Now that I've read it, I know it's not. All of the systemd naysayers lining up to say "I told you so" are now going "DOH!" and dispersing. For now...
Well, I guess if Yosemite runs on YOUR six year old Mac you must be right, and anything anyone else says must be FUD.
FUD is when people made false statements to try to prove their point. As an example of FUD, here's your statement:
Then again, OSX March was released in 2013, and dropped support for early-2009 13-inch Mac Book Pros.
I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March? Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on. So, maybe you made a second typo and had really meant 2009 MacBooks (not Pros)? Alas, Mavericks/Yosemite (they have the same system requirements) will run on early-2009 Mac Books, as well. So, you're basically just entirely wrong. Here's the Apple support page if you don't believe me: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6412.
I do think it's worth noting that the Intel macs that are not supported are either 32-bit only or computers with 32-bit EFI. Mavericks and Yosemite are 64-bit only, so the 32-bit processors computers are out. Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.
So, just to make it perfectly clear to you, they've ALREADY dropped support for a laptop that's a year NEWER than your computer, being dropped by OS that's already a year and a half old.
Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract. They merely do not support the older Macs with the latest version of the Operating system. The minimally supported systems are still at least 4-5 years old and 7+ years old in many cases (like my own). Works for me.
Mavericks (and Yosemite) also dropped support for any Xserve's older than 2009 (so server class hardware got dropped after just 4 years of support), and any mac mini's older than 2009 got dropped as well.
Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.
Something like Apache?
No and no.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Woooosh!!!
Got it?
And the others after you?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Wait, I thought the honeybee problem was already found to be Pulseaudio's fault?
Well... there's no walled garden on the Mac side. Nevertheless I used to cringe at the thought of leaving Linux. Then I just got sick of dealing with all that crap of stuff breaking all the time, and I had better things to do than spend a whole night till 2am finding out why the latest update broke something. So I learned to stop worrying and love the Apple.
BSOD is an error trap screen. The kernel was going to die, the error was caught, the crees was displayed, and the system then halts.
Saying that the BSOD is not a kernel problem is possibly correct, but not certain.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If you are using an overly verbose language with a lot of code you could automatically generate *cough* Java *cough* it is better to use an IDE. For everything else that is pure text entry Vim is superior.
I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March?
Yes, Mavericks. Not sure what freudian slip caused that.
Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on.
http://support.apple.com/en-us...
Ok, that's interesting.
Now Check:
http://support.apple.com/en-us...
"
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
"
They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.
Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.
Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.
I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".
Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.
People buying servers do not expect support to drop that quickly. Just because apple disco'd producing the line doesn't mean that support for the ones they did sell should end quicker.
Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract.
Nobody said they did. But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.
Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.
I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.
I went through this around 2007-2008 when after running Debian as a desktop for about five years on two desktops, my wife and I got tired of the breakage with every major update. While I was willing to put up with more, my wife got tired of me spending a few hours trying to sort things out on her desktop with every update -- often basic things like graphics driver stuff in a multi-monitor setup. Power savings never worked (I gave up on it).
What often drove updates was wanting to use the latest version of Eclipse or Firefox or other applications. My wife went first, going to a Mac Pro, and I followed about a year later. We're still using that hardware, although upgraded in various ways (memory, drives, graphics cards and monitors).
That said, Linux is everywhere and those years of working with it all the time have been very useful in maintaining servers (including in VirtualBox) and embedded hardware (NAS, routers, media, other) which generally face less updates that desktops. I feel Linux settled down to stability a couple years after that (driven in part by Ubuntu's widespread adoption) -- although it sounds like instability has picked up again. I feel that in general about FOSS -- maybe the old guard is getting bored or old or tired or busy or burned out and new people move to web stuff?
Of course now, my wife's Mac Pro from 2007 is not supported for an upgrade past Snow Leopard. Mine is, but I'm not sure if it is worth it yet. But, more and more, software coming out has a minimum of later versions. And there are no more Snow Leopard updates. And my wife's machine has a sporadic kernel panic or something once every few weeks or so. And mine has also been doing some lockups, although not recently after resetting the PRAM.
There were some big disappointments leaving Debian. I liked cut-and-paste under Linux where selecting something put it in the copy buffer. Mac is harder, including weirdness about having to menu click within the selected text to pull up a copy menu. Apt get was great (when stuff was compatible) and a sad loss to not have. Also, Mac's GUI design with a single global menu is just *terrible* on a multi-monitor setup, especially if the monitors are different heights; having a menu per application window like Linux makes so much more sense. I also don't like the fact that I could easily (without copyright concerns) virtualize old Linux setups, but you can't really do that with Mac OS X -- in that sense, all my work feels "contaminated" by copyright issues. That said, Apple Time Machine "just works" as a backup solution (ignoring the risks of having a plugged in backup hard drive in a worst case).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not to mention Systemd has not yet been approved for use in Thorium based nuclear reactors, presumeably due to the haphazard nondeterministic startup sequence.
And the lack of thorium reactors.
Of course Pottering just hand waved this arguement away like the rest. YOU BASTARDS!
Every commercial software product I've worked on has had at least some level of unit testing, QA and UAT before it's considered ready for prime time. You'd be sacked for using, "Does it compile?" as your metric for it being ready.
Although I cringe at the thought of Apple and its walled gardens, I hear you and I feel your pain. The Linux landscape seems more homogeneous and less 'choiceful' than it did even a few years ago. But at least give Xubuntu a try before you decide to give up on Linux altogether. And FWIW, I haven't experienced any crashes at all, (fingers crossed), and my installation is as up-to-date as automatic updates can make it.
The whole thing has become too complicated and it makes hobbyists cringe. Not just the kernel, X, everything else. That's why you mostly see corporations funding the work. Maybe it was because it was funded by corporations that it became to complicated to begin with.
Remains to be seen if the efforts to replace X will turn out something that is actually simpler and better though.
Hah.
NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel do care. That's most of the hardware that matters today. Even Samsung uses Linux in their products a lot.
And hand Intel a monopoly? Careful there.
Table-ized A.I.
android and chrome OS are shaping up as windows alternatives. I just bought a powerful computer running chrome OS, and it only cost 160 dollars.
Good luck getting code into mainline past Linus with code that just compiles. Also for the uninformed, there is massive testing with automated booting on several different types of hardware. And that is only for the vanilla releases which no one should use directly, on top of that comes the distribution testing and patching.
Linux is for embedded, and for servers. It excels in both areas, and should rightly be admired for what it has achieved. Linux on the desktop though, is an exercise in futility. The reason is that a desktop user interface is at least an order of magnitude more complex and nuanced that writing a server OS. Not to mention the fact that building a coherent desktop user experience requires pretty solid leadership - something the Open Source community necessarily lacks.
Sorry guys, but that's just how it is. Carry on playing with your desktops, and your Unity and your Pulseaudio and all that. I'm sure it's fun, and I'm sure that I'd have been pretty into it when I used to write code as a hobby. But it's probably best if you just stop trying to pretend that what you're building is in any way comparable to either Windows or OS X.
I thought open source software was supposed to be better because everyone could see the code and spot problems.
It is the case: the person that merged the patch had access to this comment, and this person should have asked for details and maybe fixes before merging.
http://www.sonnettech.com/prod...
You're mounting that mac wrong.
The latter is not unlikely. Corporations seems to love policy management, and shit seems to have hit the fan with the into of policykit. A xml monstrosity delegating limited "root" abilities based on various criteria (like consolekit/logind "seat" status).
Never mind that whole debacle with Puleeaudio, that started with a simple set of usb headphones...
Automagical turtles all the way down.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Which *could* be a bug in the kernel and that was highly believable a few years ago. More recently, not so much. BSOD are very rare except for hardware errors, driver errors and corrupt system files.
What's happening is Linux is catching up to where Microsoft was several years ago. Don't let the pretty skin and fast hardware running it fool you. It's still in a primitive state.
Systemd got my dog pregnant.
This bug is a soft lockup detected by the watchdog.
That doesn't always happen, but for example, MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 code doing more of less what you request.
weirdness about having to menu click within the selected text to pull up a copy menu.
Or right click if you use a regular mouse (I never could get the hang of Apple mice), or two-finger click/tap on a trackpad, or just Cmd-C.
Mac's GUI design with a single global menu is just *terrible* on a multi-monitor setup
Yosemite has somewhat solved this, but the menu in most applications is more of a lookup for the keyboard shortcut than something you actually use. In Yoseimite you get a menu and a dock on every monitor, and it's better, but it's not perfect. I do wonder about that top menu bar, but at the same time it's nice being able to glance to the top of the screen to see what application is active. And of course, it's really easy to hit with a mouse.
hard lockup bugs in every major version of the OS that I have used from Windows 95 to 7,
Well, Windows 95 & 98 sure - everything prior too. But I've not seen a lockup bug in Windows since then, and I use the damn thing every day at work. Hell, OS X locks up more than Windows, and I've only ever had that happen when I was doing bad things to the graphics driver while writing openGL code.
those have never been and will never be fixed.
The implication of this statement is that not only do you know what these bugs are, but you are able to reproduce them and are maybe even willing to share the details on them. I'd like to find out what they are, if only to cause my workmate's machines to lock up when they're out getting coffee...
Most of the time there is no channel for reporting bugs unless you are a multi-seat corporate customer!
Apple has a bug reporting tool, and one that actually gets responses too. If you use OS X Server you even get an email address for problems, and they even reply - it's astonishing. Most of the commercial software that I've actually bought (which is normally pretty cheap software to be honest) also had pretty responsive support. Now if you buy Microsoft software, or Adobe software, or whatever, then sure - they don't listen but they do collect crash reports & so-on (if you let them). I'm not sure that they qualify as 'most software' though, I suppose it depends on how you count it.
just in case your are not sarcastic.. . http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Can you provide a link to the Devuan download page?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
next time i have trouble getting to sleep, i will read your post and say thank you
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
No.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Debian totally jumped the shark with Jessie. A bunch of stuff broke on my machine - I suspect it was systemd.
Well, that's a useful bug report.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
makes me remember when i had that persistent bsod when using a brand new ms certified nic with ms certified drivers on ms windows. i remember exhausting all options for support, from usenet to manufacturer forums, to no avail. but it worked like a charm on linux. yes, on that outdated, primitive and monolithic kernel.
Here but there's not much there yet.
Every commercial software product I've worked on has had at least some level of unit testing, QA and UAT before it's considered ready for prime time
"at least some" just isn't enough, if it were true at all (you can't tell for commercial software because you only have gratuituous statements like yours to back it). and i've seen quite a bunch of commercial projects going through qa and uat while missing severe bugs, even fundamental design flaws going unnoticed.
the antagony open vs commercial is a fallacy. there's only competent vs incompetent teams, and both happen in both scenarios. the only difference is that with commercial closed software you'll never know, but you will always get the same rainbow & unicorns explanation.
i've been using linux on the desktop for decades now. of the zillions of ui's available, i remember doing pretty well with either windowmaker, gome (2), xfce, never liked kde but there were always options. since the gome 3 fiasco i got into tiling window managers and realized i had never actually *needed* anything else.
so ymmv but for me particularly linux has the best desktop uis available today, period. ui is only complex if you want to get dumb peolple to do smart things, and that's just impossible, a chimera. windows and mac OS are a bloody testament to that, ffs.
code in emacs or vim just seems like an exercise in masochism after you get used to a modern IDE.
i have used probably more that two dozens of ides professionally in my life. there were some very cool tools, but they come and go. eclipse, which just rocked for years, is now a bloated monster. just an example, all of them dissapeared one way or the other.
then i returned to emacs, which i had tinkered with in my early years, and realized: this software was written before i was born, it runs on anything from a computer to a bread toaster, it has a solution for anything i as a developer might need, it is still in full shape today with a vibrant community and it will most probably continue running long after i am gone.
now i would feel like an idiot if i didn't stick to emacs. let's come back to this discussion after you have burned through your two dozen shiny ides.
Systemd got my dog pregnant.
Don't let it come to term
As said by several others, BSODs are an error message from the kernel, which has died (detected that something is seriously wrong, and stopped itself before it overwrites the file system or something like that) - just like a "kernel panic" on Linux or OS X. And yes, they usually come from hardware problems (regardless of OS), sometimes from misconfiguration (again regardless of OS), and rarely from programming errors (regardless of OS).
What you're saying is that Microsoft code is trivial, since all non-trivial code has bugs, unhandled or poorly handled special cases etc.
No, OpenBSD fully supports SMP nowadays.
Linux is an inconsistent mess.
No arguments, duly noted.
Now, if you think it'd be sensible to keep embedded systems like that on the bleeding edge, then you should definitely consider the nice bridges I'm selling, a real bargain.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
ui is only complex if you want to get dumb peolple to do smart things
And this attitude is part of the whole problem - not that having to use professionally-designed operating system UI's is a problem of course, but it's not free. I do very smart things with my computers thank you very much, but wrestling with their configuration to make them actually work does not number amongst them.
Nothing. Either I didn't have my glasses on or I was drunk. On balance I was probably drunk.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
EVERYTHING you do with your computers boils down to a) run programs, b) manage files, c) manage views. there is nothing more that you, as a user, can do with a computer, and there is nothing you can do with a computer that involves anything else but those things. how hard is it to design an ui for that?
it becomes complex the moment you try to invent ways to fool people into doing those things without knowing. why? the fuck should i know. you want to use a computer you better get familiar with those 3 basic functions, you start remembering where you store your own crap, and you don't need much of an ui anymore. anything else is wasting anyone's time, except making rich a few who know how to keep you ignorant.
Microkernels!
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Linux is fucking garbage.
Hey! That's my line!
EVERYTHING you can do in life boils down to a) taking actions b) saying words c) sleeping. There's nothing more that you, as a human, can do with your life.
Now, I'm not totally sure what point you were trying to make, and I certainly don't intend to discuss it with you any further, but a funny thing happens when you 'boil things down'; You lose what it was you were talking about in the first place. Boiled down to dust like that, nothing has any meaning, and discussion ceases to be possible or profitable for either party.
Red Hat is making things harder by shipping its RHEL 6 kernel source as one big tarball, without breaking out the patches.
So the "sophisticated unreleased high level tools" are...
patch.
Moron.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So you think "sophisticated unreleased high level tools which autogenerate C code." is any C compiler?
Seriously, the quality of th AC's is dropping.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Just how much experience do you have? In my experience, expensive "enterprise grade" software such as Oracle, VMWare, WebSphere, Windows Server have a massive amount of bugs that causes crashes, unexpected behaviour, incompatibilities between minor point releases...and many go unacknowleged or unpatched by the vendor.
On the whole, the major open source projects quckly admit to and fix bugs and security holes when found.
OpenSSL a funny case of a corporation controlling and using the project for rubber-stamping FIPS approval with no concern for security. A very anti-open source model that now is getting the bleach.
well, you seemed to have a problem with my "attitude", and i'm not totally sure you understood my point in the first place. but since you don't intend to discuss any further it's kind of moot now. just fine.
If you're using Xen - which is a virtualization package. I've never run across Xen in the wild - in fact only at one job interview did they actually use Xen.
They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.
Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.
Hmmm... that is interesting. I have checked, but I image some mackintosh forums would be the place to know for sure. In either case, we're talking about a less than one year difference, so not huge either way.
I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".
Fully agreed--I wish Apple would have included the EFI compatibility shims. I think this--MacPro 1,1--is a perfect example of Apple doing something badly.
But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.
Perhaps "many" for small values of many. The majority of all Intel mac models support the latest operating system, even post–Mavericks. The only exceptions are:
1) single core processors
2) 32-bit only processors / EFI
3) a very few unsupported graphics cards
Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.
Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.
Barring a few major architectural shifts (68k-PowerPC, PowerPC-Intel, 32-bit–64-bit), Apple tends to support computers for a long time. If you're unlucky enough to be an early with low-end hardware, you might miss out. This is true, and a valid complaint. This should not be over-generalized, however!
I do not believe it's fair to say OS X has a "short shelf life" as stated by the GP (unless meaning that new versions are released frequently).
I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.
I would never say Apple is better than OSS in terms of support. The FreeBSD dev lists have been discussing some pty changes recently, and one of the mandates was maintaining jail support for FreeBSD 4 released in 2000. Other kernel options extend binary compatibility back probably to 20 years before that! You're not going to beat that. Apple certainly isn't going to even try.
FWIW, Yosemite runs faster on my 2007 macbook pro than Mavericks did (and I hated Mavericks).
Because no development model is 100% perfect.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
And, yet, critical hardware runs on Linux all the time, like most of the world's supercomputers...
> How does pointing that out improve Linux in any way?
It establishes a baseline for comparion.
On the other hand, you can simply avoid the offending kernel versions if you want. There's nothing forcing you to use either of these versions of the kernel.
Free software is developed out in the open with total transparency and no secrets. That means it includes the ugly bits that the rest of the industry usually gets to hide.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You are wrong.
One word: Chromebook
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There's also d) create programs.
The simpler and quicker this is, the easier it is for you to do things that haven't already been pre-packaged yet.
People like to drone on about UIs and "design" but this is really just a fancy way of talking about turning the user into a slave to feed input into a device that really should be automating everything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I managed to crash WIndows 8 by quickly unplugging and plugging in a USB mouse several times in a row. I'm sorry if anyone feels offended that I pushed the already slipped deadline for raising my expectations for Windows by about two or three more years into the future.
Ezekiel 23:20
My experience has been mostly positive. When I reported a crash in gfortran it was fixed in the next version. The same happened when I reported a code generation error for the closed source competitor Ifort. When I reported a memory leak in the WCS library in Astropy, the bug was fixed within a few hours. When I requested support for a new site in youtube-dl that was added the same evening. But I've had less luck with projects like Firefox, though I don't remember exactly what the issue was there.
> I was most recently using Debian, but my computer got messed up after I did an update and that SystemD thing got installed.
Debian stable still uses initd. The only way you get systemd is by running unstable.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
The Microsoft HID driver and the Microsoft USB driver crash the system, and you blame the mouse? Does not compute. That's like saying that if I type on the keyboard too fast and the system crashes, it's my fault and not the OS's fault. Complete nonsense.
Ezekiel 23:20
Crap USB peripherals should not take down the system unless the user has also installed crap drivers that break things, in which case there's really not much to be done about it. When I connect a defective or rubbish device, I expect the port to cut power if there's a short, or the "Windows cannot detect this device" balloon or similar Linux console message. If the cord on a mouse is starting to fail, causing it to disconnect randomly, I expect either intermittent functioning, frequent BADONK noises, and maybe a console message about a port being disabled for some seconds due to a device bouncing.
Then again, it's possible that his USB host adapter is at fault, and not the mouse or any driver. This would be my guess if nobody else is able to reproduce the crash when plugging and unplugging devices.
Partially agreed. For overly verbose languages like Java, an IDE is really helpful. You can make some nice macros in vim, but you can't quite match with a good IDE can do. Still though there are times I save, close, and open in vim so I can efficiently do some wacky transform with regexes and macros.
For C though I just use vim all the way. And with a few plugins, it can become a pretty good C IDE.
Unlike an IDE, vim can be made to do just about anything. I've used it before to take an image of font characters in a grid saved as an ASCII .pbm and separate them into C arrays for each character in the font.