Linux 4.11 Delayed For a Week (theregister.co.uk)

Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds said over the weekend that v4.11 version of Linux has hit a speed bump in the form of "NVMe power management that apparently causes problems on some machines." The Register adds: "It's not entirely clear what caused the [NVMe] issue (it wasn't just limited to some NVMe hardware, but also particular platforms), but let's test it." Which sounds like a good idea, given that flash memory on the PCIe bus is increasingly mainstream. That problem and "a couple of really annoying" bugs mean that Torvalds has decided to do an eighth release candidate for Linux 4.11. "I did get fixes for the issues that popped up, so I could have released 4.11 as-is," Torvalds wrote, "but it just doesn't feel right."

Comments

We need the 411 Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

What gives! Luddites

Re:We need the 411 Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

Appsolutely! Modern app appers only use appy app apps, NOT LUDDITE NVMe!

Apps!

Re:We need the 411 Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

but there are no LUDDITE appy app apperating systems using only appy app apps! All appy app appers are modern!

Apps!

Re: We need the 411 Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

Appy app appers using LUDDITE iOS for apps are causing global warming for app appers who app apps on Android. STOP IT!

*APPS!*

this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.

I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.

I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.

Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.

As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 8/10 are your only choices.

thank you.

Re: this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Some idiot wrote, "I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming." That's when I stopped reading. Lol. Then I realized this is some kind of comedy show.

You use VB to write kernel code. Lol

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice copypasta.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Bodhammer]

"For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code)."

Go To Statement Considered Harmful - Edsger W. Dijkstra

Re: this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Never seen that pasta before, I take it?

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Megol]

That text doesn't really apply to modern programming practices (with modern defined as ~70's forward). Go to statements are mostly used for exception handling and breaking out of nested loops, for those uses they are hard to replace in a good way. The result of removing them will almost always be more verbose and harder to read.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

gud troll trolls gud!

Re:this isnt a surprise

[networkBoy]

do{
if (!foo){break;}
}while(0);

the hidden goto :-)

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, that pasta is so old that the version of Windows mentioned in the original was 2000.

Re: this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I got as far as "I don't believe in C programming". The autor obviously doesn't
know the difference between C and C++.

CAP === 'denature'

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

do{
if (!foo){break;}
}while(0);

the hidden goto :-)

do{
do{
if (!foo){break;}
}while(somecond1);
}while(somecond2);

So, with nested while, how do you exit ???

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

named breaks.
If your language doesn't have those, just copypasta to the outer loop level(s).

Re: this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

break 2;

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not worried, I'm still running Linux 3.11 for WorkGroups.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Hognoxious]

do{
  do{
    if (bar}{bigbreak = true; break;}
    if (!foo){break;}
  }while(somecond1);
  if (bigbreak){break;}
  # shit you want to skip if bar goes here
}while(somecond2);

Or something like that.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[networkBoy]

do{
if (!foo){break;}
}while(0);

the hidden goto :-)

do{
do{
if (!foo){break;}
}while(somecond1);
}while(somecond2);

So, with nested while, how do you exit ???

Actually my statement was more that people *effectively* use goto without even realizing they are.
functionally my example is no different than:

//begin block
{
if (!foo){goto CLEANUP_BLOCK;}
} :CLEANUP_BLOCK

^/. is absolutely intent on making my colon prefix collapse up all the whitespace to the curly... no idea why.
Now, in my example case there is no condition, as the do-while construct is not actually being used as a loop, thus would not (validly) match your example.
in your example case I don't know that I would even want to do a goto escape as you're doing some double loop stuff that might leave things fairly inconsistent... but if I was confident that it was okay (maybe you're walking a pair of trees for something and you break when you find it?) then it would be simple to just use the goto above.
not sure if it's just my employer's style or more global, but we *always* lexically scoped our protected block in curlies (even though it's not syntactically required, it sure helps the human brain).

Re:this isnt a surprise

[goose-incarnated]

>"As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 8/10 are your only choices."

Wow- you will be rightfully modded down to -100 pretty quickly. Apparently you don't know much about the world out there.... the majority of the Internet is run by Linux servers, and has been for many, many years now. Almost all the S&P500 run Linux to various degrees in their IT. You think Linux doesn't support journaled filesystems? SMP? Seriously??? You think An MS-Windows box of ANY sort can do the work of 3 Linux boxes???!!! LOL!

You are either completely clueless or are an MS-shill or both. Not even many self-respecting professional MS-Windows administrators with Linux exposure would agree with anything you said.

Welcome to the internet - the first time I saw that copy-pasta was in 2002.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try niglet

Re:this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what that is? Dogma, and cargo culting at it's finest.

You might be a "passable" programmer, but you'll never be an excellent one.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[armanox]

Hehehe...Haven't seen this one for a while. Needed that laugh, but you can troll better then that.

Re:this isnt a surprise

[paulatz]

I would argue that a goto to break out of the loop is clearer that the break. While examining the code, it is possible to miss a break in the middle of a long complicated loop, but you will certainly notice a label statement coming after its end.

Re: this isnt a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloat, one extra if and two assignments.

Good Idea

[alphaomega325]

Bug-Fixing before release/update of any software is always a good idea, be it open source or in properitery software. So I am glad that Linus decided to wait to fix the update before pushing it out.

Re:Good Idea

[tlhIngan]

Bug-Fixing before release/update of any software is always a good idea, be it open source or in properitery software. So I am glad that Linus decided to wait to fix the update before pushing it out.

I think the NVMe issue is a showstopper, which is why they're taking time to fix it. If anyone isn't familiar, NVMe is an SSD attached to the PCIe bus - given we've already maxed out SATA3. NVMe bests that with the newest SSDs pushing 2GB/sec+ in reads and 1GB/sec+ in writes (SATA3 was limited to 540MB/sec, which is why all SSDs pretty much tested at that level).

It sounds like it could be a catastrophic bug and the last thing anyone wants is a kernel release that kills user data

Re: Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the bug report? We can't get a million eyes on this bug to make it shallow if there's no bug report we can look at to learn about what's wrong!

Re: Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Here
Have fun trying to debug that without having one of the affected hardware platforms.

Re: Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just supposed to know. If you need a bug report to tell you where to look, you don't have the skills. Piss off.

Re:Good Idea

[HiThere]

If systemd causes problems, use a non-systemd distribution. Devuan was on the front page yesterday, but Gentoo is optionally systemd free (well, so is Debian for now), and Slackware is free of systemd. There are other choices. (I don't consider Gentoo acceptable unless you have multiple computers on your desk, as the install instructions are on multiple html pages, and needing to print those out is unreasonable.)

As for Firefox, I haven't experienced the problems you are reporting. I'm using the Debian default install with Adblock Plus, and just about no installed add-ons. I commonly leave several windows with multiple tabs open for days. But I do generally forbid the use of Javascript. Usually if I allow it, it's only a temporary permission, which I soon cancel. So I'm guessing that you have a flaky add-on installed, for which it's not proper to blame Mozilla.

Re:Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

If systemd causes problems, use a non-systemd distribution. Devuan was on the front page yesterday, but Gentoo is optionally systemd free (well, so is Debian for now), and Slackware is free of systemd. There are other choices. (I don't consider Gentoo acceptable unless you have multiple computers on your desk, as the install instructions are on multiple html pages, and needing to print those out is unreasonable.)

How do you come up with this? Of course having to print them out is unreasonable - when I installed Gentoo I opened another shell and viewed them with 'links'. You do know that a Linux system can have more than one shell/terminal open at a time, right? I hope that isn't news to you. Multiple html pages? Gentoo offers a choice between one page at a time, or everything in one big html document. That was the case back in 2006 and that's the case now. I know that because I've actually installed Gentoo. You're not sounding very much like you have a clue, and yet there you are, speaking about it as though you did...

Incidentally, "I can't possibly read from the screen, just because" is a non-problem that exists solely in your head. Seriously you sound like a typical old fart suggesting that so much paper should be needlessly wasted.

Re:Good Idea

[HiThere]

Having to print out the html pages is unreasonable. Having to print a pdf would not be unreasonable.

Possibly after I'd installed Gentoo once or twice I'd feel confident enough that I wouldn't think I needed the instructions in front of me as I did it, but just now I would want the full instructions. Which is why I said "a second computer on your desk".

P.S.: Why you format your disk, and have a boot disk, it's difficult to tell what info you are going to need to proceed in a way you haven't previously gone. You don't *KNOW* what info you are going to need. Before I get in that situation I like to have a visible plan of action. Thus a printed pdf would be reasonable. I don't have a phone or tablet that would act as a surrogate internet browser. So I want a printed copy of instructions before I get into something really new.

Re:Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you have a shitty distro. those problems are ridiculous and certainly don't exist on Arch Linux.

Re:Something wrong with comment threshold slider h

[Anonymous Coward]

u could have virus

Re:Something wrong with comment threshold slider h

[epyT-R]

Also, the comment text no longer fills most of the browser window. Now a third of the space is taken up with the right hand column, which is useless on the discussion pages. I'd rather have more space for comment text. In order to get it back, I have the make the browser window substantially wider.

Re:Something wrong with comment threshold slider h

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyboard shortcuts still working fine.

] [ keys move Full slider

. , keys move Abbreviated slider

Ah yes

[DMJC]

I've encountered this bug. The laptop will sleep the SSD and suddenly nothing in the filesystem works. It's like it's just unmounted or force disconnected and doesn't come back without a hard reboot.

systemd delay?

[birukun]

[ **] A start job is running for kernel-4.11-release (1.2 day / 7 days)

IntranetLinux For Small Business - For nostalgia's

[williamyf]

In the same vein as the
Linux 3.11 for workgroups release, this release should be called

Linux 4.11 IntranetLinux For Small Business...

(and yes, I know that a la latter stage, netware was just a userland component on top of linux...)

Re: Something wrong with comment threshold slider

[Anonymous Coward]

...NO CARRIER

What's the rush?

[sentiblue]

Take your time! I have been through kernel 2.4x and 2.6x for many many years..... Then all the sudden 3.x came out followed by an aggressive update schedule... I don't really give a shit because no production environment will be willing to keep up with this kind of change. Frankly, I don't care if it goes back to the sleeping mode for several years like 2.x did.

Re:Something wrong with comment threshold slider h

[armanox]

Yeah, the layout has been weird like that for at least a few days - I get a little box on the right with my username, ID number, and Karma score and that is it (maybe it's an ad location?).