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Info About Kernel 2.3
Peter Hernberg writes "Linuxtoday has a interesting little tidbit from Linus about 2.3. "
Talks about the last fixes in the 2.2.8 patch as well as what is
happening first in the 2.3.0 series.
And just a note to help curb future flamage directed towards
me and my mediocre website from appearing on the kernel
mailing lists: 2.3.x is the devel series kernels. Don't touch
them unless you are a kernel developer, a mental patient (or both)
The appearance of 2.3.0 "merely" means that the Linux kernel development process continues. That's great. It's also good to see the fork happen much sooner than the 2.1.0 fork did.
Beyond that, the fuss and flames must be because of new Linux users. Otherwise, they'd already know the scoop about 2.odd.n kernels, and this silly discussion wouldn't be occurring.
To get real:
Is there a preliminary menu of features for 2.3? I've heard of LVM and ext3, to name two. There have been some rumblings of extending SMP to higher numbers of CPUs. Someone needs to say "GGI" and start another flame war...
I rather hope that 2.4 doesn't take as long as 2.2 did. Not out of any sense of hurry, but because the long gestation of 2.2 tended to put feature creep pressure on the 2.0 series.
Is that if you get a cycle as long as the last one was, you're practically FORCED to run one if you need features you can't find in the current stable ones. The 2.1.xx series gave me MUCH faster (Like, 3 times faster) disk access and better SMP performance too. If they worked (And they ususally did) they worked 100% -- nice and stable and much much faster. If they were broken, they would generally not boot at all and I'd just go back to the last one I was using.
Hopefully they'll narrow the feature set between stable kernel releases so we can get a stable kernel with features we need on a timely basis.
>>Don't touch them unless you are a kernel developer, a mental patient (or both)
This is of course crap. Everybody willing to test
development kernels is of course welcome to do so,
and a wide test by the user base is a very important element of the linux development process! If people don't test early the releases will be buggy, so to get good releases there need to be hordes of alpha/beta testers.
As the old GNU saying is "the contribution of users to GNU is testing". This applies 100% to Linux kernel development too.
Of course it is not recommended to run development kernels on production machines, but e.g. on your workstation it can be done without many problems. Even development kernels are usually more stable than most Microsoft releases @) If something doesn't work just fix it, of if you can't, report it with a detailed bug report (of course it is usually a good idea to check the l-k archives first if the bug has been already reported - that is often the case with "obvious" compile time problems)
If some misguided people on l-k say otherwise, just ignore them. Or did you see any prominent kernel developer in this silly thread?
-Andi Kleen
I remember reading a quote where Linus _liked_ that people still run old kernels. He liked the fact that people didn't just _have_ to upgrade their kernels. Often, an older kernel suited someone just fine and they saw no reason to upgrade.
I think that's a pretty big complement to a programmer. That's basically like saying that what you had two years ago is good enough for me, what you have now must be fantastic!
Of course, all of that being said, you don't _have_ to have a reason to upgrade. You can do it just because you want to. That's reason enough.
If there are NO patches OR warnings on /. for a given kernel inside of one week of release, it is probably a stable kernel, with no catastrophic bugs.
If the last patch > 100K, even when bzipped, there are enough changes to make unexpected side-effects, or even simple typos, likely.
If the last two patches are If these suggest that a development kernel is going to be stable, I'll probably upgrade to it. I like playing with the new features. Mind you, if these suggest the kernel is liable to destroy the compputer, raid the fridge and pull funny faces at my boss, I'd probably upgrade anyway.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I dont see why people should be so thrilled about a new kernel unless it actually does something for them. I used to download the kernel every new patch for 0.99 and 1.0, but those were the days when each patch really addressed something important. If it aint broke, dont fix it, for the most part it aint broke, so I aint fixing it :-)
I cant even remember the last time one of my machines crashed due to a kernel bug '95 maybe. Possibly '94.
-Rich
Will Alan Cox still maintain the 2.0 kernel series? Seems like developing 2.3 while maintaining 2.0 and 2.2 would be a lot of work kernel?
Does anyone still maintain/use the old 1.2 kernel?
cpeterso
the final 2.0.37 prepatch is almost done; When that's out, that'll be it for the 2.0 series. 1.2 et al is no longer being 'officially' maintained, but feel free to roll your own
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