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

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

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

[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

[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: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

[networkBoy]

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

the hidden goto :-)

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.

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.

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).

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...)

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: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

[armanox]

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

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?).

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.