Linux 4.0 Kernel Released

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux 4.0 kernel has been released. Linux 4.0 brings many features including live patching, Radeon DisplayPort Audio, RadeonSI fan control improvements, new OverlayFS functionality, Intel Quark SoC support, and a heck of a lot more. Linus's release announcement reads in part: "So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there really weren't any known issues, and while I'll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I'm hoping that won't affect the merge window very much. We'll see. Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously 'small' is all relative. It's still over 10k non-merge commits. But we've definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones)."

Comments

Re:Is it as secure as OpenBSD's kernel?

[TheRaven64]

Here's the list, though a few are mis-filed (the arbitrary code execution from this year is actually in Flash, no idea why it appears here), but most of the privilege elevation ones from this year and most of the arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities are real (though several seem to be in Logitech HID drivers).

Still not The Year of Linux on Desktop

[jones_supa]

I'd like to interject for a moment. Sadly, the desktop is still extremely glitchy. Let me show some examples.

1) Notebookcheck a new Intel NUC. Intel HD Graphics 6000 was missing Linux support at the moment of writing. That's not the end of the world, but how does Linux Mint report about it? Nope, you don't get an informative "device not supported" message, nor does X.org fall back to a VESA mode. Instead you get corrupted graphics! Nice failure mode there. Just look at the screenshot in the article. Does that look professional to you?

2) When you install Linux, various manual hacks are needed to correct all sorts of little glitches here and there. Read the installation report of this guy. Does that seem familiar?

3) Laptop brightness adjustment still goes in multiple steps! I can't believe this bug is still around. The same issue is in Ubuntu in Mint and affects most laptops. Bug #527157. Just try pressing the brightness keys of your laptop under Linux and you see what I mean. An everyday feature like this should Just Work without me having to even think about it.

Conclusion: I need an desktop operating system that is more deterministic in behavior. I want robust and predictable user experience. This is not rock solid at all.

variation in user land and "GNU/Linux"

[DrYak]

In practice Bash is part of most Linux installations.

Even in the realm of "GNU/Linux" not everybody uses bash (some use zsh, for exemple).

And that's only the portion of users running an actual "GNU" userland.

Then you have the embed world using Busybox (with uClib, etc.) and co for the userland (which has its own simplified shell).
And then you have Android (which runs a completely different user land by Google, like Bionic for a C library, a different message passing bus, and most of the things usually handled by deamon running in userland, handled by java-like code on a java-like VM).

And the other way arround: you have other Unice (OS X, various *BSD) which obviously do not run Linux kernel, but do run bash.
OS X, for example, was affected by bash.

Re:Wine runs Windows desktop apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is totally irrelevant. Photoshop 3.0 has been working perfectly fine for at least a year now!