Linux 2.2.7 Released

MazMart was the first to report that a new stable kernel. Linus decided to name it 2.2.7- a surprise move that enraged and shocked, but since it was the next available digit we shouldn't be all that surprised. Now if I only I had a T1- hemos would kill me if I seized control of the ISDN for something so selfish as as kernel.

Comments

USB Support

[Jordy]

Hmm, the USB support in 2.2.7 appears to be an alternate development by Linus & friends rather than from the Linux USB project.

Anyone have any ideas why they wrote their own instead of working with Linux USB project's version?

The Linux USB projects sources seem farther along than what is included in the kernel.

--

Automatic kernel patch distribution

[LucaL]

If you send mail to Majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu with "subscribe linux-kernel-patch" in the body, you will automagically receive the latest patch, as soon as it is posted by the Linus.

If the patch is too big (> ~400k) you will receive a notification and the diffstat output.

The truly wicked could setup a procmail rule to feed mail from linux-kernel-patch directly to "patch -p1 -d /usr/src/linux" ...

Small Patch to get USB to compile

[LucaL]

I have just posted it to linux-kernel:

--- drivers/usb/usb.h.bak Wed Apr 28 21:59:45 1999
+++ drivers/usb/usb.h Wed Apr 28 22:08:08 1999
@@ -363,8 +363,8 @@
void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *, u8 *);
void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *, u8 *);
#else
-extern inline void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *, u8 *) {}
-extern inline void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *, u8 *) {}
+extern inline void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *interface, u8 *data) {}
+extern inline void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *interface, u8 *data) {}
#endif

#endif

Linux uptime?

[Znork]

Well, a bit on the silly side, I just went through a horrible horrible bug in Linux 2.0.30. After somewhere around 500 days uptime... IT WRAPPED!
According to last, it went up at:

reboot system boot Tue Dec 16 22:51

(That would be 1997).

Now:
11:40pm up 22:21, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.00

Suddenly I was back at 0 uptime, and my logfiles went through a spasm with kernel error messages ending with this:

Apr 28 01:56:07 dream kernel: Call Trace: [do_gettimeofday+34/68] [sys_gettimeof
day+44/112] [system_call+85/124]
Apr 28 01:56:07 dream kernel: Code: f7 f1 ba 10 27 00 00 89 c1 31 c0 f7 f1 a3 dc
fa 1a 00 89 c3

Oh, well, still it didnt panic, altho a load of apps including X went haywire.

It sorta puts life into a perspective too. Last time I rebooted this machine I was 25. Now I'm 27. Agh.

Re:NT is only on sp4

[Kenneth]

Linux has far more releases than any closed source OS, because the philosophy behind closed source code is to never let your customer see a bug. Obviously this hasn't worked with NT. Open source on the other hand, releases every even marginally working piece of software. This software is then viewed and 'fixed' by a large number of people, then resubmitted to whoever is maintaining that code.

With closed source software, about 10% of the time is spent writing the code, then the rest is spend debugging. Debugging takes many many worker hours in order to do correctly. This is why there are alpha and beta versions available for some things, but they are still being tested.

With open source, such things are not worried about. The user has access to the source code, and those thousands or hundreds of thousands of 'eyeball hours' looking at the code for problems, can be accomplished in a matter of days or even hours.

There have been times during the development of linux that Linus released a new kernel version more than once a day. I would imagine that this happens more with the unstable releases. For discussion on how to tell, see earlier posts.