Linus Torvalds announced the release of 2.6.1-rc1, the first prepatch for the 2.6 series. He announced that 2.6.1-rc1 includes many patches that have been in the -mm patchset for a long time.
Linux 2.6.1-RC1 is Out
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…here’s the thought that soon there will be a new breed of trolls here, the “2.6 is not stable” trolls. :<
Anyway, I think it is a good thing, seeing that they immediatly address the problems that were still left.
I don’t know, but I seem to remember that 2.6 was given its stable number earlier, simply because it took so long before 2.3 became 2.4.
IMHO The first stable 2.6.x kernel.
Theres some truth to that, but 2.6.0 is without question the most stable “.0” Linux release yet. For most stable architectures and mainstream devices it works without fault. Some stuff is not yet finished, like IDE-RAID and various more obscure or non-server related drivers but for early deployment/testing its ready. For me its been more stable on my hardware then the 2.4 branch since around 2.5.65, but your milage will vary. I’d experience seemingly random lockups regardless of distro until I gave 2.5 a whirl. All such issues are gone for me. For real production use most people, as well they should, will wait but its certainly stable enough for end users, enthusiasts, or test production uses. 🙂
Note that the version indicates that this is Release Candidate. It seems that prepatches are being skipped altogether. I guess it won’t be long before 2.6.1 is out. BTW before the end of last year 2.4.23-pre3 was released too.
Everyone who uses Linux knows that 2.6.0 is not “mission-critical” stable. Its not a matter of anything in the code, its just a matter of getting the release widely tested. The “.0” kernel is a signal for everyone using Linux for non-critical tasks to install it and do stability testing. Then there are several releases to fix bugs resulting from this feedback. Since Linux supports a huge number of configurations, this is the only way to iron bugs out of the release kernel.
2.6.x will be stable when distros do their QA and release versions based on 2.6. It’ll be stable for enterprise use when IT departments start doing trials to vet it for their networks.
Linux 2.6.0 has been released as “stable” meaning that the API isn’t going to see any major changes, and most core subsystems will be left the same. It doesn’t mean “stable” as in “never crashes”. This is a very important point, and it’s what kernel developers always stress.
Additionally, Torvalds has said before that the purpose of a .0 release is to get loads and loads of testers. They try to avoid any major bugs, but everyone running critical production boxes knows that it’s best to wait until around 2.6.5 when any serious issues have been discovered and other notable bugs ironed out.
How hard is it to get 2.6 into the stock Debian Woody? Assuming you were trying to get the XFree 4.3 and all the goodies into Woody, do you have to install Woody with the 2.2 kernel and then upgrade everything afterwards, or can you ‘slipstream’ the 2.6 kernel into the install like Windows service packs?
“How hard is it to get 2.6 into the stock Debian Woody?” Out of the box ? I’d think to be very difficult, if not impossible.
But after a fresh install, compiling a 2.6 kernel is not harder than compiling any kernel on debian: make menuconfig/fakeroot make-kpkg kernel_image/fakeroot make-kpkg modules_image, and install the .deb as root with dpkg -i. Just remember to get the new modutils, or you won’t be able to load your modules.
“Just remember to get the new modutils, or you won’t be able to load your modules.”
True: you’ll need “module-init-tools” in order to use modules. You can’t apt-get that for it ain’t in Woody. You can find a backport of this package for Woody on backports.org or google.com with a search for “module-init-tools Woody”. I’m not sure about the status of this package in Sarge btw.
I have a rather strange problem with compiling a 2.6.0 kernel on my debian: when I make menuconfig, I have the following error:
“scripts/kconfig/mconf arch/linux/Kconfig
can’t find file arch/linux/Kconfig”
I don’t really understand what it is about. I am using a 3.3.1 version for gcc (the unstable debian one).
I have a rather strange problem with compiling a 2.6.0 kernel on my debian: when I make menuconfig, I have the following error:
“scripts/kconfig/mconf arch/linux/Kconfig
can’t find file arch/linux/Kconfig”
I don’t really understand what it is about. I am using a 3.3.1 version for gcc (the unstable debian one). Does someone know how handling that ?
diego@estel:~/kernel/unsta$ LC_ALL=’C’ make menuconfig
make[1]: `scripts/fixdep’ is up to date.
scripts/kconfig/mconf arch/i386/Kconfig
^^^^
looks like your scripts look for arch/linux instead of i386. “i386” is probably determined by $(ARCH) in the Makefiles. Which is determined by uname -m….perhaps this can help?
“looks like your scripts look for arch/linux instead of i386”
Indeed. As usual, just after writing my post, I found the uname -m problem: uname -m gives me i686, which doesn’t exist in the arch folder. I hacked the makefile to set the ARCH variable at hand to i386 (very ugly
).
Where is set the variable returned by uname -m ? This i686 seems odd to me.
Linux asgaard.fiane.intra 2.6.0-1.21 #1 Tue Dec 23 19:31:42 EST 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
13:39:33 up 5 days, 19:26, 5 users, load average: 0.07, 0.08, 0.09
No problems so far