Linux Kernel 4.5 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: Yes, you're reading it right, after being in development for the past two months, Linux kernel 4.5 is finally here in its final production version. It is internally dubbed "Blurry Fish Butt" and received a total of seven RC builds since January 25, 2016. Prominent features of Linux kernel 4.5 include the implementation of initial support for the AMD PowerPlay power management technology, bringing high performance to the AMDGPU open-source driver for Radeon GPUs, scalability improvements in the free space handling of the Btrfs file system, and better epoll multithreaded scalability. The sources are now available for download from kernel.org. Update: 03/14 13:24 GMT by T : Reader diegocg lists some other notable features (a new copy_file_range() system call that allows to make copies of files without transferring data through userspace; support GCC's Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (-fsanitize=undefined); Forwarded Error Correction support in the device-mapper's verity target; support for the MADV_FREE flag in madvise(); the new cgroup unified hierarchy is considered stable; scalability improvements for SO_REUSEPORT UDP sockets; scalability improvements for epoll, and better memory accounting of sockets in the memory controller), and links to an explanation of the changes at Kernel Newbies.

Comments

What about 2.6.32?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for all the beta testers out there. Have fun with the new kernel. But what about all of us on 2.6.32? No updates for you!

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to update - 4.5.0 is for you too. What is this superstition about staying with 2.6 forever? I can understand that the new 4.5 is "too new and untested" for some, but there is 4.4 and 4.3 and 4.2 if you want something more well tested.

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[Barsteward]

no doubt you've been testing the next LTS version in the mean time, you can move to that

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[darkain]

2.6.32 just had an update 2 days ago with 2.6.32.71 - http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you talking about cuntcheese? 2.6.32.71 is available right now.

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a distro kernel if you want support. Red Hat will support their version of 2.6.32 until at least the year 2020.

Re:What about 2.6.32?

[Anonymous Coward]

2.6.32 just had an update 2 days ago with 2.6.32.71 - http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...

Umm... that story you linked to explains how there will be no more updates for 2.6.32.

Comprehension isn't your strong point, eh?

New name

[Anonymous Coward]

It is internally dubbed "Blurry Fish Butt"

Rumor has it that the next kernel will be named "Lennart's buttery balloon knot".

Re:New name

[jandersen]

It is internally dubbed "Blurry Fish Butt"

Rumor has it that the next kernel will be named "Lennart's buttery balloon knot".

Oh dear, I definitely feel old age sneaking up on me; I just don't find these names funny any more. If ever I did. I'm all for having a sense of humour, but it would be refreshing if it wasn't always stuck up our own backsides. Can't we raise the level a bit? (Groan, I shouldn't have said that - now it's going to be about tits instead, isn't it?)

Re:New name

[KGIII]

I don't think Lennart's got tits. But, he does have nipples. Lennart's Nubian Third Nipple...

Hmm... Nope, still not funny. Maybe they'll aim higher?

Re:New name

[Anonymous Coward]

Blurry fish butts are what I see when my fish get startled or antsy. Their little tails start wagging and it's a blur. It looks especially funny when my Mollies do it.

Re:New name

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blurry fish butt" is a reference to the quality of Linus' pictures while scuba diving. He admits that underwater photography is not his forte and the "blurry fish butt" pictures have becoming a running joke about the fish pictures he takes: all swimming away and not in focus. He posts these on Google+ but I'm too lazy to dig up a reference.

Well????!!!111

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but does it run Linux?

Re:Well????!!!111

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Yeah, but does it run Linux?

As of last week, "Does it run MS SQL Server?" is the new "does it run linux".

Still pretty crusty on laptops

[jones_supa]

I recently did a quick survey in Reddit on people's experience on suspend/hibernate, and I may summarize it simply by saying that Linux is not the best performer in this area. :D It's a shame that such an important laptop feature works so poorly. Some might say that it's because OEMs do not "support ACPI spec properly", but in practice most PCs don't... It could be more practical to just find the patterns that Windows uses, and imitate them.

One really weird thing is also that backlight adjustment requests are sent to both ACPI and GPU, which causes double backlight adjustment events on many laptops.

People fight about SystemD, various open source licenses, differences between DEs, filesystems, but at the same time there's these fundamental problems which should get way more attention. Sometimes it feels like we are in a house arguing what kind of wallpapers bring the best experience, while that same wall is infested with mold inside.

Some people still talk like this is supposed to be the hi-tech kernel that breathes new life to my PC. Are they blind to all this stuff happening?

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Kjella]

General issues are everybody's problem. Issues with one particular piece of hardware is:

a) Not really the problem of anybody else
b) Not something most people can reproduce
c) Not anybody's job

If Dell delivers laptops with Linux preinstalled, then it's their problem, they got the hardware to reproduce it and they got paid people working on it. If $random_user installs $random_distro on $random_laptop, well the manufacturer doesn't care. And while there's always a few people working to make Linux run on everything, they're few and they can't go around buying laptops just because and there's new models all the time. Red Hat will work on supporting the servers that RHEL runs on, they won't generally work on random hardware. And the kernel is mostly driven by paid development, other hardware is very much in the "you want support for that? great, submit a patch and we'll review it" mode.

Some might say that it's because OEMs do not "support ACPI spec properly", but in practice most PCs don't... It could be more practical to just find the patterns that Windows uses, and imitate them.

Says no person who has tried imitating an undocumented binary blob ever. Basically manufacturers just bang the code until it stops crashing, unless you can replicate it exactly which is hopeless in practice you're going to run into random issues. And random issues here aren't just glitches, they're usually crash/hang bugs. I'm sure a lot could be done if you brought the right people together with the right hardware and gave them some money to work on that. But I don't really see who'd do that, because it's not just free time and there's no profit in it.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

If your hardware has problems, what are you contibuting to fix the problem? whining? *tumbleweeds*

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

are these even kernel features you are talking about?

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Gaygirlie]

People fight about SystemD, various open source licenses, differences between DEs, filesystems, but at the same time there's these fundamental problems which should get way more attention. Sometimes it feels like we are in a house arguing what kind of wallpapers bring the best experience, while that same wall is infested with mold inside.

You're setting up a false dichotomy, there: the fact that some people are designing filesystems or DEs or Systemd or such isn't necessarily away from progress on the ACPI-stuff and the likes. Not everyone knows enough about ACPI, for example, to be able to contribute anything useful, so them working on something else doesn't hinder the progress on the ACPI-stuff in the least.

Also, not everyone agrees with your priorities, like e.g. a lot of people deem work on filesystems more important than getting ACPI totally right -- not everyone needs working suspend, not everyone is running Linux on a broken laptop, but filesystems? Improvements in them are likely to have a much wider area of effect.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Bert64]

Suspend and hibernate works just fine on laptops designed to run linux (e.g. chromebooks), the same can be said of macosx - suspend and hibernate is perfectly reliable on apple laptops, but is usually flakey on a hackintosh.

Linux already has various kludges to emulate the nonstandard way in which windows handles power management, but laptops also often come with customised model-specific drivers so even if you run windows you often still have problems if you run the default drivers or drivers for the chipsets rather than the specific laptop model.
The lower end laptop makers also make things difficult for users by varying the hardware in the same model, when looking at laptops recently i was told that a given model could have any one of 3 different wifi and ethernet chipsets, and that i wouldn't know which until i physically took delivery of the laptop... They will guarantee that you get "an 802.11ac wireless card" and "a gigabit ethernet", but the performance, range, stability or cpu usage can vary wildly between chipsets as can compatibility with linux or other systems and even (albeit quite niche) features like wireless monitor or master modes are not available with some chipsets.
The chipsets in use for various components were always an important factor for me when deciding what to purchase.

Yes it's a huge nasty mess!

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Viol8]

Ah , the old "Only kernel developers can complain about an issue, users should shut up and say nothing" school of thought. I wondered how long it would be before some mouth breathing window licker said it. Congratulations, you are that idiot.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs make hibernation obsolete

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

If your hardware has problems, what are you contibuting to fix the problem? whining? *tumbleweeds*

And THIS is why Linux has had problems becoming a ubiquitous desktop platform: arrogant disconnected dweebs who fail to understand computers are merely a TOOL for doing something ELSE.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[subk]

Troll much? ACPI has worked fine on all the laptops I've had in the last decade. Some have needed hands-on configuration, but that's the worst-case.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[OzPeter]

If your hardware has problems, what are you contibuting to fix the problem? whining? *tumbleweeds*

Ahh .. victim blaming at its finest.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[fph il quozientatore]

The problem still stands for suspend-to-ram, though.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah , the old "Only kernel developers can complain about an issue, users should shut up and say nothing" school of thought. I wondered how long it would be before some mouth breathing window licker said it. Congratulations, you are that idiot.

It's a bit more to it than that. Kernel developers don't have a right to complain about it, if it doesn't work it is typically on their table to fix it.
The ones that have a right to complain are paying customers, if they paid money to get it working and it doesn't work then they have a right to complain.
Some dude that downloaded it and installed it doesn't have much to complain about. There is a text form the manufacturer that he didn't read that says that they don't guarantee that it works with any random driver you found on the internet and there is a text from the kernel developers saying that they don't guarantee that it works with any random hardware you picked up.

So, fork out the money to get supported software or STFU and start coding.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they blind to all this stuff happening?

Denial is a bitch. "At least it's not Windows" they say.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that some of them are largely blind to this stuff: it's not as though hackers and FOSS idealists don't exist; but to the degree that people are hired by interested parties to work on the kernel, it is substantially about servers/HPC and assorted embedded systems. In these cases, the hardware you are working on supporting may or may not even include ACPI(on the embedded side) and won't be miserable consumer crap subjected to some of the hairier suspend/resume/unexpected user behavior stuff(on the server/HPC side); and the hardware you are doing your work on can be basically whatever you like, since SSH-ing in to a remote system or running a bunch of VMs, or using whatever debug interface some ARM dev board provides don't tend to require running Linux even if you are working on making Linux run.

Even those who aren't blind(Linus certainly swears enthusiastically when ACPI comes up) I'd imagine that there is no terribly good solution to a problem that can come up in myriad different ways depending on the device, vendor, BIOS/UEFI version, peripherals, etc. Some sort of support for "Don't try to do ACPI correctly, just apply the ghastly-awful-hacks-I've-constructed-for-this-device" is really about all you could do at the kernel development level without committing to the Sisyphean task of trying to hunt down and reverse engineer as many dysfunctional ACPI implementations as you can find and include one-off quirks support for each one of them.

I'd be the first to agree that Linux on laptops, especially if you try the new or exotic ones, isn't so hot; but it's not clear how the kernel developers are well placed to do something about it.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[OzPeter]

the same can be said of macosx - suspend and hibernate is perfectly reliable on apple laptops, but is usually flakey on a hackintosh.

Yeah .. works totally fine in OS X on my MacBook Pro.

But I can't seem to find the configuration controls for the Computer Bag Heater function. You know the one .. where you put the computer to sleep, close it up, put it in your bag, and then an hour later you feel how warm everything still is and realize that the damn computer is still running.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's worth noting, in terms of 'difficulty of dealing with undocumented binary blobs and ACPI in general', that Microsoft's own designed, developed, and blessed Surface Pro and Surface Book products have been dogged by power management issues; and that's with hardware hand picked by Microsoft, an OS built by Microsoft, and drivers and firmware either written by Microsoft or written for Microsoft by vendors who do most of their driver development work to support Microsoft OSes.

Obviously "but look at the other guy!" isn't an argument against the fact that Linux on laptops indeed has issues; it just provides some perspective on what a ghastly mess PC power management is. If Microsoft's own "Our OEMs are making us look bad, so here's a kick in the ass and a reminder of what kind of products we want in the PC space" product can't power-manage properly, that doesn't imply positive things about the difficulty for the Linux kernel team of getting power management to work correctly on some random vendor's apathetic attempt to shove a laptop out the door for as little money as possible.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe people just shouldn't buy crusty laptops? I can remember having had trouble with suspend and backlighting about 12 years ago, but not of late.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not trolling. If you actually bothered to read the link provided you'd see that MANY other people are have had problems with laptops in the last decade, myself included. Seems you're one of those "the world revolves around me" type of assholes. Fuck you.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know of an app that detects when it's been unslept (perhaps notes a sudden jump in the system time), and pops up a 'click here' button that if not clicked within 15 seconds, starts playing an incessant piercing alarm?

That'd actually be pretty useful.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

The bag heater problem occurs to me when I have Virtualbox running with Windows. If I shut Vbox down, before closing the lid, it suspends just fine.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It isn't quite as ghastly as it used to be(if more because of increased integration of peripherals than because of any philosophical shift); but it still seems to be the case that the PC OEMs will only assure specific components if you purchase from their 'business' lines, since IT departments like image stability; while the consumer offerings will only offer 'something gigabit' or 'something 802.11ac'(though in practice you often get lucky, since chipset-churn can eat up much of the savings provided by perpetually hunting the cheapest chipsets, so you'll often see a reasonably long period of identical hardware between the silent revisions).

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[OzPeter]

The bag heater problem occurs to me when I have Virtualbox running with Windows. If I shut Vbox down, before closing the lid, it suspends just fine.

Interesting. The last time it happened to my I was running VBox prior to putting the computer to sleep. I'll have to look into that one.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[thegarbz]

e.g. a lot of people deem work on filesystems more important than getting ACPI totally right

And this is why Linux on desktop will never come. We spend a disproportionate amount of time fine-tuning the already spectacular, while the mindbogglingly stupid usability issues stay in the too hard basket.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[KGIII]

A distro's support mailing list recently had a comment about this. It wasn't even trolling, just some new guy.

The response, and only response, that I saw was someone who said, "With today's SSD and hardware being so fast, I don't even need it. It's a useless feature anyway."

Which is emblematic of my largest distaste for the community. It's certainly not something I have against Linux, the kernel, but that is rather atypical for the many communities surrounding it.

I almost responded, "Nope, it works fine for me." (It really does.) But, fortunately, I don't drink any more and I'm generally not an asshole. Well, not always.

I decided that I'd scroll down prior to hitting submit. *sighs*

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

If your hardware has problems, what are you contibuting to fix the problem? whining? *tumbleweeds*

And THIS is why Linux has had problems becoming a ubiquitous desktop platform: arrogant disconnected dweebs

He is right in a way. If you didn't BUY linux, who are you to COMPLAIN? The non-paying customer isn't always right.

Now, this don't mean linux is only for kernel developers. If you want the right to complain, buy linux (from redhat or some pre-installing computer manufacturer), then you have some level of guaranteed support and ability to complain to someone who makes money from satisfying you.

If you want your linux completely free of charges, then you're expected to handle technical problems yourself. Or start paying for support as the need arise. The latter is simple enough - several companies sell linux support to those who want some help or handholding.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[IgnitusBoyone]

This was a feature on my Mint Laptop last winter when my car heater went out.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[ChunderDownunder]

And what percentage of users with problems filed bug reports with their distro instead of just profanely complaining about it on reddit and slashdot?

(Admittedly Ubuntu dropped the ball by disabling hibernate/suspend by default - which I had to re-enable on my working hardware)

Kernel developers can only fix what users report, so keep submitting helpful diagnostics...

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Barsteward]

Suspend/hibernate has always been down to the manufacturer not following the standards properly but following what Microsoft Windows needs because it doesn't follow standards. They bodge it to make sure WIndows works

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say filesystems are more important than ACPI issues. Yes, both are major, but filesystems affect everyone, while ACPI affects a subset. It would be nice if btrfs were production quality, but it seems that "OMG, I lost everything" stories are still common on that. Having it "earn its bones" in the server room and be able to stand up to server grade loads would be a great boon for Linux.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Some use hibernate to keep all their programs/documents open, not for a faster "boot".

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Viol8]

"So, fork out the money to get supported software or STFU and start coding."

And people wonder why OSS supporters have a bad name in some quarters. Jesus H....

Newflash - I've coded free software. When people sent me emails to tell me there was a bug I didn't tell them to send me the fix themselves or STFU. Sort out your attitude boy.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Broken laptop my ass.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Gadget_Guy]

The ones that have a right to complain are paying customers

And who are you to actually say that? You can't even be bothered creating an account on Slashdot and yet you feel you can tell logged-in users what they can and can't say.

Nobody has to shut up just because you say so. Now whether the kernel developers actually listen to the complaints is up to them, but they can't dictate what their users say. Nowhere in the GPL do we sign away our right to free speech if we don't pay someone money.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Burz]

The problem is you're buying "Windows PCs" and expecting "PC" to mean its Linux compatible. If you don't try to stick with PCs that were _designed_ to work with Linux, then you set yourself and your associates up for disappointment _and_ you reward the designers who disregard standards and Linux and deprive designers who honor standards and Linux.

There are Thinkpads that continue to work very well with Linux, in additional to open-source focused brands like Purism and System76. Dell and HP reportedly have laptops made to work with Linux.

Seriously, you have more models to choose from than Mac users do -- so what's your excuse?
Seriously, a Windows fan would not be caught dead buying PCs that were not designed for Windows -- so what's your excuse?

If the distinction is not that important to you, then by all means use Windows with your impulse-buy laptop. But if using Linux really matters to you then you must *MUST* plan your hardware purchases around products intended for Linux. Luck will not keep you in the charmed "Gee, it just worked for me I don't know what your problem is" category indefinitely.

Unrealistic expectations about hardware compatibility ("Hey, its a PC and Linux was made for PCs!") is one of the major factors that caused Desktop Linux to fail. These expectations were like a social disease... they just spread effortlessly from person to person. The worst part was that almost every PC appeared compatible on the surface after a cursory 10 min. session. Over the mid-long term it just doesn't work and even people who kept getting lucky will find themselves writing the same kind of dismayed messages about compatibility that you did.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[phorm]

"One really weird thing is also that backlight adjustment requests are sent to both ACPI and GPU"

ACPI was (and in many cases continues to be) a mess at the hardware level. There are a lot of boards out there with shitty ACPI support. In windows-land, the windows have often released drivers with their boards which cover the weird bugs and deal with them. In Linux, there are flags for some known issues that can be enabled, but in general you're not getting anything direct from the vendor and have a somewhat generic kernel.

Then of course is the issue between the GPU vendors' closed-source/proprietary drivers and the FOSS kernel, again in many cases where the proprietary driver does weird shit. Laptops are especially problematic in this regard. I had a nice Asus laptop that eventually became useless to me for Linux because with it did something as soon as the proprietary driver loaded the backlight would dim to black. This happened in both Linux/windows, but on windows at least I could stick with Win7 (good for a bit yet) and an older driver, whereas on 'nix there was no luck getting the older driver to work on newer kernels/distros. I spent a week picking apart the FOSS parts of the driver and recompiling but this definitely seemed to be something tied to the hidden bits.

Usually in Linux you can just move up to a newer distro free and easy, but in this case the disjoint between hardware drivers and desktop/apps screwed me over. I can't blame the kernel devs for this as the weirdness very much seemed to be in AMD's driver and *not* in the kernel itself.

I've also had plenty of machines with flaky USB in 'nix - usually causing EHCI to drop devices - due to more non-standard stuff, usually ACPI-related.

So yeah, you could "find the patterns windows uses" for some edge cases, but in reality you've got thousands of boards with thousands of drivers/versions and most of them NOT open so finding out WTF windows does only works if you've got skill, time, and the actual hardware to debug.

I'm happy to say that I haven't seen issues with EHCI in years as newer hardware seems to follow standards much better in that regard, and Suspend/Hibernate support has worked for almost everything I've got with recent distros (even the stuff that's otherwise flaky USB-wise).

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[bytestorm]

I'm glad you're able to repair defects that only occur on hardware you don't own, that you can't reproduce, and can't validate as fixed for hardware/firmware with no vendor support, having no published specification, and will be obsoleted in only a few years. There are hundreds of different platforms to support when nobody follows the spec. Most people consider that somewhere between "frustratingly difficult" and "damn near impossible."

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been reported often here, but I'll say it again.

Most ACPI implementations are so bad, so fucking broken that windows wrote their own power management implementation that assumes the PC is broken by default. Internally, it also includes a HUGE whitelist/table of bugs, workarounds, etc for known computer models.

Its that bad.

Microsoft fixed the issue by pouring a lot of money in to their own research to fix the issue - And kind of as a side effect they enable the PC maker's bad habits of shipping shitty PM. (And Apple fixes the issue by having end-to-end control over both software and hardware) - Linux is stuck in the unfortunate spot of hoping things work as advertised.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Gaygirlie]

Well, it might not be broken if you didn't put it in there..

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[jones_supa]

If Dell delivers laptops with Linux preinstalled, then it's their problem, they got the hardware to reproduce it and they got paid people working on it.

According to a Reddit comment, even Dell does a partial job in Linux quality assurance. The touchpad supported palm detection, but the feature was not implemented. I'm pretty sure it works if you put Windows on the same computer. How much other small things are there hiding in that laptop that do not work properly in Linux when you take a closer look?

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[jones_supa]

Of course, but filesystems are a solved problem already. Always reinventing them takes up a lot of testing time. Even Microsoft puts much less resources into filesystems: they occasionally add a small incremental update to the tried and trusted NTFS, and that's that.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[jones_supa]

Linux is stuck in the unfortunate spot of hoping things work as advertised.

How can you be sure that it's only that, and that Linux does not also contain crappy code? It's a bit too easy to just blame OEMs.

For example, the multiple backlight events problem could be pretty easily avoided by simply leaving the backlight adjustment responsibility only to the GPU driver. There's nothing hacky about that. A lot of machines can already be fixed with "acpi_backlight=native".

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[serviscope_minor]

Of course, but filesystems are a solved problem already.

Apparently not.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[serviscope_minor]

Some people still talk like this is supposed to be the hi-tech kernel that breathes new life to my PC. Are they blind to all this stuff happening?

Nope. I've never had trouble with Linux on laptops. Why? Well, before dropping a bunch of money on something that's going to get thousands of hours of use, I spend a few hours researching whether it's any good or not. Then when I've found one which meets my specs (i.e. right combination of weight, power, disk space and runs Linux OK) I buy it. Never had a problem with that method.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

If Dell delivers laptops with Linux preinstalled, then it's their problem, they got the hardware to reproduce it and they got paid people working on it. If $random_user installs $random_distro on $random_laptop, well the manufacturer doesn't care. And while there's always a few people working to make Linux run on everything, they're few and they can't go around buying laptops just because and there's new models all the time. Red Hat will work on supporting the servers that RHEL runs on, they won't generally work on random hardware. And the kernel is mostly driven by paid development, other hardware is very much in the "you want support for that? great, submit a patch and we'll review it" mode.

Let's take this again. RHEL != servers. Red Hat has two desktop versions of RHEL, Desktop and Workstation. Both are perfectly fine on laptops, they are even made for them. I have desktops that old releases of RHEL has better support for than Debian.

RHEL is absolutely a desktop just as much as a server OS. Red Hat even went so far as rebase the entire GNOME desktop from 3.8 to 3.14 in the RHEL 7.2 minor update.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[MatthiasF]

"It could be more practical to just find the patterns that Windows uses, and imitate them."

I think you have that backwards, I have a feeling most BIOS are generally tailored to Windows behaviors and not pure ACPI, so Linux never really had a chance.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[delt0r]

Funny, I have no problems with either feature for years now. I however don't often hibernate. But i use suspend all the time without issues on 4 different laptop since about 2008 i guess. I assumed it wasn't a problem for others as well. These where 2 different IBM/Lenovo thinkpads, a few Acers a Dell and a HP laptop.

I guess i have a few things i do different from average. I always just leave the fast GPU on and turn off the power saving one, i find it makes little difference. I use slackware which i guess others tend not to. And i spend some time customizing and configuring things. After that i don't update outside security updates that affect me which are few and far between for slackware. So i will use the same system for a few years. So maybe i just got lucky.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[delt0r]

I think one of the reasons is that powering up and down, even to standby power settings exposes a lot of different hardware quirks with specific chip sets. I know my own just plain AVR stuff is very specific and that is just one chip. Getting a CPU, buses and GPU and memory, DMAs, USB controllers etc to all go into the right mode correctly and then wake up in the correct sequence would not be easy.

Re:Still pretty crusty on laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh .. buzzword bingo at it's finest. I bet there's some real victims that would kick you square in the nuts for that.

Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for my lack of knowledge regarding this topic, but why does linux kernel's version releases add support to "AMD powerplay management tech" or "logitech camera driver" etc ? I thought these were supposed to be "modular" addons to a kernel, like in windows.

Hell, I even thought filesystem support was supposed to be a "module" that kernel can load.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does not come with stable driver interface, so drivers supplied by vendors would rot quickly. It's more practical to just bundle everything with the kernel, update the driver interfaces there, and recompile. However this has the additional benefit that one does not have to hunt drivers around Internet, so if you have the most recent kernel, you also have all the most recent drivers.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[WarJolt]

Many times open source someone has already asked the question and it's been answered answered: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Doc...

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Gaygirlie]

You are confusing things. The drivers are part of the kernel's sources, but you can either build them compiled-in or as modules that are then loaded when needed.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Dutch Gun]

Thanks for the link. I actually read through that, and while some of the arguments were certainly valid, some of them sounded an awful lot like simple justification for how Linux chooses to do things. For example, rapidly changing internal API interfaces is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when you assume you can just change the interface of any drivers for which you have the source. He acknowledges that it would be more work to maintain older, depreciated interfaces, and claims that they couldn't impose such a burden on volunteer programmers. It may be true in some cases, but that argument seems a little weak with the knowledge that these days most contributors today are actually paid by a corporation for their work on the kernel.

This sentence is of particular note: "...get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn't fall under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech)..."

This attitude is both the strength and weakness of Linux. It works FOR Linux as an open platform, but certainly AGAINST it as a commercial one, if a manufacturer doesn't wish to open-source their drivers - and that unfortunately includes video card manufacturers, which is also a major issue for Linux. If a commercial vendor feels unable to release open source drivers for their proprietary hardware for whatever reason, then Linux is simply *never* going to work reliably on their hardware.

More importantly, because client machines tend to be much more reliant on the subtle interfaces and behaviors of many complex drivers (headless servers don't have to worry about nearly as much), I believe that this philosophy is a large part of why Linux remains something of a second-class citizen on the desktop. I'm not saying this philosophy is necessarily wrong, but I think it's important to understand that it definitely comes with some tradeoffs.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the rarity of Linux on the desktop has anything to do with Linux itself. It is simply blinkered, crusty, technical managers who only knows Windows and who don't want to consider anything else, even when clearly shown that Linux would be superior. The old "my mind is made up, so don't confuse me with facts" problem.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Linux does support(and, at least outside of the smaller embedded systems, is typically configured to use) kernel modules that are loaded as needed for driver support and the like; but those modules are treated as part of 'the kernel' when talking about kernel development(for devices that have in-tree drivers, there is nothing stopping you from using modules from other sources, if available).

As with Windows drivers, a Linux system will typically only load kernel modules based on what is actually present on the system it is running on(so an Intel GPU-based system wouldn't ever load AMD power management stuff, though a Linux distribution might include those modules on the disk somewhere in order to support as many different hardware configurations as possible). If the module is developed by the kernel team, in sync with the kernel, it is still treated as part of 'the X.Y kernel', even though actually using it is optional.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

He acknowledges that it would be more work to maintain older, depreciated interfaces, and claims that they couldn't impose such a burden on volunteer programmers. It may be true in some cases, but that argument seems a little weak with the knowledge that these days most contributors today are actually paid by a corporation for their work on the kernel.

Linus himself has said that he has nothing against a stable interface. However, those that want it get to write it and maintain it. So those developers paid by those corporations could just get on to it.

Except those corporations that pay those developers are the ones that have no problem with the current process. The corporations that would benefit from a stable interface are those that would worry that any developer time spent on it would be free labor for their competitors.

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

One can obviously debate the value of this; but my impression is that, while in an ideal world they'd like to be able to support more hardware, when it comes down to it the Linux project really isn't interested in just providing a cheap OS for people to put on top of their giant heap of binary blobs. They certainly aren't as hardline as the FSF; but even the 'engineer-pragmatist' types see binary blobs as an impediment to their work(that's why the kernel taint flag exists: if your system crashes, you have a potentially interesting bug report; but if it was 30% Nvidia blackbox by weight at the time, they don't want to waste their time shooting in the dark).

Re:Why Support Drivers in Kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, thanks cuntcheese. The link alone (i.e. without your I-have-a-tiny-dick commentary) would have been sufficient.

residents of southern hillary dismayed?

[Anonymous Coward]

no mention of living submerged was in the pamphlet? synthetic oxygen sucks? free the innocent stem cells,,, cease fire..

Re:Why branch when you don't intend to support it?

[WarJolt]

Are you seriously still complaining about this?

The last odd kernel was released in 2003. In 2.6 stable and unstable merged. Kernel 3.0 wasn't even a drastic change.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/2...

Between 2.4 and 2.6 linux was drastically overhauled. We really don't need separate non stable versions anymore. Plus version control is far better now.

Why that tone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the imputed incredulity in the summary that a new linux kernel has been released? Two months doesn't sound like it's a particularly long period for it to be 'finally' here.

Re:Why that tone?

[WarJolt]

Why the imputed incredulity in the summary that a new linux kernel has been released? Two months doesn't sound like it's a particularly long period for it to be 'finally' here.

I'm excited about 4.6. I'm hoping for Tegra support in mainline. Right now it sucks.

Re:Why that tone?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Out of curiosity, what aspects of Tegra are expected to be mainlined/have Nvidia play nice on? If their PC stuff is anything to go by, I'd assume that Nvidia will just provide a shim for the GPU and CUDA stuff; but it's hard to imagine what benefit they would derive from being uncooperative about the basic 'ARM cores and assorted non-GPU peripherals' stuff, since keeping those stuck in some awful BSP is a pain for their customers and those components aren't nearly as interesting and distinguishing as the Nvidia-specific GPU stuff.

Re:Why branch when you don't intend to support it?

[ls671]

This was a very successful development model for over a decade and I don't understand why that's changed.

It must be Firefox and the like fault. Their release cycle and their numbering scheme must have influenced Linus.

Re:Why branch when you don't intend to support it?

[Kjella]

As I recall, the older versions of the kernel added some features and offered others as third party patches. The 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x, and 2.6.x branches were supported for a very long time, (...) This was a very successful development model for over a decade and I don't understand why that's changed. Arguably, it would require fewer work since there wouldn't be as many branches to maintain.

Actually it wasn't. Distros were massively cherry-picking from the odd-numbered branches creating huge variations from the stock kernel, creating strange bugs and making the big jumps was a huge pain because the more relaxed requirements to put it in a development branch led to poor quality. Linus tightened ship and basically said do development in your own branch, when it's ready merge it to the released kernel and ~2 months after the merge window closes it'll be released instead of years like the old kernel. No more hodge-podge development kernels full of half-assed changes. It got distros to work more on the upstream kernel than their own variations, leading to more manpower and higher quality in the core project. It was a great success.

"Blurry Fish Butt"

[westlake]

"Blurry Fish Butt"

Geek humor is to humor what military music is to music.

Re:"Blurry Fish Butt"

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you mean "no less valid just because I don't personally enjoy it as much"?

Re:"Blurry Fish Butt"

[Anonymous Coward]

Roller ball is to balls as wedding cake is to cake.

"Lennart's Tiny Head"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Lennart's got tits. But, he does have nipples. Lennart's Nubian Third Nipple...
Hmm... Nope, still not funny. Maybe they'll aim higher?

"Lennart's Tiny Head" : Linux 4.7, includes the systemd NFSA io secheduler, the systemd NFSA job scheduler, as well as the systemd "do it all as init 1" replacement for the Linux graphical subsystem. Enjoy.

always up for a good march

[Anonymous Coward]

all in our places with bright shiny faces,, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umjYHLt56kg

But is it ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

... in the year 2016