kernel news

Partnering up for a showdown? Red Hat Summit 2008

This post was contributed jointly by SearchEnterpriseLinux editors Lauren S. Horwitz and Caroline Hunter

As the VAR Guy noted in a recent blog post on the upcoming Red Hat Summit, Red Hat has some gumption. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has crossed the Mason-Dixon line to hold its annual event in Boston, the territory of its rival, Waltham, Mass-based Novell: What chutzpah!

Not to be outshined, Novell has made its presence known, posting some conspicuous advertising in the Hynes Convention Center, the location for this year’s Red Hat Summit, the VAR Guy reported.

But whether Red Hat’s choice of venue is a real shot across the bow or not, there’s little doubt that that over the past several years, the Red Hat/Novell rivalry has gotten pretty heated. One could date the boiling tensions to 2006, when Novell signed an agreement with Microsoft to share product patents. In 2007, the two companies agreed to work toward interoperability and have even dedicated a lab to that purpose.

By joining forces, Microsoft and Novell aim to gain an even stronger foothold in the open source market, though some data indicates that both the Red Hat and Ubuntu distributions have made strides against Novell SUSE. A new survey on open source adoption may support these findings.

The VAR Guy also noted Cisco’s expected prominence at the Summit and wondered whether it might signal an upcoming Cisco/Red Hat partnership, much like Microsoft’s with Novell. Or maybe Cisco’s “cozying up,” as the VAR Guy characterized it, is more a case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Consider this user comment in response to the Var Guy’s musings:

“Cisco now views Microsoft as its #1 threat in unified communications and other areas,” the user wrote. “I think they are just solidly placing themselves on the other side to be honest. They see a cost/competitive advantage and want to help set the ‘other’ standard.”

Stay tuned from the frontlines for more Red Hat Summit coverage.

Ubuntu version 8.04 will feature 2.6.24 kernel

Ubuntu server version 8.04 (which is currently available in alpha 4, released on February 2 as Hardy Heron) will feautre the 2.6.24 Linux kernel. This will be the first of the major enterprise Linux distributions to be released with the new kernel. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is at 2.6.18 with RHEL version 5.1. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is at kernel 2.6.16.12 for Novell SLE 10.

Canonical Ltd. has confirmed they will support version 8 of Ubuntu upon its scheduled April release, with the new kernel.

Linux 2.6.23

Usually I put on a little party hat and blow up some balloons for days like these, but I missed my alarm this morning and things got a little hectic in the ol’ apartment, or Linux Launch Pad, as I like ot call it.

Onwards and upwards to the news: Linux kernel version 2.6.23 is live and ready for your perusing pleasure.

LKLM:

Finally.

Yeah, it got delayed, not because of any huge issues, but because of various bugfixes trickling in and causing me to reset my “release clock” all the time. But it’s out there now, and hopefully better for the wait. Not a whole lot of changes since -rc9, although there’s a few updates to mips, sparc64 and blackfin in there. Ignoring those arch updates, there’s basically a number of mostly one-liners (mostly in drivers, but there’s some networking fixes and soem VFS/VM fixes there too).

Shortlog and diffstat appended (both relative to -rc9, of course - the full log from 2.6.22 is on kernel.org as usual).

I want this to be what people look at for a few days, but expect the x86 merge to go ahead after that. So far, all indications are still that it’s going to be all smooth sailing, but hey, those indicators seem to always say that, and only after the fact do people notice any problems.

My my, seems like Linus is a little peeved this morning too. I wonder if he missed his alarm? I bet it’s a penguin. No, a real one.

Linux kernel newbies has a nice summary up today about what’s new in this release (note, it’s been Dugg, so this is a Google cache link):

2.6.23 includes the new, better, fairer CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest ‘Linux-on-Linux’ paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, make SLUB the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the ‘lumpy’ reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.

Linux 2.6.23-rc9 and x86 merge incoming

Linus Torvalds provides us with an update on the Linux kernel today, as well as a heads-up about incoming x86 merge news set to drop fairly soon.

LKML:

I said I was hoping that -rc8 was the last -rc, and I hate doing this, but we’ve had more changes since -rc8 than we had in -rc8. And while most of them are pretty trivial, I really couldn’t face doing a 2.6.23 release and take the risk of some really stupid brown-paper-bag thing.

So there’s a final -rc out there, and right now my plan is to make this series really short, and release 2.6.23 in a few days. So please do give it a last good testing, and holler about any issues you find!

This is also a good time to warn about the fact that we’re doing the x86 merge very soon (as in the next day or two) after 2.6.23 is out, so if you have pending patches for the next series that touch arch/i386 or x86-64, you should get in touch with Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar, who are the keepers of the merge scripts, and will help you prepare..

Doing it as early as possible in the 2.6.24-rc4 series (basically I’ll do it first thing) will mean that we’ll have the maximum amount of time to sort out any issues, and the thing is, Thomas and Ingo already have a tree ready to go, so people can check their work against that, and don’t need to think that they have to do any fixups after it his *my* tree. It would be much better if everybody was just ready for it, and not taken by surprise.

Sounds like the kernel fellas have some work to do this week.

Linux 2.6.23-rc5 in the wild

As is often the case, with a new month comes new, exiting ideas from the Linux kernel community. Today, I present to you with much admiration and bombastic prose, Linux 2.6.23-rc5.

Now humbled, we can examine the details of this release candidate:

I’m making ready to leave for the kernel summit (as are probably a lot of other core kernel people), and as part of that, there’s a 2.6.23-rc5 out there now.

Hopefully we’ve addressed most regressions, so please do give it a good testing.

The shortlog and diffstat are appended: the diffstat is uglified by some powerpc defconfig updates, but otherwise it all looks pretty nice and small. The shortlog is fairly informative if you care about the details of what changed, but it does end up boiling down to “fixing a number of generally pretty small issues”. Mostly in drivers and SCTP.

So have fun, give it a go, and expect a quiet week next week. — Linus

Kernel summits and uglified diffsat’s? Truly, this fine September could not get any more bright.

Linux 2.6.23-rc4 — come and get it!

RC can mean many things to many people. Some think of the olden days of RC Cola; its blue and red cans glistening in the summer sun, waiting to be enjoyed at a ball game or picnic with friends. Others think of remote control cars feverishly jockeying for position on a homemade backyard race track.

On the Enterprise Linux Log, we think of release candidates and the Linux kernel. It’s what we do. It’s what we enjoy. It’s life, Linus Torvalds style, all the time.

Ok, I lost it, and let two weeks pass between -rc releases. My bad.

As a result, -rc4 is a bit bigger than it would/should have been, but hopefully it’s all good, and we’ve fixed most regressions. There’s some arch updates (MIPS, power, sparc64, s390) and an ACPI update, but the rest of it is mainly lots of small fixes (mostly to various random drivers). With some scheduler and networking noise.

I think the shortlog is _just_ too big to be posted on the kernel mailing list, but since it can mostly be described with the one word “boring”, it’s not a huge loss. As usual, just do

git shortlog v2.6.23-rc3..v2.6.23-rc4

If you have the git trees to get the all the details on extraneous semicolons, missed or duplicate include files, kzalloc conversions, new PCI ID’s etc etc.

Linus

Truly, a great day to be alive. Anyone thirsty?

Linux kernel 2.6.22.3 is stable!

Oooo-weee! I just love myself some stable kernel versions early in the morning!

Delicious.

Linux 2.6.22.2

The latest Linux kernel release is out and about today. Hold onto your hats!

We (the -stable team) are announcing the release of the 2.6.22.2 kernel.
This release has a lot of bugfixes and some security updates so all
users of the 2.6.22 series should update to it.

I’ll also be replying to this message with a copy of the patch between
2.6.22.1 and 2.6.22.2

The updated 2.6.22.y git tree can be found at:
 git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kerne…
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
 http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/gi…….

thanks,

greg k-h

Bug fixes and security seem to be the words of the day.

Linux: 2.4.35 Released

As the headline says, Linux kernel 2.4.35 is now ready for your viewing and poking pleasure, whatever that means…

KernelTrap:

After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I’m happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35.This one contains the same fixes as 2.4.34.6, plus a small set of add-ons, among which some new PCI IDs, more usb-storage unusual devs, support for high-speed USB HID, updated e1000 driver, a few watchdog updates, support for systems with no keyboard controller (mainly blades), backport of the skge and sky2 drivers from 2.6, support for the “notsc” boot option for some broken dual-core x86_64 systems with no HPET, and a the latest fixes from the LVM package.

Note that I’m very conscious that 2.4 has mostly left desktop PCs and notebooks, but it’s still commonly found on servers, route reflectors or firewalls. For this reason, I’m open to merge the small updates required to maintain such systems running (eg: PCI IDs and such), but I will generally refuse all patches which add support for new desktop or notebook-specific hardware, unless the people present very convincing arguments. Those people generally would better upgrade their systems to 2.6.

The 2.4.34.X stable branch is now closed and a new 2.4.35.X branch will open with the first next fixes. This model has proven very efficient to provide riskless fixes, especially in a situation where several weeks may pass before a patch gets tested on a production environment.

This version has been tested on x86 SMP, sparc64 SMP and alpha.

Solid.

Linux 2.6.22 kernel released (architectural changes edition)

The latest stable version of the Linux kernel dropped over the weekend. Linus Torvalds had this to say in the kernel mailing list:

Not a whole lot of changes since -rc7: some small architecture changes (ppc, mips, blackfin), and most of those are defconfig updates. Various driver fixes: new PCI ID’s along with some ide, ata and networking fixes (for example - the magic wireless libertas ioctl’s got removed, they may be re-added later, hopefully in a more generic form, but in the meantime this doesn’t make a release with new interfaces that aren’t universally liked) … And various random fixes for regressions and other buglets.

And there you have it. Happy Monday.