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Linux Kernel 4.12 Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate quotes Softpedia:
After seven weeks of announcing release candidate versions, Linus Torvalds today informs the Linux community through a mailing list announcement about the general availability of the Linux 4.12 kernel series. Development on the Linux 4.12 kernel kicked off in mid-May with the first release candidate, and now, seven weeks later we can finally get our hands on the final release... A lot of great improvements, new hardware support, and new security features were added during all this time, which makes it one of the biggest releases, after Linux 4.9...
Prominent features of the Linux 4.12 kernel include initial support for AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, intial Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" accelerated support, implementation of Budget Fair Queueing (BFQ) and storage-I/O schedulers, more MD RAID enhancements, support for Raspberry Pi's Broadcom BCM2835 thermal driver, a lot of F2FS optimizations, as well as ioctl for the GETFSMAP space mapping ioctl for both XFS and EXT4 filesystems.
Linus said in announcing the release that "I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits," also noting that 4.9 was a Long Term Support kernel, whereas "4.12 is just plain big."
"There's also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree - it's all just normal development, just more of it than usual."
Prominent features of the Linux 4.12 kernel include initial support for AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, intial Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" accelerated support, implementation of Budget Fair Queueing (BFQ) and storage-I/O schedulers, more MD RAID enhancements, support for Raspberry Pi's Broadcom BCM2835 thermal driver, a lot of F2FS optimizations, as well as ioctl for the GETFSMAP space mapping ioctl for both XFS and EXT4 filesystems.
Linus said in announcing the release that "I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits," also noting that 4.9 was a Long Term Support kernel, whereas "4.12 is just plain big."
"There's also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree - it's all just normal development, just more of it than usual."
There were two things that I didn't know about, so I figured I'd share those links:
F2FS is a flash filesystem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
BFQ is a scheduler for I/O: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
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The release notes I read seem to concern adding new capabilities to Linux, but not IMPROVING the code in the kernel. Are any changes happening there, or is it now perfect and set in stone forever ?
They are waiting for you to implement those kernel improvements and to submit them. :-)
Soon systemd will include its own kernel anyway, so there's no point.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
some recent interview with linus was that every now and then he gets submissions in places he thought didn't have much to improve or fix bugs.
you don't put those on the changelogs though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I understand maintaining the old schedulers but schedulers to most newer hardware are actually detrimental. SSD and even some modern hard drives do best with the noop scheduler simply because the overhead of a scheduler is noticeable. Even on embedded devices, schedulers take up cycles. And if you really need one, there are literally dozens of them to choose from and even though you may want to have some variations in yours, why take them all up in the mainline kernel? Just keep them separate.
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BTRFS is broken by design. It should not be used, it should be tossed and any efforts going to ZFS.
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I am talking about things that improve the kernel itself.
How about BFQ? I/O scheduling is a core kernel function, and BFQ is a significant improvement.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What would you like to see improved?
IIRC, that bug only existed in MSWind 95A, not even in 95B, much less 98. (They had other problems.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What would you count as a kernel improvement?
Others have said that they consider some of the things posted as what they think of as kernel improvements. If those don't meet your criteria, what would? (And remember, we're talking kernel here, not user space.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why is BRTRS broken?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
One problem I encountered with btrfs is that at about 80% full, it will refuse to create any new files saying it is out of space. This happens because the free space is fragmented: apparently btrfs can only allocate space in blocks that are entirely empty, not in partially filled blocks. I then have to run a command manually to make btrfs move the data such that the free space is combined and usable again. To make it worse, that command needs a free block to do its job, so I either have to remove a large enough file to free up an entire block or add a second block device for temporary working space.
I don't understand why a file system is considered production ready when it is as clunky to use as this. I remember the days when Linux users could make fun of Windows users having to run defrag...
Crap like this is why I stay away from what I call "vanity" file systems. It always seems there is some kind of issues with the filesystem itself or the tools you have to use to maintain it. I'll just stick to plan old ext3/4 file system. Vanity file systems may have their advantages but their issues always seem to outweigh them.
An that is probably why I have never seen one of them in the wild. When it comes right down to it, in the linux world ext3/ext4 is king and for a good reason.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.