OSNews

I'd argue that your initial reaction is still valid.

The diff against 2.6.17 is 950,000-some lines long. And that's typical for the 2.6. kernel. I don't know how they can call 2.6 "stable" when nearly every minor revision has nearly a million-line diff. That's a lot of changes for "stable".

and yet its done

heh, much of the code dont need much changes done to it over most smaller time periods (device drivers mostly) unless something closer to the core of the kernel changes that is important to how the other code works.

and much of those drivers are maintained by the same people, organizations and corporations that use them, they just happen to use linux as the basis for all the rest to ease the workload.

it just shows the power of cooperation i guess.

and then you trow in the source for x.org or xfree, gnome or kde (with their software packages) and things realy start to make you wonder how its all financed

AFAIK a 2.8 kernel has not been taken in consideration yet !

Edited 2006-09-20 11:13

While I agree that this Eugenia's post is a little sparse, to say the least, the one you linked to doesn't actually say much else, other than "Linus talked like a pirate."

I imagine an actual OSNews article containing only Linus's email summarising changes (and maybe mentioning pirates) would have attracted even more heated critisism for being a waste of time.

Edited 2006-09-20 12:08

Yarr! A new kernel off the port bow! Give her a broadside and prepare to be boarded.

What do you want, the 3mb changelog posted on the front page?

Other comments showed how to summarize the changes nicely or at least give helpfull links.

People... some would bitch if you gave them a new kernel.

To achieve better integration we must avoid integration. The best kinds of integration are applications that work together without being tied to each other.
Unix is about lots of small programs all working together to create what ever you need.
Integration should always be done at the user level because each user has completely different needs. By integrating at the development level you just get applications that don't fit a user's needs.

I <3 tar,gzip,ssh,grep,mail,rsync.

Linux has DBus for that. DBus is used by HAL (which help managing your hardware), which uses Udev, which itself is based on lots of improvements from the kernel.
DBus basically allows "applications that work together without being tied to each other".
It couldn't have been achieved without sysfs whih is in the kernel, and would have been less efficient if Linux hadn't the unstable API policy.

>Unix is about lots of small programs all working together to create what ever you need.

And integration is all about their developers talking to each other, not doing duplicate work and cooperating on common issues. It makes sense for some small programs to merge and for some it doesn't. It depends on many factors. Integration is done to get more features but can also bring new set of issues.

I don't believe in that "do one thing and do it well" paradigm as it doesn't work in most real world cases (nor in operatig system design). It's an oversimplification. For example it is more useful to have a grocery with both potatoes and tomatoes instead of having two selling just one thing on adjacent places. But it may be better to have a phone and a PDA instead of a bulky and ugly combo device which is neither a good phone nor a good PDA.

...but if they were selling the Potmatoes would you be happy if you just wanted the potato?

But it may be better to have a phone and a PDA instead of a bulky and ugly combo device which is neither a good phone nor a good PDA.

My Treo resents that comment

You'd better move beyond your total lack of clue and giving advice at the same time.
If you got even a little clue, you'd know that the "minor" changes you talk about allow you to have a faster system and disks even under load, to suspend without problem, to autodetect and autoconfigure devices like USB without the need to read the red tape on your device (true PnP), to have live updating of your FS (downloads), to have more Wifi adapter supported, ... a lot of thing very visible to any users. Then, there are other things visible to specific users.
What is this trend of denying title of "user" to people that are not Joe using his desktop ?
The fact that some parts of ivtv drivers are now integrated in the kernel tree will be visible to lots of MythTV users. They are not lesser users than Joe !

I would give the kernel the crown, but maybe 2 years ago, now it is the base we all feel comfortable with

A lot of people are still not comfortable with the kernel, as a lot of "unstable internal API" trollfests or "recompiling the kernel to update a driver" trollfests show us.

How many times I wished open office would be faster, and much stable, how many times I wished the browsers be as fast as in windows

Please, don't downgrade my browsers to the speed they have on Windows ! I'm always amazed at how slow they are on Windows, IE being the worst. Sometimes, I wonder if the Firefox works on Windows, being so slow.

or how many times we wish installing application would be more simple and straight forward rather than compiling in many distros

Who are "we" ? Every one of my users install apps on Linux, which they couldn't do on Windows !
"compiling in many distros" ?!! You just showed you're a troll. You couldn't help it, could you ? Or are you really that clueless ?

I wish all other parts of the OS would achieve what the kernel has achieved in short time!

Which is ?

Give also some credit to HP, IBM, Sun and others who donate hardware devices in thousands of dollar to kernel development!

You've got to be kidding. You think they don't gain a lot from that ?
This is work like everywhere else. I cringe to have to remind you that very few people on earth actually buy the hardware devices that you talk about, which are for enterprises. And so, if these companies want to sell Linux on their expensive and powerful hardware, they'd better give the Linux kernel devs the hardware necessary for that. No credit due there, as these changes for big iron make people angry more than anything.

No credit due there,

I give IBM credit for their fine developerworks articles.

"If you got even a little clue, you'd know that the "minor" changes you talk about allow you to have a faster system and disks even under load"

False.

Faster disks, then let me tell you the story of very High I/O Wait you can experience on all linux distros since kernel 2.4 till kernel 2.6.18; the story goes like this, if you just copy a huge folder like 1 GB internally on your disk your CPU no matter what AMD, Intel, X2, Dual core, HT on will reach 50% through a samba job on the system, just one, then your CPU raeches 70%, do a third job and your system is unusable at all due to 100% CPU saturation. I also confirmed this on Intel hot E6400 CPU and still no change. Now even though I dislike windows and I use it as my just file server and gaming, I admit that you could access your disk like a maniac without even getting CPU >20% unless you have compressed the volume then you CPU under the same previous tests would reach to 30%.

I guess, my friend that you lack experience, or you never even tried to benchmark linux at all. I benchmarked linux like crazy, with SPECviewperf and other small tools that is compatible with windows as well and I admit sadly that windows beats linux in performance, and gladly not stability.

Who's problem is this, is it the drivers for disks, noop, because the kernel guys confirmed its related to file system (ext3 or Reiserfs), and this is true as I have repeated again the previous tests on JFS and XFS and found that JFS beats both linux file systems while XFS beats all of the three to a point reaching MacOSX native journaled file system, but again nothing to reach windows performance (of course assuming its a fresh install and not infected, which I always do to my testing environments).

"to have more Wifi adapter supported"

Why just Wifi Adapter why not also web camera which the kernel basically supports almost none of the most common two major webcam manufacturers (logitech and Creative)

Sound support on almost all cards with synthesizers never were able to play .mid files due to some error messages of "null sound device" again never was fixed since 2.4 kernel till now 2.6.18. It would be then wise to not expect much from the kernel but rather from OEMs to give kernel modules!

I wish you stop claiming things and misleading readers, and start to backup you claims with real life benchmarks and results like I did before, and you are welcomed to repeat the previous tests and write down your experiences for us, and thanks for all.

What a load of tripe. Just for kicks, I moved 20GB off one of my disks to another in the root filesystem. My oldish CPU only hit 30% with ReiserFS, which is a cpu-intensive filesystem.

Ben Dooks:

[ARM] 3784/1: S3C2413: keelhaul config for MACH_S3C2413/MACH_SMDK2413
[ARM] 3785/1: S3C2412: Fix idle code as default uses wrong clocks
[ARM] 3793/1: S3C2412: fix barnacles in wrong serial info struct
[ARM] 3794/1: S3C24XX: do not defined set_irq_wake when no CONFIG_PM
...

It's good to know someone's fixing the barnacles in the Linux source code.

Davy Jones:

Didn't do anything, the scurvy lad. Ahoy!
Eh, I thought the Monkees were lip-synching anyway.

On a (slightly) more serious note it's somewhat refreshing to see that the Linux kernel developers have a sense of humor about what they do.

I know Microsoft definitely does, given all those videos (like the "Microsoft Redesigns the iPod" video they made as a cautionary tale for their packaging department)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857

One question I probably ought to be able to find elsewhere: Has anyone added Minix 3's MinixFS to the Linux kernel drivers yet (or will they ever)? I know Minix 3 uses a new system Linux can't read.

Hope my Realtek 888 is fixed.

here you go!

Patch from Realtek:
- Add support of ALC888 codec
- ....

I don't know if it supports Realtek ALC850?? Anyone?

Edited 2006-09-20 22:45

I couldn't wait for FC6 and compiled the damn thing :-)

It reminds me that this kernel should have a fix for a broken PATA driver for a chipset which is used on the best Core 2 Duo motherboards (ASUS, MSI), and makes, for example, Ubuntu live CD unbootable on these, unless you have a SATA CD drive of course.

I've never benchmarked CFQ with our loads versus AS. A bit late now, but I'm wondering if this will cause our shop some performance issues (initially, I'm aware I can change it back to AS).

Well, CFQ looks better than AS here -> http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/schedulers/ so presumably you will have some performance gain

Well, CFQ looks better than AS here

Excellent article! Much appreciated.