Linux Kernel 4.2 Released

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.2 kernel is now available. This kernel is one of the biggest kernel releases in recent times and introduces rewrites of some of the kernel's Intel Assembly x86 code, new ARM board support, Jitter RNG improvements, queue spinlocks, the new AMDGPU kernel driver, NCQ TRIM handling, F2FS per-file encryption, and many other changes to benefit most Linux users.

Comments

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[Kjella]

We're getting to the point where the Linux kernel itself is superb, but everything built on top of it is becoming utter shit. This is unfortunate, because the kernel alone is not very useful. The kernel's actual usefulness comes from it laying a solid foundation for the great things that could potentially be built upon it.

There was a billion Android devices shipped last year. It has 98% market share on the TOP500 supercomputer list. About 92% of Amazon's EC2 cloud servers run some form of Linux. Maybe we'll still be waiting for YotLD ten years from now, but I don't think anything could reverse that momentum. The entire FreeBSD ports tree had in Q1 2015 a bit less than 7000 commits from 163 developers, there's a ton of work missing to reach feature parity with the Linux kernel and nobody complained about it in the first place, I think there already was a "BSD-like" init system called OpenRC and it'd probably be less work to finish that than to write all the bits that are missing from Linux. Either way the problem is how many packages you must maintain that don't support your init system upstream.

Personally I wish Google would take a play from the Microsoft playbook and introduce the Android desktop, then again at this point it might be seen as admitting Microsoft has a point about one device from smartphones to tablets to laptops to desktops. Then again their Chromebooks are very successful, unfortunately really since they got you very hooked up to the mothership.