Linus Torvalds Officially Announces the Release of Linux Kernel 4.8 (softpedia.com)

Slashdot reader prisoninmate brings news from Softpedia: Today, Linus Torvalds proudly announced the release and availability for download of the Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now the latest stable and most advanced one. Linux kernel 4.8 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than eight Release Candidate testing versions that early adopters were able to compile and install on their GNU/Linux operating system to test various hardware components or simply report bugs...

A lot of things have been fixed since last week's RC8 milestone, among which we can mention lots of updated drivers, in particular for GPU, networking, and Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM), a bunch of improvements to the ARM, MIPS, SPARC, and x86 hardware architectures, updates to the networking stack, as well as to a few filesystem, and some minor changes to cgroup and vm.
The kernel now supports the Raspberry Pi 3 SoC as well as the Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen.

Comments

Well that's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still using 2.6.32-642.4.2 and it works eminently well for me. Plus, no systemd.

Re:Well that's nice

[arth1]

I'm still using 2.6.32-642.4.2 and it works eminently well for me. Plus, no systemd.

No need to stay at old kernels to get the benefit of no systemd.

# uname -a
Linux hastur 4.4.21-gentoo #1 SMP Thu Sep 29 15:31:21 EDT 2016 x86_64 Intel Xeon E312xx (Sandy Bridge) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
# ps -fp 1
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 1 0 0 Sep29 ? 00:00:02 init [3]

Re:Well that's nice

[epyT-R]

arth's point was that the kernel, new or old, doesn't require systemd.

Re: Well that's nice

[arth1]

Not yet, but I'm sure Lennard will correct that in due course.

One of the systemd developers tried to make changes to the kernel for systemd only, breaking other software in the process, and was politely told where to stuff it.

Re:Well that's nice

[Rutulian]

Of course you can change targets ("runlevels") with systemd without rebooting. If you use Fedora, they have even preserved the telinit command and made equivalent "runlevel" targets, to make it easy for people coming from a sysvinit background.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki...

Re:Well that's nice

[Rutulian]

So if I update any of the libraries that init uses, all I have to do is a "telinit q"?

systemctl daemon-reexec

That one isn't mapped to a telinit equivalent (I don't think).

Last I checked, that was broken in upstart

Lots of things were broken in upstart. Systemd is a tremendous improvement over upstart, much to the chagrin of Mark Shuttleworth.

And systemd now lets me drop to single user mode? That's an improvement.

That's been there, for a while. I'm not sure who these "perps" are that you speak of, but systemd will do anything you tell it to. If you want a single user mode, define a target that creates a single user mode, just like you would define runlevel 1 to not start multiple ttys. I didn't follow every development of systemd as it was happening, and only really jumped in when it came (officially) to Red Hat 7.2 and then Ubuntu 16.04. While there are some lingering integration issues still (mostly with specific daemons), I would say it works pretty well, and the distro maintainers have done a lot good work with backwards-compatibility scripts to help people transition from sysvinit. So yes, there is a rescue.target, which is also called runlevel1.target on both Fedora and Debian.

Linux Torvalds sends his regards

[Anonymous Coward]

https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/07...

Announcement

[hcs_$reboot]

The announcement was made from a balcony somewhere in Finland. We expect the video anytime now.

Re:Announcement

[MayeulC]

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

and where does your little moan fit into the categories that you've defined for us? It certainly isn't in the 'interesting' one.

Eight RCs?

[allo]

That's not good sign. Either Linus doesn't understand what a RC is, or each of them still had bugs nobody noticed before, which is a bad sign for the code.

A RC is something, which can be renamed to a final version, unless somebody finds a critical last minute bug.

Re:Eight RCs?

[gmack]

On something as complicated as an OS, there will be bugs that are workload or hardware dependent and won't show up until the wider pool of people start testing it and that, as it turns out, is when RC1 gets released. .

Re:Eight RCs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or alternatively, there is a lack of understanding of the Linux kernel development process.

Re:systemd

[number6x]

systemd is a pile of horse shit that was thrown into a fan so it sprayed everywhere, touched everything and contaminated what it touched.

sysvinit is a pile of cow shit, in a field somewhere, touching only the ground it rests on. Don't go to that field and step in that pile and it won't bother you.

If there are bugs in sysvinit, they affect sysvinit. If there are bugs in systemd, its everyone else's fault and everyone else should re-write their software to handle the bugs in systemd because the systemd developers are way too important to waste their incredible talent fixing their own bugs.

Re:systemd

[Barsteward]

yaaawwnnnnn......

Re:What OpenRC ?

[arth1]

What? OpenRC? Why run a mean a lean init system written C ? The heresy !

You're confusing sysv init with sysv rc. Gentoo uses sysv init - no need to replace the init system with something complex. OpenRC is a replacement for what init calls - the rc handler, which doesn't need pid 1.

Personally, I like many of openrc's ideas, but not the implementation. I like good old-fashioned runlevels, and not named abstractions that may differ from system to system. Predictability is good. So are posix scripts, which continue working even on systems where /bin/sh is lightweight ash or some other bourne family shell that isn't bash.