Linux Archive

"When you are using SMP you might want to override the kernel’s process scheduling and bind a certain process to a specific CPU(s). CPU affinity is nothing but a scheduler property that “bonds” a process to a given set of CPUs on the SMP system. With the help of Linux scheduler utilities you can set up processor affinity for a certain task or process." On a related note, here's a short guide on kernel compilation.

Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel, is worried that an increasing number of defects are appearing in the 2.6 kernel and is considering drastic action to resolve it. "I believe the 2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier. It seems we're adding bugs at a higher rate than we're fixing them," Morton said, in a talk at the LinuxTag conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Friday.

"Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails to run. In such situations after I have tried every trick in the book like searching on the net and posting questions to Linux forums, and still failed to resolve the problem, I turn to the last resort which is trace the output of the misbehaving program. Tracing the output of a program throws up a lot of data which is not usually available when the program is run normally. And in many instances, sifting through this volume of data has proved fruitful in pin pointing the cause of error."

The day when WiFi cards 'just work' under Linux may be fast approaching. WiFi software stack specialist Devicescape has released its 'Advanced Datapath' 802.11 driver stack to the open source community under the GPL, and the Linux kernel developer community appears to be working to adapt it for mainline inclusion.

"This is the first part of a series of articles regarding Linux Kernel Modules. In this series we will see some examples of module programming and some techniques and general rules that we must keep in mind when we work in kernel mode. This is not an in-depth series of articles, but and introduction for those people who want to know more about kernel internals. A background in C programming will be helpful."

"This research report by a third-year graduate student examines the growing use of desktop Linux among governments in the US and globally. Drawing on published research and comments from industry analysts, the author hypothesizes that desktop Linux may be nearing a tipping point within government settings, after which adoption can be expected to accelerate."

"The Free Standards Group will unveil Linux Standard Base 3.1, the first LSB version to include explicit Linux desktop application support, April 25 at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego. The standard has already been endorsed by Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell, along with other major Linux players such as AMD, Asianux, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Mandriva, RealNetworks, Red Flag, and Turbolinux, according to the FSG."

"Why tune my system? This is probably the first thing you want to know. When a distribution is packaged and delivered to clients, it is designed to be fully compatible with most of the computers available in the market. This is a very heterogeneous set of hardware (hard disks, video cards, network cards, etc.). So distribution vendors like Red Hat, SuSe, Mandriva and the rest of them choose some conservative configuration options to assure a successful installation. For instance, probably you have a very advanced hard disk with some special features that are not being used due to standard configuration settings. To summarize: your Linux distribution goes well... But it can go even better!"

"In this article, we’ll look at the internals of VFS file system and how it functions. VFS came into picture when BSD implemented VFS for NFS with an aim of dispatching or getting rid of different file systems. Before delving further in the topic, let’s define the necessary terms we need to know before understanding the concept."

Efforts to bring glitzy new graphics to Linux are fueling an old conflict: Does proprietary software belong in open-source Linux? The issue involves software modules called drivers, which plug into the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system. Drivers let software communicate with hardware such as network adapters, hard drives and video cards.

"US software maker Oracle is considering launching a version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two firms dominating the technology, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday. As part of a recent study of the open-source software market, Ellison told the newspaper, Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux."

"Many Windows users are familiar with different modes of execution of their operating system: safe mode, command prompt only, safe mode with network support and other such options that are presented during the boot-up process. Similarly, Linux has different modes of executing as well, which are known as runlevels. But unlike Windows, we can change runlevels on a fly. Runlevels control services started by the initialization process. The number of runlevels and services started on those runlevels varies with Linux distributions. Information about the runlevels of a particular distribution is listed in file /etc/inittab."

"There are plenty Linux reviews, though almost none of them are about Linux. You see, Linux is only a kernel, but most Linux reviews are about KDE, SuSE, the desktop and so on. Those reviews aren't about Linux, strictly speaking. In contrary, this review is about Linux, made for the people who normally don't configure and compile their own kernel."

TuxMachines reviews the SuperGamer-1 DVD, a live-DVD based on PCLinuxOS, optimised for gaming (incl. 3D drivers), and concludes: "The Supergamer-1 DVD performed very well. I had no stability issues and lag was very minimal. Only after long periods of inactivity or loading a new gaming level did I experience delays while the DVD was spun and accessed. Hardware detection was spot-on with, just to name a few, the net connection, graphics, and sound automagically enabled. It was a completely enjoyable experience and I can't find anything to complain about."