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

How many people to thank?

[plover]

There's a long list of people who have contributed work to this, and I'd just like to say thanks to all of them.

Re:How many people to thank?

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Most civil first post on Slashdot, ever?

Re:How many people to thank?

[Kjella]

How many people to thank?

According to this:

Each Linux release includes more than 10,000 patches from more than 1,400 developers and more than 200 corporations.

Of course a whole lot of them work on some driver that won't have any effect on you unless you own that piece of hardware, same with architecture-specific code and various other subsystems. The number of code changes that touches everyone is significantly less.

Re: How many people to thank?

[JDevers]

99 early days? This place was awesome in 1994, downhill since.

slackers!

[blogagog]

Windows is up to like 9.x OSX is in the 10's Firefox is in the 40s! Chrome is probably in the hundreds by now. I dunno, I don't use them.

Now, I'm no computer scientist, but I can tell if one number is bigger than another. C'mon you linux slackers - Make more editions. You've got a lot of catching up to do.

Their work is being wasted.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Once above the kernel, things start getting pretty bleak. First we have systemd. Its ideological and architectural flaws are such that they cannot just be fixed. For example, you can't just apply some code changes and have binary logging start being useful. No, it's a broken concept, and thus any implementation of it is inherently broken as well. The same applies for pretty much everything else systemd does.

Then we have the desktop environments. KDE isn't too bad, and there are some lightweight alternatives that a quasi-usable. But the former star of the Linux desktop environments, GNOME, has pretty much destroyed itself with its GNOME 3 effort. This is one of the most stunning failures ever seen when developing software. The user experience has been ruined in a way that many thought would not be possible. Yet it has happened.

On top of all of that, we have software like Firefox. Like GNOME 3, its UI has been reworked in the stupidest ways possible, which has in turn destroyed its usability. Long-standing bugs and performance issues go unresolved while the UI gets worse and worse, and even ads have been injected into the browsing experience!

So now we have a fantastic kernel, but a userland that's totally awful from its very bottom to its very top!

This wouldn't even be a problem if we had some diversity among the major Linux distributions, but that has pretty much vanished, too. They're almost all using systemd by default. They're almost all using GNOME 3 by default. They're almost all using Firefox by default. The only ones that aren't, like Slackware and Gentoo, are rife with a different set of problems: they're goddamn impractical. The whole point of using a Linux distro is so that its maintainers do the work to integrate and compile everything, and provide a widely usable default configuration. Gentoo fucks up the compilation part to a large extent, and Slackware totally misses the boat when it comes to providing a usable system out of the box.

The saddest part is that it wasn't always like this. While the kernel has typically been top-notch, the other software running on top of it used to be pretty good. There were numerous init systems, including sysvinit, that were better than systemd. The whole notion of "services management" wasn't even needed because such things become trivial when doing things the UNIX way. GNOME 2 was once a fantastic desktop environment. Firefox used to have amazing usability. Thankfully the kernel hasn't fallen victim to the mediocrity and destruction that has ruined so much of the software that runs on top of it. But this gets us back to the original problem: an excellent kernel is useless without an excellent userland.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[chipschap]

The user experience has been ruined in a way that many thought would not be possible.

Many thought not possible? Think: Windows 8. A failure far more stunning than Gnome 3, Unity, Firefox, or just about anything ever seen anywhere. Although it's apples and oranges, it makes systemd look stellar.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the security aspect of things. Systemd is this large chunk of code that has network connectivity and is as close to kernel space as possible.

Is it tested for security? No. Has it FIPS and Common Criteria testing? RedHat 6.x have, 7.x have not.

Is it audited for security? We as admins and IT people have no assurance that the fact it listens and communicates on a network doesn't make it a big fat security hole, especially with edge cases.

How good code is it? Nobody knows, as it hasn't been audited. It could be just as bad a code job as OpenSSL, but nobody knows.

Is it better than modules? SVR4 has stood the test of time. /bin/su has been tested, vetted, and secure. Systemd has none of that, and hasn't even emerged into a long term version that is stable enough to certify for a LTS version of Linux.

As an enterprise admin, I would say I really don't have much confidence in systemd, just because there has been no thorough testing and audit results. Couple that with the fact that the systemd of today is different from the systemd 2 weeks from now, and it is a platform too unstable for production work.

systemd isn't bad. We just need something to show to auditors that it was programmed by people who know what they are doing, especially when it comes to real money at stake if there is an outage or a security breach.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[mabu]

I agree. But we should be celebrating good code where it is.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[GNious]

We're getting to the point where the Linux kernel itself is superb, but everything built on top of it is becoming utter shit.

Don't worry - in one of the upcoming Systemd releases, the Linux kernel will finally be 100% replaced.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[phantomfive]

and Slackware totally misses the boat when it comes to providing a usable system out of the box.

Slackware works great for me lol, and I'd be interested in hearing what your problems are with Gentoo's packaging.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Gentoo fucks up the compilation part to a large extent...

Eh? The deal with Gentoo has *always* been that you compile the packages yourself. If you have more than one system, you easily can use one of them to package the compiled result into a package that can be installed on all of the others. There are also Gentoo derivatives (like Sabayon) that do the compilation for you.

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.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[phantomfive]

If only I could apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade.

Use slapt-get

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[buchner.johannes]

"Gentoo fucks up the compilation part to a large extent" ... no it doesn't. It is true though that Gentoo upgrades sometimes need attention for resolving blocks. But in return you get a bleeding-edge, super-stable, polished system. It is extremely rare to see compilation errors, and they are usually fixed within days. Gentoo is a big community...

As for GNOME 3, I use it and I like it. It gets notifications out of the way until I have time and focus to attend to them. It does everything I need it to, it is consistently designed and behaves smoothly.

I don't get all the GNOME3 hate. I guess you want something that behaves like Windows 95-2000, but configurable. Great, enjoy KDE, GNOME 2, Xfce or whatever GNOME fork. But not all of us want to relive that time forever.

PS: KDE's Akonadi is a major screw-up.

Re: Their work is being wasted.

[dilvish_the_damned]

Their users are happier than they were before.
And the rest of them left.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[Zeio]

One thing we can look to is that Linux can be put with any user land. Linux can be used in many places. Look at Android, if the init wars has you down fork and roll, or spork it like NextBSD.

The coolest thing I've see in Linux 4.2 is eBPF accompanied by BCC,

Check it out - they are doing dtrace like things with Linux with it:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-05-15/ebpf-one-small-step.html

- You can do IO virtualization
- All network IO can be handled by in-kernel byte code generated by bcc (BPF COMPILER COLLECTION).
- All storage IO can be watched - you can create histograms of slow and face places on disks, raid array, even ceph clusters.
- You can basically implement dtrace for Linux using eBPF to do so.

Basically eBPF has a guaranteed non-looping in kernel general purpose VM.

I think this is an example of a quiet revolution and it started with Linux 4.2

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[arglebargle_xiv]

No, GNOME3 and Unity pretty much take the cake for sucky UI, the one on Windows 8 a distant third in suckiness.

Have you actually used Win8? I know there are all sorts of opinions on Unity (particularly earlier versions), but I can take J.Random user (with previous computer experience) and sit them down in front of a Unity desktop and they can use it. Sit them down in front of Win8 and they're completely lost, the interface is so alien that they don't know what to do any more (that's from actual experience with various users).

It really is hard to think of a desktop/laptop UI that's worse than the Win8 one, it sort of defines the extreme end of a scale that goes from, for argument's sake, Snow Leopard at 9.5 (can't think of a 10 really) to Win8 at 0. I'd put Unity at maybe a 3 or 4.

Re:Their work is being wasted.

[johnw]

Being mostly a KDE user, I don't know why everybody hates GNOME 2, can anybody explain this?

It's Gnome 3 that gave rise to a lot of bile, not Gnome 2. Gnome 2 on the whole was pretty popular.

Gnome 3 has actually come on a long way too. Its big problem when it first appeared was that it removed lots of important functionality, because the developers thought that they knew better than the users, and although the users wanted them, the developers were of the opinion that they *shouldn't* want them. Suddenly all the things that made your desktop a constructive work environment were taken away, and to begin with at least, complaints were ignored.

Over time though it has got better, and there are features of it which I now really miss when I'm using other desktop environments. There a still some really stupid design decisions, and bits that work worse than in earlier versions, but it's got back to being usable.

A few examples of remaining irritants in Gnome 3:

* If you suspend your laptop, then resume, the network manager prompts you to ask whether you want to reconnect to the WiFi point which you were using before. Why? It doesn't prompt you at boot, just after a resume. Yes, of course I want to carry on using the WiFi I was using a moment ago.
* By default, if you drag a window to the top of the screen it causes the window to be maximised. Yes, I know they copied this from some other desktop, but it doesn't make it any less idiotic. It's overloading a gesture to do something different, and leaving you no way to do the old thing which the gesture used to do. It doesn't even make it any easier to maximise a window, because you could always double click on the title bar to achieve the same thing. It does however mean that if you want a number of tall windows (making best use of your large monitor) you have to jump through hoops to achieve what should be easy.

Doubtless others can provide lots of other examples.

Re:How do I upgrade?

[techno-vampire]

Wrong. Ubuntu continues to roll out updates for everything, including the kernel, for every version it supports. You will continue to receive new kernels for Ubuntu 14.04 right up until it reaches End Of Life, just as you will with Fedora. (For Fedora, it's versions 21 and 22 that are currently supported.) Please learn what you're talking about before replying, instead of just guessing.

Re:How do I upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that there is a kernel package built for every version.

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

Right now there is no stable version of 4.2.

You can also go to kernel.org, download 4.2, make oldconfig your existing .config file (will take hours depending on how knowledgeable you are and how old a kernel your running), make, make modules_install, make install and try it out. At your own risk.

iKernel

[fluffernutter]

Is the kernel wrapped in glass or metal? Otherwise it will not meet my requirements.

Re:How do I upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 15.10 kernel will be backported to 14.04. The kernels for each release after an LTS (14.04 is LTS) is always backported. They are each supported for nine months, and the backported LTS kernel from 16.04 will eventually be supported for three years on 14.04.

Re:How do I upgrade?

[Kjella]

Everything? No. Just the kernel and X. Also note that if you first upgrade to a non-LTS kernel you're only getting support on that until the next LTS kernel is out, if you want something you can leave untouched for a few years afterwards you'd better stick with the original kernel.