Linux 2.6.27 Out 452
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
Linux 2.6.27 is out, OpenBSD 4.4 is in!
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Interesting)
sad part is i just pre-ordered the openbsd 4.4 cd set... hah. im not sure if i should be proud or ashamed.
then again, i sometimes think im the last of the right-os-for-the-job heretics... openbsd on my firewall. solaris (with zfs) on my fileserver... mac os x on my main desktop... (i dabble in photoshop and video.. mostly failed fark contests. ha) and windows vista on my macbook pro (along side of os x of course)... because i do a lot of autocad/solidworks stuff on the side. my webserver runs gentoo..
i guess you could call me a glutton for punishment.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
then again, i sometimes think im the last of the right-os-for-the-job heretics... openbsd on my firewall. solaris (with zfs) on my fileserver... mac os x on my main desktop... (i dabble in photoshop and video.. mostly failed fark contests. ha) and windows vista on my macbook pro (along side of os x of course)... because i do a lot of autocad/solidworks stuff on the side. my webserver runs gentoo..
i guess you could call me a glutton for punishment.
I am very impressed, your defenses on why you use what you do for your computing needs have foiled my plan to call you a fanboy/newb. It is like you already saw the attacks coming, and preemptively shot them down. You sir, have won three internets.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
"Masturbating monkey" is what comes to mind.
Which, coincidentally, is the name of an upcoming Ubuntu release.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
I've got some, what do you want moderated?
Oh, wait...
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
Not to worry, I can help!
No, wait...crap.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
Mod parent up!
If nothing else, it would just totally blow the AC's mind when he cruised by here. "WTF? Mod points?"
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
One of these days, I'm going to chop you into little pieces.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
One of these days, Coward -POW, right in the kisser!
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Informative)
For those moderators who didn't get it and modded him Troll: it's the (only) line from the Pink Floyd song "One of these Days".
By the way, it's "cut", not "chop": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_These_Days [wikipedia.org]
Oh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, why not? It's not like slashdot could get any less useful on April Fools anyway, where other sites run one story slashdot is all wacky all day long.
MOD GP DOWN (Score:3, Funny)
Hell I can't figure out why it could be seen as insightful.
Re:Linux 2.6.27 Out (Score:5, Funny)
No, that would be Sun Microsystems.
Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.
http://release.debian.org/emails/release-update-200808 [debian.org]
Although, I guess they made the decision for 2.6.26 before they realised that a September release would be an impossible target.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Download and build your own kernel..
Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I looked about 9 months ago there were well over 3000 build options for the 2.6 kernel. Thats probably gone up a lot. I used to build my own kernels , anything up to 2.4 was do-able. But 2.6 is so complex with so many options which frankly mean nothing to me , that you would end up with a right dogs dinner thats far worse than anything the distributions could produce and you'll probably find you missed out some important functionality and/or dependency for something to work correctly and have to start again.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Informative)
And you really need to do this once. After that for each new version, you just do "make oldconfig" against the old
Changed hardware? New PC? Just reconfigure the "Drivers" section in a few minutes and you're golden. That's assuming of course you stripped down everything you don't need - if you left it in, you don't evenhave to do as much, it will just work.
BTW, if you're into tinkering, go all the way and try Gentoo. That project is alive and kicking, regardless of what the media have been saying recently.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Funny)
Good luck with that.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of builing your own is to get a lean efficient kernel, not one that has everything including the sink bundled in plus hundreds of modules to build after.
You know, I spent most of a decade building "lean efficient kernels" a ruthlessly stripping them down to their minimal components.
Then I started benchmarking the results.
Now I just run with whatever Ubuntu ships with, knowing that it's 99% as "lean and efficient" as my best efforts and I automatically get new versions without screwing around with "make oldconfig".
If you want to build your own kernel for the sake of building your own kernel, great! It's fun and instructional. Just don't delude yourself into thinking it makes a measurable difference outside some very specific cases (like targeting an embedded system).
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because it's impossible to do on Windows and Mac. You need to wait until the next version of the entire operating system comes out, and then pay for that.
So yes, please switch so you don't even have the option of doing what a Linux user mentions casually in conversation. Less is better, right?
(WTF?)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
To each their own. However, I always preferred having the driver just be there when I need it. I always found it annoying, under Windows, to have to hunt down drivers. Especially when you have a hundred similar devices that have the same binary driver blob (same chipset) but require a hundred different INF files because every company that assembles a board insists on having a unique driver download. Then you can throw in driver signing that makes life even more difficult.
Linux drivers are much easier to deal with.
Re-buying peripherals (Score:4, Informative)
Linux drivers are much easier to deal with.
Unless you're switching to GNU/Linux and don't want to have to buy all-new peripherals. To pick a random example from my collection of incompatible hardware, Microtek isn't helping the SANE project make drivers for its ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner.
Re:Re-buying peripherals (Score:5, Informative)
To pick a random example from my collection of incompatible hardware, Microtek isn't helping the SANE project make drivers for its ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner.
That's OK. It looks like they're doing you a favor [amazon.com]. If it makes you feel any better, they don't support Vista either [microtek.com].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's where driverpacks [driverpacks.net] and perhaps nlite [nliteos.com] projects come in handy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah its incredibly difficult.
falcon ~ # emerge linux-uvc -pv
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild N ] media-video/linux-uvc-0.1.0_pre250 39 kB
Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 39 kB
Hang on a sec.....
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah ok not a good idea to talk about things that you dont know about.
On Gentoo it uses the kernel in /usr/src/linux, since your expected to roll your own kernel anyway.
It is exactly that simple to install the driver - one command - even though its a power user's distro.
On the user friendly distros like Ubuntu it will install the binary blob version for your kernel just like Windows but without the cd.
They only have a couple of kernel versions just as Windows only has XP, Vista, etc... drivers.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Funny)
So? Download and build your own kernel..
Or get Windows or Mac and never have to hear that.
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Download and build your own kernel..
Or get Windows or Mac and never have to hear that.
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
I bet he bought his TV and refrigerator preassembled too.
(don't flame me bro, I also use Linux all the time, but you asked for it ;-))
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with wanting things to 'work' sometimes. Some people have better things to do in the evening than trying to get working. Especially when they spend their day fixing other people's problems.
Sometimes it's fun to mess about with stuff like that sure, but sometimes you just want to know that your hardware to work with your OS. That's part of the reason that I use OSX at the moment.
Linux is a lot better these days than 5 years ago obviously: wireless support, and now improved webcam support. Those were 2 of my major issues last time I tried to move to Linux as my primary OS. I used Skype for videocalling a lot back then. The whole thing is a virtuous cycle - better default support means more users, means more OSS developers, third party application and driver support, and so on.. I'm looking forward to the day I can use Linux to play the latest games or use the latest devices as soon as they are released, rather than having to wait a couple of years for WINE or driver support to catch up enough.
I out source (Score:5, Funny)
I bet you buy your LEGO preassembled too.
I actually pay a LCSE(Lego Certified Systems Engineer) $150 per hour to assemble mine for me, its the only way to be sure.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Informative)
It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.
Debian never paid much attention to desktop features, may I suggest Ubuntu 8.10 [ubuntu.com]?
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Funny)
may I suggest Ubuntu 8.10 [ubuntu.com]?
You have my permission.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Funny)
No, he's only filed a TPS report. He also missed that memo we all got.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Funny)
He got the memo, he just forgot.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Informative)
I believe you have my stapler?
No, this one isn't red.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF are you smoking? I've been running Debian on the desktop for years before Ubuntu ever existed.
So did I, as in I used to. Just because you're able to install the packages, doesn't make it any less true. I waited for a long time for basic niceties like a GUI installer, a nice splash screen when I didn't feel like reading the boot log and a million other smaller and bigger things that never came. And less than 18+ months release cycles, as testing could and did sometimes break, while stable was stuck in the stone age. I'm sorry but I have replaced Debian with something better, and I think you would see it too if you knew what you were missing.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry but I have replaced Debian with something better, and I think you would see it too if you knew what you were missing.
s/better/more appropriate
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think he is referring to the lack of polish that Ubuntu has.
s/Ubuntu/Debian/g
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:4, Funny)
s/Ubuntu/Debian/g
gives
I think he is referring to the lack of polish that Debian has. I find Debian's default Gnome desktop atrocious. I prefer their KDE or their base install. Debian, on the other hand, does a very good job with Gnome while Kubuntu lags.
I think you meant s/Ubuntu/Debian/ , only first occurence replaced, not all. Using v to only select
I think he is referring to the lack of polish that Ubuntu has.
is cheating, no real hacker uses vim-specific features ;)
Re:Not in upcoming Debian (Score:5, Funny)
Although, I guess they [Debian] made the decision for 2.6.26 before they realised that a September release would be an impossible target.
Yeah. Nobody could have predicted that a Debian release would be late.
This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
In only 3 months, all of this code has been completed and reviewed by multiple developers. This happens *every* three months. The pace at which the Linux kernel is moving and yet still maintaining quality is incredible. It is clearly the case that the Linux kernel has hit a new kind of critical mass and is now a form of software development that has never been seen before. The sheer number of people involved changes what is possible. If you suggested that every single change to the codebase be reviewed by multiple developers in a traditional proprietary software development house you would be, rightly, laughed at. There simply isn't the resources.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I work, it's called "pair programming".
(If two programmers is enough to count as "multiple". Also, bug fixes are supposed to get an additional diff check.)
If you do it right, you not only save time by not-writing bugs you don't have to fix later, but you can also avoid wasting all sorts of time (writing the feature wrong, going down paths that could lead to disaster, or spinning your wheels and banging your head when you can't figure out something stupid like feeding rrdtool deltas when it expects raw counters...), and you can bring new developers up to speed on a code base very very quickly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
that's a pretty interesting development technique. i'd never heard of it so i had to look it up [wikipedia.org] on wikipedia.
at first i'd assumed this was simply assigning a two person team for each development task, but turns out it's a much more involved methodology involving close cooperation and meticulous division of labor, with all duties being split between two separate roles of the driver and the observer/navigator.
the driver is the person coding, and the observer/navigator is responsible for reviewing the driver's
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Funny)
But you can only waste time on Slashdot if you *both* agree to cover for each other. This is an unacceptable solution.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Informative)
In only 3 months, all of this code has been completed and reviewed by multiple developers. This happens *every* three months. ... It is clearly the case that the Linux kernel has hit a new kind of critical mass and is now a form of software development that has never been seen before.
Intel HDA audio still has static noise in the left channel since at least 2.6.20 kernel (probably before). This is a known problem and the solution is 'try random settings of some undocumented (outside the kernel source code) module parameters and hope it maybe works'.
This is on Dell hardware. model=dell3stack, position_fix=1(?). This hardware works perfectly under Windows, with no tweaking whatsoever. It worked under older linux kernels, which means they probably broke something.
The linux kernel is good, but just having a bunch of people look at the code means nothing unless they are actually finding and fixing problems people care about.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have this hardware? Any chance you could narrow down the versions it works on and the versions it doesn't?
This is a general problem with kernel development.. if you don't have the hardware, it's a bitch to test. Please do contribute your findings.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have this hardware? Any chance you could narrow down the versions it works on and the versions it doesn't?
Same hardware as this guy:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/266927 [launchpad.net]
System is at work... I would test except there are not any easy options for doing so there. Also, I realize that you can't be expected to fix hardware problems where you don't have the hardware... in fact I've personally seen code fail on one system and run perfectly on the exact same spec hardware sitting right next to it, with exactly the same software (ghosted).
Mostly I'm just pointing out that there are longstanding problems in linux... the original fanboy post was way over the top.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you bother reading the bug report:
...it seems linked to the HDA Intel chipset, although I do not have this problem in Fedora or PCLinuxOS."
Its a ubuntu problem not a kernel problem, i would have guessed it was pulseaudio/alsa problem and not a kernel based problem too.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was at Microsoft, that's exactly how it worked. All code had to be reviewed and approved by the feature owner and the PM. There was also a team that reviewed any changes to the common libraries, in addition to the PM.
In addition, to actually get code checked in, it had to pass FxCop (code standards verification tool), not break the build, and not break any of the build verification tests (BVTs).
Mind you, I worked in the test team. Developers have to go through all of the same steps, and then their code also gets tested by the test team.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked at VMware we had to get code reviews for every checkin. Code reviews are literally the only thing that has been shown to consistently improve quality. Of course, it's not just code reviews.. it's also attitude. If you're accepting of stuff being broken because it is "in development" then that's what you'll get. On the other hand, if you have a tight knit small team working on the same stuff then you can get similar quality by just maintaining pace and having lots of communication through the code.. but that doesn't scale.. this does.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Informative)
Well, yes and no. The old LK dev model had unstable releases where bugs were expected. Now every release is stable, and bugs are truly anomalies.
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Insightful)
Now every release is stable, and bugs are truly anomalies.
Or so the theory goes. Some of the early 2.6 releases were a bit dubious and I had my doubts when they announced there'd no longer be a development kernel but it seems to have settled in nicely now, don't know if it's developers making better code before including it in the kernel, Linus being stricter, closer cooperation wtih distros or more testing feedback but all the later ones have been quite good from what I understand. At any rate, the kernel isn't the most exciting part for me as it seems to have all the parts to run a nice desktop already - it's userspace drivers, X+extensions, Compiz and Gnome/KDE that make up most of my improvement wishlist...
Re:This is a huge amount of work (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to work quite well, and now you no longer have to meddle with dark arts and unsupported known-broken dev kernels to get recent hardware working. Win win all around IMO.
No more backporting/sideporting/up/down/leftporting to get current hardware code into current kernels, just all the dev community working on one codebase. Makes progress a lot more straightforward and apparently better/cleaner/less buggy.
AR5008 (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent! Macbook & Pro users can finally have wifi support.
Re:AR5008 (Score:5, Informative)
Change naming scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Change naming scheme (Score:5, Funny)
'pure' flash devices (Score:5, Interesting)
Before you get all excited about running UBIFS on your USB drive, take note: UBI is not for consumer flash media [infradead.org]. These devices already incorporate hardware to hide their flash nature so they look like a plain old block device to your OS. UBI is for pure flash devices that directly expose the quirks and distinct characteristics of the underlying media.
So what kind of flash hardware is this for? Embedded devices, apparently. But maybe as flash storage becomes more common, more devices will support raw access?
Re:'pure' flash devices (Score:5, Insightful)
So what kind of flash hardware is this for? Embedded devices, apparently. But maybe as flash storage becomes more common, more devices will support raw access?
Olympus' xD card format essentially specifies a direct connection between the NAND flash chips and its external interface.
It's weird and proprietary, yes. However, it's already being done, and there are arguments to be had for minimizing the amount of circuitry on the memory card itself. Interacting directly with Flash isn't as uncommon as you might think it, and can be of huge benefits for portable/embedded devices that require low power consumption.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about SD cards? They appear to be rather low on circuitry.
Re:'pure' flash devices (Score:4, Interesting)
How about SD cards? They appear to be rather low on circuitry.
No, SD cards still have an on-board microcontroller. If you take the lid off, there are usually two chips in there: one's the flash itself, the other's the microcontroller.
(SD cards are awesome if you're a homebrewer. They speak a high-level protocol over a very simple four-wire serial interface. It clocks down far enough that it's possible to hook one up to, say, a C64 or Spectrum by just connecting it to some spare I/O pins and wiggling them manually. You can then read and write 512 byte sectors by sending the appropriate command, and you don't have to worry about any of that horrible flash stuff.)
Re:'pure' flash devices (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems quite likely that OLPC will largely replace jffs2 with UBI [gmane.org] for the internal nand on the XO. Good news. Maybe this will apply to the Asus eee as and other solid-state drives as well.
Re:'pure' flash devices (Score:5, Informative)
Naturally upcoming Maemo (Nokia Internet Tablet) releases will feature ubifs, since much of the work on it has been done by Maemo Software kernel team.
Embedded devices for sure (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, embedded devices definitely. It'll be awfully nice to see simple flash chips soldered onto a board rather than someone bolting an SD or compact flash socket onto them just so you can have a boot device.
Fragile, more expensive, and adds another physical item that can break. And not only that, but you can drop about 20-30 dollars worth of non-essential hardware from your design and still be on target. If you do any embedded work you know how big 20 dollars worth of hardware savings is. This new driver is *huge*.
ACPI (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ACPI (Score:5, Interesting)
> Any chance that this will fix some of the ACPI problems with Linux?
Just to be clear, ACPI problems are motherboard problems, not Linux problems.
If the ACPI function of your motherboard is correct and compliant with the ACPI specification, Linux will work just fine.
Part of the motherboard ACPI problem is that Windows expects, and uses, some functions within ACPI that are not compliant with the ACPI specification ... you know the drill: embrace, extend, obscure, try to screw the opposition ...
Fortunately with ACPI we have not quite yet got to the "extinguish" phase.
Re:ACPI (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the motherboard ACPI problem is that Windows expects, and uses, some functions within ACPI that are not compliant with the ACPI specification ... you know the drill: embrace, extend, obscure, try to screw the opposition
Yet Windows works around more 'crap' ACPI implementations than it 'takes advantage of' non-compliant specifications.
This is really a goofy argument, as there is very little mainboard ACPI implementations that are Windows specific, let alone off spec to be Windows specific.
Instead you find crap Motherboards that still have exceptions for OS/2 RAM usage, non-Windows features like VGA palette crawling, cobbled Sx states, and horrid USB support for 'legacy' OS methods that Windows hasn't used in 10 years. (Yes we know these are not all ACPI specific)
I'm sure it is fun to blame windows for ACPI sucking and Linux's support of ACPI sucking.
The bottom line is, ACPI tends to suck, and Linux doesn't have the development resources to make it work in all circumstances, even though it does a pretty good job. Apple has trouble with their hardware, yet have few model, moved to EFI and still have some of the same inconsistent behavior Linux and Windows users encounter or messed up combinations of hardware.
As for ACPI, MS tried to push the industry on ACPI and move past it back in the 90s, and it was hobbists that were using non-Windows OSes like Linux that screamed and stopped EFI type suggestions from taking hold. MS shoved for legacy free BIOS concepts, and there is some hardware even out there that used a generic proprietary EFI type of legacy free BIOS system, go look at Toshiba laptops from 2002 that required OS level drivers, as there was no traditional BIOS. They also didn't have legacy ISA or older device support and could boot WindowsXP in less than 10secs on some machines, and return from a full hibernate in under 2 secs because of no BIOS time delay.
Just to blow your argument to the side, crap like this link would not exist if Windows did have more control over ACPI compliance as you suggest. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831691 [microsoft.com]
Specifications and variations in the specification is an area that 'logic' would dictate that the OSS model would be supreme; however, in reality, the complexity and diversity of the implementations favors larger production OSes like Windows where exceptions have to be implemented, and a large vendor like Microsoft can force Motherboard companies to clean up their crappy implementations or work around them, as Windows often does.
One of the biggest bitches users had with Vista and hibernation and Standby were because of Vista adhereing to the specifications and trying to force vendors to do the same, so that S1,S2,S3 etc were consistent. Instead MS had to write a bunch of 'exception' code for motherboards and even up until SP1 was still adding code to deal with crappy motherboard implementations to get the hibernation and standby back in line so that hybrid sleep could work consistently.
Microsoft doesn't have control over the hardware markets like people assume they do, and never really have. If they did, they would not have had to resort to proprietary hardware for the XBox 360, as some of the hardware specifications in the console are things MS shoved for in the PC market years before. Just an example would be unified shaders, and this didn't finally get shoved to PC users until Vista's DX10 required them, even though the benefits of a more agnostic GPU shader system was known years and years ago.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's a lot harder to do. Instead of following a spec, you now have to reverse engineer Windows and replicate its exact functionality, bug for bug.
Anyone know what's up with AR5007? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a relaxing week-end with your wife and children.
Re:Thank you Linus. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Insightful)
Rejecting patches is a lot of work, especially given how many he has to reject.
Unless you're fine with people lobbing whatever they want into your kernel? :)
Re:Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Thank you Linus. (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you joke, but on average he merges four code bases (patches) per day. That is not trivial by any measure.
Thanks for the hard work....but...my wifi.... (Score:3, Interesting)
First I would just like to say thank-you to everybody that develops the Linux kernel, without it I would have been stuck with the "other" OS that everybody loves to hate!
Linux (through various distros) has been my OS of choice for about 9 years now, has enriched my IT life and quite frankly made IT actually interesting again.
But one thing has been bothering me!
I recently upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 8.04 then hit a problem - my wifi network connection became unusable (very weak signal and slooowwww internet access). I tried pretty much most fixes but it still wasn't working right (slightly better wifi signal but then would randomally stop altogether). If I booted into my "production" partition (Ubuntu 7.10) everything was fine and the "balance of the force" was restored. I had a spare partition on the hard drive and installed Fedora 9(? It may have been 10 - can't remember). This also exhibited "dodgy wifi behaviour". Of course, it was a kernel(2.6.22) driver problem and I need to find the time to download the latest drivers and compile. Thankfully I can do this but it still irritating!
I have gone back to Ubuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.14?) and it's been fine since.
My wifi hardware is based on the rt2500 chipset series and is quite common on most laptops and until recently were reliable. As far as I remember the drivers were being rewritten for the kernel - which is fine but if it breaks hardware (which until that time had been reliable)
then people should have been made aware of this or even work with the distos for a interm fix.
At least include the compiled legacy drivers with the distro and not force people to download them from the internet and recompile.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Stability version? (Score:4, Interesting)
When is the next stability-focused version (like 2.6.16) due out?
Intel e1000e bug fixed? (Score:4, Interesting)
This [lwn.net] bug could've been a showstopper. It essentially ruined your intel e1000e ethernet card, by overwriting the firmware. They've not patched it, according to LWN:
What does that mean? Obviously, it should not ruin your ethernet card anymore, but will e1000e work very well with this kernel? Or what?
Since this is a pretty high-profile bug it's strange it ain't mentioned in the summary. E1000e is a very popular gigabit ethernet chip from Intel, and actual hardware corruption is serious and (luckily) rare.
Re:Intel e1000e bug fixed? (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody has figured out the bug. The patch is so that the bug (whatever it is) cannot destroy the card. It does this by setting the hardware so it ignores any attempt to overwrite it.
This should be pretty obvious from the comment you quoted.
As far as I can tell, the hardware "works". If that card did not work then probably people would not notice this bug, because they would not see the hardware fail! In fact it is strongly suspected the bug is not in the driver but in some other part of Linux.
Re:Barely on v.2.6.27? Sheesh, Windows way past th (Score:5, Funny)
what number is Vista?
666
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:4, Insightful)
You should probably learn the difference between a root kit and a virus before you post to Slashdot in the future.
A fair number of people here actually have a clue, and thus do know the difference.
Might I recommend digg [digg.com] so that - in context - you sound like you have a clue?
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Informative)
SYSTEM and Local System are basically one and the same, and are almost perfectly synonymous with root. Network Service would be the equivalent of the "nobody" user - i.e. an account that you can use to run low-privilege services. Administrator would be the same as a user with administrative privileges in Linux (perhaps someone in the sudoers list). The trouble, of course, was that, until Vista/2008 came along, it was trivially easy for an Administrator to escalate to SYSTEM - you just had to run a scheduled job in interactive mode (think of a cron job with no password required) and you'd not only have root access, you'd also have access to the current user's console. For an administrator, this came in handy - of course, what was handy and convenient for an administrator was just as handy and convenient for someone else.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
As an arrogant asshole, you need to know you are one of the core reasons why Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance by the masses because you're too good to stoop to a "newbie's" level.
That being said...nah, you're still an arrogant asshole.
Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you did it in a bad way. Let's see how to explain this...
Every Linux user was a Linux newbie once. Being new to Linux does not make someone a bad person, nor does being confused by piles of jargon or the 20 different version numbers you have to face to understand the OS.
What you're doing is like going into a preschool and yelling, "Call that writing? You're such a n00b!" and then slapping the kids. It's not pleasant, necessary or acceptable, not even on the internet.
Besides, I'm not even sure the poster was even wrong, he may have just been using a weird terminology (Ubuntu 2.6.27 for the version of Ubuntu to use the 2.6.27 kernel).
In essence, you've not broken taboo, you've just been arrogant and uncivil. I suggest you break both habits forthwith.
Re:Current Limiting? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Current Limiting? (Score:4, Informative)
Surely a lot of that is up to the compiler. In fact everything you mention there is likely to be a compiler decision unless you code stuff in assembly (which means you are already being fairly processor specific).
Math Coproc: Replace it with a (much slower and longer) integer based floating point algorithm.
MMX/SSE: You just have to do lots of operations, rather than in one fell swoop.
The big one is having a MMU, which has been there on x86 architectures since the 386, and on pretty much any other processor outside of the embedded arena. For those systems you have uClinux, which has a 2.6 kernel release.
I've used some of the processors available on opencores (some of which are written from scratch and are quite different from existing processors) but many of those have had linux kernels ported to them.
Having the source available makes a huge amount of stuff possible. You could probably compile for a Turing machine if you were sadistic enough.
Re:Huh??? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Huh??? (Score:5, Funny)
That is will been destroyed in the time war. So nothing is stopped him from about to post that.
Re:Huh??? (Score:4, Funny)
Dr. Dan Streetmentioner would like to interview you for a book on tense formations which he wioll haven been writing.
Re:Huh??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty old now, and was crappy at the time. You really should look at upgrading to OSX. The discussion at hand is about Linux kernels though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some of these features are genuinely interesting, though. For example:
OMFS stands for "Sonicblue Optimized MPEG File System support". It is the proprietary file system used by the Rio Karma music player and ReplayTV DVR.
In other words, it means I can open up certain embedded devices -- particularly that DVR -- and pull files off the hard drive. I suppose the OS X answer is that I should've gotten an AppleTV instead?
In this release, Ext4 is adding one of its most important planned features: Delayed allocation, also called "Allocate-on-flush". It doesn't changes the disk format in any way, but it improves the performance in a wide range of workloads.
Only way OS X is getting this is if it's an undocumented feature in HFS (unlikely), or if they port ZFS.
Kexec jump: kexec/kdump based hibernation
Reading through this, it looks like it's really nothing new, just slightly more flexible than before.
But what we had before allowed quite a