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Thread ID: 40790 2003-12-18 11:10:00 Linux kernel 2.6 Chilling_Silently (228) Press F1
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201459 2003-12-18 11:10:00 Yep, its out... (see kernel.org)
But out of curiousity, what are some of the major changes that "Joe Bloggs" like me will notice?
Chilling_Silently (228)
201460 2003-12-18 11:54:00 So far have found this:
Thread support is *much* faster and less buggy provided you have the right version of glibc.

Schedular fixes.

IDE cd burning is less CPU intensive if you dump the ide-scsi module and use the newer cdrecord instead.

ALSA by default with OSS support in a legacy-mode

Better firewire support

devfs is now deprecated in favor of udev (which is roughtly the same thing but userspace as opposed to devfs's kernelspace)

sysfs is also new in 2.6 which adds some information mounted in /sys

Faster boot times

And the usual driver improvements.

There's gotta be more to a kernel than better support for CD-Burning without ide-scsi!?!

What am I really missing here..?
Chilling_Silently (228)
201461 2003-12-18 12:03:00 Have a look here (www.kniggit.net) for a summary of the major changes. b1naryb0y (3)
201462 2003-12-18 12:37:00 Hehe, had just finished reading that page..!

Have since foun:
slashdot.org

Looks to be a good release!
Chilling_Silently (228)
201463 2003-12-18 22:09:00 I've been running Test11 for a couple of weeks and it is certainly stable. But for most people it probably isn't worth getting it immediately.

- X does seem slightly more responsive (not that I ever really had a problem with it). It behaves like its the only thing running even when I have a heap of other stuff running.

- You won't be able to use CDRDAO. It currently needs ide-scsi, and the 2.6 version is broken & umaintained.

- Aside from better ACPI support, there is also swsup which is like hibernate except it will work on any computer even if it doesn't have APM or ACPI etc.

- /sys is new, but fairly boring. It just moves some stuff out of /proc. It will break some old programs, eg lm_sensors which tries to look in /proc/bus/i2c/ .

- Top gets a new feild, IO wait, eg:
Cpu(s): 19.0% user, 16.7% system, 42.9% nice, 0.0% idle, 21.4% IO-wait

- Disk accesses seem to be faster. hdparm now measures my disk as 57MB/s when 2.4 was less than 40. I've noticed the difference when starting up big apps like Eclipse.


/runs off to find a 2.6 mirror that isn't swamped.
bmason (508)
201464 2003-12-18 22:24:00 This new kernel is looking good :D

I had a look at Fedora's release schedule for Core 2 and it seems like it will be April 2004 at this stage until it is available. I might update the kernel earlier then, rather than waiting for Core 2.

I will wait until the initial stampede is over though :p
Jen C (20)
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