Linux 4.16 Released (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.16. Linux 4.16 integrates more of the VirtualBox guest drivers into the kernel, provides AMDGPU DC multi-display synchronization, continues with mitigation improvements for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, tightens up access to /dev/mem by default, and many other improvements and changes.

Comments

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Billly Gates]

When?

How Microsoft made Linux run on Windows was by adding hooks through an abstract layer. Unfortunately, Windows was designed with a HAL (hardware abstract layer) from the beggining when David Cutler wanted to make it portable across hardware. Win64 and wow32 (win32onwin64) are really layers on top of the kernel for runtimes. Linux is another one.

Linux is a macro-kernel so this would be messy (reminds me of the old Linux is obsolete it isn't a micro kernel debate from Andy Tannabum) but could be I guess possible if someone wanted to a winapi including NDIS and lord knows what else hooks into the linux kernel itself.

Then a daemon could use those hooks and launch the inverse of WSL that is on Windows 10 to run binaries.

Also keep in mind at this time only console linux apps work on Windows. This is because the OpenGL and device driver API and ABI's have not been ported yet. On Windows everything is gui based :-(

So this would not be easy or possible unless one wants to just run win32 powershell scripts and dos commands.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

WSL is not "GNU" anything. It's proprietary, it's a compatibility layer, and it's not complete enough to actually make most Linux based code work. If you think I'm kidding, try any X based application, sshd, and httpd.

httpd compiles and runs fine on WSL

Every x apps I tried runs fine as well, didnt try sshd though.

Re:improvements

[BadDreamer]

Corner cases, mostly.

Init is fine with daemons that work as intended, and are reasonably stable. It suffers with broken code, and most competing replacements are trying to address that, not any actual flaws in init itself.

Re:improvements

[KiloByte]

indeed, that restart feature is a bandage for shoddy software

It's worse than that: it's a security hole with no excuse whatsoever.

A daemon never has a reason to crash. I don't recall the last case a daemon crashed for me (not counting failing to start), and I run unstable on a number of non-production machines. Code that goes into a proper distribution these decades is not hopelessly buggy.

If your company has some local daemon that requires a band-aid, you need to debug crashes ASAP as there's above 50% chance the crash is exploitable. Obviously, usually your management is criminally negligent and wants you to add features instead, but in such case it takes a single line to use runit or some other daemon supervisor.

Thus, auto-restarting crashed daemons is such a bad idea it must never be a part of an init system. Doing this anyway should be considered exceptional, and in such cases you need to take some extra precautions anyway.