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Kernel Feature freeze in 2 weeks?
According to an email written by Linus, "a feature freeze in about two weeks is the current plan", so people who wants their patch included (a hint to ISDN dev. guys) should work/write faster. I guess kernel 2.4 may be out this fall after all.
Yes, but what is more embarassing.. having your fresh new untested kernel go down or your boxers? :-)
So the last major update took 2 1/2 years... Yeah, that's a long time, but there were TONS of changes... 2.2 is far ahead of 2.0... 2.4 won't be quite as big a leap. I would like to see PnP, USB, TCP/IP fixes all working before a 2.4 though....
They only thing I can think of, is that maybe they concentrating on stability now... add a few features, stabilize, lather, rinse, repeat... It could also be that they're saving 3.0 for the major changes.. whatever those might be.
Man.. I still know of boxes running on 2.0.35 (with currently 309 days uptime)... I started on 1.3.something... Our little baby's all grown up!
Wow, warm boxers! That sounds like a great idea....hmmm....
-David
I don't think you understand the term 'feature freeze' very well. The whole point is that nothing new gets added so it can be better stabilised.
Send your patch to the linux-kernel mailing list just saying "Hey here's a patch against Linux 2.x.y that autodetects Foo Inc.'s Bizbaz XT controller card." Unless your patch is really big (why would it be?); then just give a link to a website or something to your patch. In case you're not on the linux-kernel mailing list, the short summary of how to make a good patch is:
.c file for the XT controller and find an appropriate email address if you don't want to broadcast your patch to everyone on the lkml. Hope this helps.
$ diff -urN {original-source-tree} {your-source-tree} >/tmp/linux-patch
Alternatively, look in the
Support for a full, robust journalling filesystem would be worthy of a major number increment (Linux 3.0). Filesystems (especially modern journalling ones) are *very* complicated and *very* fundamental to the system. If your filesystem only works correctly 99.9% of the time, your system is *wholly* unusable.
The changes that you mention are in the planning stages, but will take a very long time to implement and an equally long time before they are deemed "stable". 2.4 is supposed to be a quick cycle, so such changes do not fit in its scope.
As for what *is* new in 2.4, Pranevich put together a nice piece called the "Wonderful World of Linux 2.4" (just as he did for Linux 2.2). It is on Linux Today, and I suggest you check it out.
--Lenny
I wish I had one of those Neuralizer's From Men in Black. I'd flash my Boss.
"Huh? You won't give me raise?!?
Uh, yeah, I'll take that raise and the Promotion. Oh? and we're not installing NT?? Linux, Firm-wide you say???
Do not read this
While we're on the subject of badly needed pronouns, I'd like to add an addendum for the legitimization of "ain't" as a contraction of "am not." We've got second and third person, singular and plural, covered in all applicable tenses. It's time we spoke out for #1.
I'm mad as hell, and I ain't going to take it any more!
A few questions about kernel development:
;)
a) when do they decide that the next version should be for instance 2.4 instead of 3.0?
b) what constitutes a feature freeze? When everything is considered stable? if everything is stable, why do they keep adding new versions that must be debugged?
Just curious, Ive always wondered things like this
-Dave
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
When you're -truly- speaking globally, why don't you just say 'In Q4'? The fourth Quarter. Then there's -never- any confusion with seasons. Whoever thought of using seasons as a timeframe should be shot. Seasons are for -farmers-.
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
Depending on which of the Big Two dictionaries you ask, that *has* been a valid contraction for a few years now.
--GAck
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
What, in particular is wrong with X? I use even some of its more obscure features on a regular basis. What I would like to see in kernel graphics support is KGI, with good device support, and then XGGI on the userspace side, but that probably won't happen until GGI is ready.
Why? Because they cant program.
Well, in that case, please show us exactly how its done, Mr AC. Obviously you know what you're talking about, don't you.
silly man,
:-)
everybody knows that transmeta is just a front for the aliens. they are in constant contact with the motherbase back on Transmeta Prime, and are busily building a spacetime portal in the basement. You laugh now, and engage in idle speculation about these "patents", but see who's laughing when they pour through their portal and enslave us all.
--sam
--sam
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Looks like Linus learned from the last development cycle, where it took 2 1/2 years to get a new stable version out the door.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
just wishful thinking, really. I've got a Yamaha PCI Soundcard, an XG-DG or some such...sounds GREAT in Window$, but the only support via Linux is thru OSS from 4front. So for now, I'm stuck with my SB16 PNP. Oh, anyway, I'd like to see more support for multimedia hardware. Like my card. Esp. my card (:
Northeast USA Computer Show Schedule
http://www.vermontel.com/~vengnce/shows
Actually, a feature freeze will probably help stability.
Instead of spending more time adding new features than on refining existing code, the kernel folks will spend more time on polishing the code, having stopped adding new features (the word "stop" being a bit relative).
That would give, at the very earliest, assuming that fall in California starts around the 20th of September, about a month of bugfixing. And that's a minimum.
It doesn't seem like such a hurry from where I sit. *shrug*
--
QDMerge -- data + templates = documents.
how to invest, a novice's guide
But, isn't Webster an American dictionary?
The plot grows thicker and thicker...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
In short, people who think they have major requirements had better get their act together. That means that if ISDN people actually want to try to get into a real release one of these years, they don't have all that much time to futz around any more.
Hm. I don't know if Tove will let you get near him with a clue stick.
----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
Personally all the hardware on my computer is supported well (except for an old scanner I had). Unless there is a speed improvement or memory management change I will stick with 2.2.10!
---------------------------
^_^ smile death approaches.
Kernel 2.4
XFree 4.0
XFS
IA-64
Some days it's good to be alive.
--
I think KDE 2.0 is a long way off. When it gets here it should be really nice. With KParts and KOffice, it really sounds like something that will be very comprable to windows.
-matt
Uhm...that's the point of a feature freeze. No new features, only bug fixes. Btw, if you think that the kernel programmers can't code, I'd love to see what you can do.
-matt
A parallel question, does anyone have any idea when we're going to see 2.2.11? 2.2.11-pre1 is on the kernel mirrors, but I'm not keen on running a devel kernel on my system...
-Cheetah
gee there are some bugs in 2.2 that should be fixed first. I hope that they still support 2.2 and make improvements to it and do not just plan on stopping at 2.2.11 or 2.2.12. What is the rush for 2.4? why not just clean up 2.2 or is that not possible?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Sure, we want to look like we are developing quickly, but people will ask "What's new in 2.4?" What will we be able to say?
Of course, some people could make the argument that y'all is singular second person, and all y'all is plural second person.
I'm not one of those people. I'll stick with you and y'all
Fall doesn't start in California until about mid October :)
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
The OED has citations for both back to the 14th century, which kind of pre-dates any American English usage. It states that 'fall' was short for 'the fall of the leaf', which probably explains why people still say 'in the fall' rather than 'in fall', while 'in autumn' is fine.
Good thing he posted as AC, not many ppl would want to get all the flame mail from criticizing Linus.
/. readers have enough background to make the judgement that the ISDN ppl are or are not "futzing around" but from what's been presented isn't it about time that they synch their schedule up with the next kernel?
Since you're so big on logic... Isn't it sad that when someone says "that's a bad attitude" the first response was "well Mr. Authority said it!" and that's supposed to be a valid argument?
A management mistake is just that; no matter who makes it. Management may not be #1 but it matters.
I doubt very much that most
That's exactly my point and the post you were responding to was either not ad homonym or your complaint of ad homonym against the AC was off topic (and therefore feeding a troll).
Your post can reflect a value judgement on the point; you named an informal fallacy in an attempt to refute that point. By presuming that such a method of management is "good enough for our/my purposes" either you must either feel that a malliable attitude is wasted on your workforce (which is still poor management) or that you do know enough about the topic to judge the AC's criticism of Torvalds' email.
My point about the "Mr. Authority" comment was that since you're so concerned with logical form that you'll identify an ad homonym why didn't you identify this other Informal Fallacy? It was the entire point of the AC's post!
I believe the rest is self explanatory.
... and maybe the ISDN ppl were ignorant of the deadline. It would suck to expect 6 months to finish a project and all of a sudden get a memo from your pointy-haired boss to get your ass in gear for a code/feature freeze next week. So someone picked a date, and noone can push it back now can they? Yes there were rumors of a fall release. Does that make the probably unexpected feature freeze any more devistating to an unready development team? Off to patchland the ISDN users go!
Not that Linux development should ever suffer from the curse of middle management, but it helps to keep the general on his toes.
so...
QUESTION AUTHORITY
Just on the off-chance anyone cares,
and for comparison purposes,
a lot of people in Ireland,
when speaking "Irish-Dialect" English,
use "yez" or "youse" as the 2nd person plural.
Y'all is sometimes heard too.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I know, but see the autodection routines in there? I put one in for another card.
As soon as they realize that the next release isn't going to be revolutionary enough to deserve the new major number
what constitutes a feature freeze?
When all the features are in place. They freeze it so that they'll be able to work on getting things stable instead of putting in new things all the time. A feature freeze does not mean that things are stable.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I bet Linus has some corporate intentions behind this sudden hurry. And I bet it has something to do with their mystery processor. And possibly something about Amiga too.
Anyway I hope all this hurrying isn't going to hurt stability...
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
So is XFS or ext3 or ext2+b*tree going to make it in to 2.4? Is any of this stuff in the 2.3 kernels yet, I didn't think it was.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
Is the USB support in the 2.4 kernel going to be 'complete' enough to allow the use of USB modems? I've noticed that they're the same price as serial modems or even slightly cheaper these days and I need a new modem. :)
Is the TCP/IP stack going to be rewritten to be multithreaded (finally) in 2.3.x/2.4? (I haven't been following the 2.3 releases at all... I miss my Ethernet.... when does school start again? :-) This is a badly needed feature in the kernel, and I can't believe that it didn't have it already...
Anyway, if somebody has the answer to this question please email me at spong@wave.harvard.edu.
Thanks
Matt
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Gee a couple of big things come to mind, such as:
ISDN (already mentioned)
DEVfs
Linux-Raid Patches
Uniform-IDE/UDMA Driver
I personally dont see much value to a new kernel until these are in........
--John C
Red Hat 6.0 is based on kernel 2.2.5, although I wouldn't be surprised to see a 6.1 release (on a 2.2.x kernel) after 2.4 is released. Red Hat 7.0 is still a long ways away.
For more information, click here.
hahaha
That sounds like the problem I have with floppies. Once in a while I need them to transfer some files to and from a laptop.
My personal hope is that some of the changes in the FS and SCSI layers for 2.4 will help out the stability problems. Currently I can't scan with my SCSI scanner for more than a handful of scans before the sg device or machine locks.
No, y'all is still first person; all y'all is second person. ;)
ahh, but brand new roads can be a bad thing. My mother's street was cambered incorrectly around a corner (instead of going Up on the outside of the turn it went down) so lots of people had fun going around too fast and flying off the road into people's gardens, etc.
ìì!
Send it to the kernel mailing list. If it's not trivial, ask for testers; once it's tested, send again with an explanation and a request for inclusion and CC whoever is the maintainer for that code (looking in MAINTAINERS, hedrick at astro.dyer.vanderbilt dot edu seems like a good choice). Allow a week; if there's no response, send on to Linus and Alan with a brief note of explanation.
Revise and repeat as needed.
Sumner
Suse 6.2 ships Aug 9th
Pardon the horrid off-topicness.
Autumn is a British word. It's derived from the Middle English autumpne, from the Latin autumnus.
So says Merriam-Webster, at least.
Also see:
http://www.linuxtv.org/
I actually think I remember hearing that SGI was going to contrib some fixes toward this. I could be wrong.
I've got a BP6 as well and I actually (sorry) originally intended to install NT on it and put Linux on my PII. Unfortunately, (maybe) I couldn't even get NT to install on this machine, so I put Linux on it, w/o using the ATA66 support (I plugged my fancy ATA/66 HD into a standard IDE controller, what a waste.) However, what is this issue with pset? I don't even know what pset is. Also, where did you get ATA/66 support? It would be really nice to have that working, as it yields a nice performance boost. Are there plans to include it in the next kernel release?
suse 6.1 gives you the option of installing a 2.2 or a 2.0 kernel.
Take a look at my logic again, I didn't make any value judgement on that point at all, because *I* don't know enough about the issue. I did assert that the management is "good enough for our purposes," which is more truly "good enough for my purposes". I don't think that "mr. authority said it" is a valid argument either, but so what?
Someone had to pick a date, someone did. It's not like there's a date that would please everybody, is there?
I believe that more work should be going into stabilising 2.2.x. AFAIK Alan is still unhappy with the number of unexplained failures.
Linux's "legendary stability" must be top priority.
And what's this stuff about "kernel 2.4 will be after all at this fall"? Autumn is still nine months away.
Think global.
Buncha slackers, those volunteer developers... :-)
Eh? 1.2.15? Was that a typo, or should I be upgrading my 1.2.13 laptop?
NFS was in a shoddy state in 2.2; 2.2.11 and 2.2.12, once Alan gets around to releasing them (I think he's here in Canada right now) should fix this reliably.
Honestly! The aliens have been trying to teach humanity Transmeta-ese for generations, and yet there are some humans that still can't speak the language correctly. Motherbase, indeed! Where would the processor go, eh?
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)
It's in Shakespere, so it must be ok. :)
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 have never, ever heard anyone talk about the "autumn" season, in ANY context, in or around the United States, by ANYONE, other than visiting Britons.
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)
Although I generally say 'fall' more than 'autumn,' I do use both.
But then I use two different pronunciations of 'either' interchangably, and I strongly support the use of 'y'all' as the new standard 2nd person plural pronoun. Maybe I'm just a freak.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Don't forget, the last day of fall is Dec 20th. I'm guessing that this is mainly a call to get people serious about closing on 2.4, and it's easier to be serious if you're at least somewhat serious about a deadline. In this case, Linus is trying to give us 2.4 as an early Christmas present, it would appear (even though he hasn't come out and said so).
I'm sure that the kernel will go out when it's ready, and no sooner. Nonetheless, it's good to state some goals up-front, and a "limited development cycle" goal for 2.4 is probably a good idea. Saying "feature freeze" and "2.4 in the fall" at least gets people starting to think in that manner, rather than leaving it open-ended and sprawling, as it happened with Linux 2.2.
(Personally, I feel 2.0 should've been 1.4, and 2.2 should've been 2.0, in retrospect. At least the numbering, relative amounts of features and release dates are more consistent that way. Ahhh well....)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Please pardon my bout of mental flatulence.
LATEST-IS-1.2.13
--Joe
--
Program Intellivision!
I still don't think that 2.4 will be out by fall.
Althought its only been a few months since 2.2 came out and 2.3 is already about to be frozen.
There was a lot of new features being worked
on and not merged with the main kernel months
before 2.2 came out when 2.1 was frozen, and were
shot into 2.3 as soon as it was open season.
-Omar
Omar El-Domeiri
I was planning my next machine to be on 2.2... It now looks like Linus, et al, may be finished with 2.4 before I even order any hardware.
Does anyone know if SuSE or Red Hat is planning another release based on 2.2?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Feature freeze != code freeze. Even the best programmers occasionally have bugs in their code, and that's why a feature freeze is a Good Thing, as it lets the coders focus on fixing the bugs.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Running a fresh new kernel is like putting on a warm pair of boxers strait out of the drier.. Mmm....
Corndog
Thousands of Linux advocates and Transmeta watchers are debating the significance of a recent email sent from Linus Torvalds to Alan Cox on 8-3-99. The email read in part:
/. thousands have suggested that he is implying that Transmeta has created a magic invisibility device which Torvalds will use to battle the fiendish crime lord Erik "The Red" Blowhard. /. "I think that Linus didn't mean to cc. the kernel list on this one. He's spilled the beans on the whole Transmeta operation. Think about it. Invisibility suits. This rules. FIRST POST."
/.
Probably. I really think it's a matter of "if this device really doesn't
have any ordering constraints, then we can use the new nifty feature to
make it invisible to most users".
The big question is what did Linus mean by those fateful words. On
"Wow man!" Shouted flak in a post to
Anthropologists have postulated that Linus' mails receive so much attention because he is seen as a sort of divine "priest king" by his followers. "Unfortunately, this means that if the pace of development on the kernel ever slows, the crazed worshippers may sacrifice Linus to regain the favor of their gods. History shows this pattern occurring again and again." commented Dr. Rajeev Papshigali of the University of Utah. "If the sacrifice is unsuccessful, we may see Linux users losing their faith and joining other strange sects. Possibly they may even convert to one of the daemonology cults that originated at UC Berkeley."
An AC suggested that this was an out-of-context quote from a mail about standard pc bus architecture. This was quickly moderated down as "flame bait" as was another post wondering if Linus could scratch his nose without having the event posted on
--Shoeboy