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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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?)
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?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."