Mandrake 10 has it, SUSE’s rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a “test” version with it since last year, and now we’ll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure [except Slackware, which only provides a test package in source-only]. This is not in line with the basic “it’s ready when it’s ready” dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors, says NewsForge.
Is the 2.6 kernel ready for general distribution?
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Well, I don’t particularly like how distributions roll their own kernels with all kinds of patches. It can make it difficult to take your own vanilla kernel and put in a few of your own patches.
Hopefully 2.6 will reduce most/all the patches distributors were putting into their own kernels.
It won’t. Companies make themselves unique by making changes. It’s the rule of competition.
I had been wondering for awhile if Linux would start to bend towards getting things out fast vs getting things out “right”. I guess we now know. Although partially to blame are the kernel developers: while they do a ton of good work, it seems like the first 10 “stable” releases of a series are nothing of the sort.
I’m using 2.6.4 in Debian sid. Everything is working fine no problems whatsoever. The GUI responsiveness feels similar to that of WinXP, but then is just a feeling…
…and now we’ll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure[except Slackware, which only provides a test package in source-only]
Does that means the next Slackware release won’t come with 2.6.x?
Slackware current is still running 2.4.x so as of this moment it looks to be yes. 9.1 was “2.6 ready” but Patrick V. (can’t spell his last name) does not feel it is stable enough yet I guess. It is fairly easy to upgrade to 2.6 though if your hardware does not have problems on the newest kernel. Just get the source, compile and install (linuxquestions.org has a good step by step for newbies) you don’t have to update any of the other packages, though you do need to turn off rc.hotplug if you have it on (no needed in 2.6). I had to adjust rc.modules as well but I think that was just due to my choices in what I compiled in versus making modules.
The benefit/disadvantage of Slack is that it uses the stock kernel by default, so you don’t have to worry about vendor applied patches
I have a pretty simple setup, but the 2.6 have been working really well for me not for several months.
I’ve been using 2.6.x kernels all the way back to test-0 and granted I have a pretty avg system not once did I experence sort of problems relating to the 2.6 kernels even while was in testing and for that nasty local exploit in 2.6.0 it was ready then
Umm, there were like four of the remote root exploits in 2.6.x. Everyone keeps trying to play it down with technicality, but my box was rooted several damns, and I believe it may still be being used to send spam.
>I’m using 2.6.4 in Debian sid. Everything is working fine
>no problems whatsoever. The GUI responsiveness feels
>similar to that of WinXP, but then is just a feeling…
Have you tried turning off uneeded services ?
The 2.6.x line look good. Just wating until suse 9.1 comes
out <-:
Umm, there were like four of the remote root exploits in 2.6.x. Everyone keeps trying to play it down with technicality, but my box was rooted several damns, and I believe it may still be being used to send spam.
There’ve been none remote root exploit in kernel 2.6.x. so far. Try keeping your troll down.
Hi
2.6.1 or something had a local exploit in it but AFAIK it crashed the system. It was never shipped with any distro so it was early testers using it.
2.6.x has no remote exploits at all. so the above poster is misinformed or trolling.
if your machine is somehow cracked you should pull if off the network rather than commenting vaguely that someone might be using it for spam
regards
Jess
That’s probably because the Debian developers niced the XFree86 server to -10 by default. You should put it back to the normal (0) level. Don’t know how though as I don’t use Debian and I don’t know which file they’ve modified. Maybe startx?
It was a bit necessary to do that with the 2.4 series (esp. if the kernel wasn’t compiled with preemption) but it isn’t with 2.6. In fact, it hinder the new scheduler, reducing the performance.
Umm, there were like four of the remote root exploits in 2.6.x. Everyone keeps trying to play it down with technicality, but my box was rooted several damns, and I believe it may still be being used to send spam.
I am not aware of any remote root exploits in the 2.6 series kernel itself. Could you list what they are/were and what the versions the exploits were in?
I run 2.6.x on all my systems here at home… a server which I use for e-mail, web serving, and stuff like that, and my desktop. One of which is pretty advanced hardware and the only stability issue so far was easily resolved when I did some research.
The idea of the kernel being “ready when it’s ready” seems to fall more in the hands of Linus. If he didn’t think it was ready he wouldn’t have released it as 2.6, thus if Linus says it’s stable why can’t the distributions hop on it?
Is the suggestion now that distributions should also be waiting to see if it’s ready? Why wait twice? The distribution’s aren’t the ones creating the kernel, they’re just including it. Why should it be their judgement of whether it’s ready or not when Linus and crew have already decided it is?
I’m not sure what was meant by Slackware being 2.6 ready. I use Slackware-current and still had to manually upgrade procinfo and reiserfsprogs before using 2.6.
2.6 has been extremely stable though, and if it works on most “standard” machines why not put it in distro’s? I’m sure people with weird systems end up editing a lot of their distro’s original settings anyway.
It won’t. Companies make themselves unique by making changes. It’s the rule of competition.
There won’t be too many patches in the beginning. A lot of the patches that the disto’s were using in 2.4 have been implemented in 2.6.
I had been wondering for awhile if Linux would start to bend towards getting things out fast vs getting things out “right”. I guess we now know. Although partially to blame are the kernel developers: while they do a ton of good work, it seems like the first 10 “stable” releases of a series are nothing of the sort.
I’ve experienced the opposite. 2.6 has been very stable for me. In fact I use the mm patched kernel now without so much as a hiccup. I think the main reason for getting 2.6 out the door so soon is that it IS that good. Besides that it is basically just a cleaner implementation of the heavily patched 2.4 series that most distros are now using.
Um… if you really can’t tell for sure wether or not your box is being used to send spam, Im suprised you even know what a root exploit is. Of course, maybe you don’t, considering you seem to be pulling them out of thin air…
Frankly, its my opinion that 2.6 IS ready for production use. I wouldn’t use it for the truly mission critical systems yet, but then many of those are still using 2.2 or even earlier, and they deffinatly don’t use the latest version of SuSE! 2.6 is deffinatly ready for the average webserver or workstation though, assuming of course that its properly evaluated and tested to ensure it works well for your setup.
What are we talking about here on kernel stability. Obviously we know it’s not randomly crashing on machines within a period of hours, that’s been well tested. Are we concerned that it will cause irreperable damage to certain file systems over a period of months? I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it.
I think 2.6 was well tested. And it will have patches, bugs, and hacks in the future but there is no such thing as perfect stability.
I don’t see a need for distributions to switch to 2.6, but it’s not a bad thing. I do see a need to not include KDE 3.2.0, it was baaaad (I use 3.2.1 now, and it’s great).
Personally I still run the 2.4.x series, cause I have had issues with Nvidia drivers; but I plan to switch to 2.6 within the year. I don’t feel a lot of pressure to switch though, my system is already far running far more fluid than WindowsXP does on it (I dunno who thinks that XP runs smooth, it’s always been glitchy for me; on multiple machines).
Don’t know about you, but I’m using Slackware-current
With 2.6.4 [sinse test8 or smthng] and i think Slackware is 2.6 ready.
Downloaded the Source, Compiled it, Installed, and thats all, and yes, i use reiserfs.
Had 1 crash with mis-configured ACPI[my mistake]
And about upgrades, I use swaret and i find it N00By friendly,
easier to use than Windows update.
“That’s probably because the Debian developers niced the XFree86 server to -10 by default. You should put it back to the normal (0) level. Don’t know how though as I don’t use Debian and I don’t know which file they’ve modified. Maybe startx?”
In Debian you usually configure things with ‘dpkg-reconfigure’ command. There’s also a program called ‘gkdebconf’ that offers a frontend for setting many system properties, including nice value for XFree86. Also install libgnome2-perl to make gkdebconf look pretty. 🙂
“This is not in line with the basic “it’s ready when it’s ready” dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors”
That’s why the _commercially_ oriented distros rush to get the high numbers, and the distros that emphasize _quality_ (e.g. Debian, Slackware) wait until it’s had some more testing.
I think Linux 2.6 is a great improvement (my laptop boots faster and has lower response times) if it works for you. However, there have been some issues. One of my machines crashed on 2.6.0-test3 when someone SSHed to it, and my lovely partially closed source RTL8180 wlan driver won’t run on 2.6 (causes an Oops durin module initialization).
Beware of typos, I’m so tired I can’t read what I write. 🙁
Thanks for the gkdebconf tip. I allready used configure-debian but this is slick…. And the offending package is: xserver-common
So use gkdebconf or dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common to set the nice value to 0….
KDE 3.2.1 + Linux kernel 2.6.4 = best desktop experince ive ever had
second that! some of the old small KDE annoyances persist but the performance boost is amazing.. what the hell happened? Is this still the same Duron 650 I’m used too??
If you check out the Changelog for -current, you’ll see that 2.6.4 source was added…
looks like the next stable Slack may ship with 2.6.4.
Hi
“second that! some of the old small KDE annoyances persist but the performance boost is amazing.. what the hell happened? Is this still the same Duron 650 I’m used too??
”
Developers use valgrind all over to find and reduce performance bottlenecks. the result is the huge speed improvement.
have fun
Jess
Slackware is probably waiting for things like udev to stabilize so he can move over to it completely, instead of what a lot of distros do which is populate the dev directory automatically, defeating the whole purpose of udev.
Of course, if Linux wasn’t an always-changing target that introduced major changes like this in the middle of stable kernel lines, we wouldn’t be asking these questions, but hey…
I second this:
“KDE 3.2.1 + Linux kernel 2.6.4 = best desktop experince ive ever had”
Mandrake 10 Community is very responsive. Running on top of the 2.6.3 Kernel, it’s much better than Fedora Core 1 running a patched version of 2.6.
So for desktop usage it is ready.Maybe the drivers will take a bit more time.
Hi
Actually FC 1 runs a version of 2.4 not 2.6. fc 2 devel tree has 2.6.3 and probably will have 2.6.6 when it gets released
FC 2 devel has a comparable speed to that of mandrake community 10
regards
Jess
— “KDE 3.2.1 + Linux kernel 2.6.4 = best desktop experince ive ever had” —
Now you just need to make it Gnome 2.6 + kernel 2.6 and you’ll be in nervana!
Now you just need to make it Gnome 2.6 + kernel 2.6 and you’ll be in nervana!
Is it still possible to run GNOME on the Linux framebuffer? I’d seen it done once, I don’t know if it was ever a standard capability, but it was pretty cool…
😀
Yeah its a shame that the release was set back till the 31th. Still, I cant wait to give it a try.
I third this:
“Slackware + KDE 3.2.1 + Linux kernel 2.6.4 = only best desktop experince ive ever had”
I recommend monolithic kernel, the performance is superior to one to modularizated.
The article is not very clear concerning Fedora.
Fedora has kernel 2.6 – in fact 2.6.4 as of today. And XFree was replaced about a week ago by xorg. I can’t imagine Fedora going back to a 2.4 kernel. Besides, I’m very impressed with the Fedora updates. I’ve yet to experience a major screw up.
I am still waiting for ATARAID to be officially add into the 2.6.x series. But I guess not many people is using this. Since 2.6.x is released without this being fixed…
I am running kernel 2.6.3 in Mandrake 10
It is fast, stable and incredibly lean on resources.
As to Suse their kernels have always been superb. I don’t believe they are going to lose their good reputation now.
“So use gkdebconf or dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common to set the nice value to 0….”
Or just change nice_value in /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
That’s probably because the Debian developers niced the XFree86 server to -10 by default. You should put it back to the normal (0) level. Don’t know how though as I don’t use Debian and I don’t know which file they’ve modified. Maybe startx?
Type as root:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common
Very simple
Damn, someone got in front of me
Ah well.
I’ve been using the 2.2 kernel for ages and only resently, within this year have I switched to 2.4x so I think i’m gonna wait 😀
* AFS (ARLA and OpenAFS) doesn’t work in 2.6
* DirectFB doesn’t work in 2.6
And some others. It’s not polished yet, but i think we’ll see it polished earlier than the 2.4 series. Great job!
Well, I knew the solution but not how to apply it. I don’t plan to use Debian but I guess a bit of knowledge doesn’t hurt.
>Debian “unstable” is generally considered at least as stable as most >commercial Linux publishers’ latest releases, with “testing” more solid than >most,
Either he is a blind zealot or have never run Debian Unstable. It lived up to it’s name in my experience over a few years. Fun yes, stable no.
And “generally considered”? That part makes the sentence go from zealotry to being a plain lie.
a .10 or .11 release before I think about putting a kernel on my production servers. I do have 2.6.4 on my Gentoo workstation, because I don’t really care if there are security issues because I’m behind a NAT’d firewall, so it’s unlikely anyone will be able to get in, since script-kiddies don’t know how to rewrite the firmware to do anything malicious. I feel that the kerenel is generally stable, I haven’t gotten a kernel panic, and X feels so much more smooth.
I may be off thread here, but what is all the beef about Nvidia drivers? I keep hearing it pop up, especially in reference to Fedora Core, which I would very much like to try out. If I have an Nvidia card in my machine (which I do) does that mean Fedora won’t run? Has this been adjusted in FC 2, which has the new kernel?
Thanks, and sorry for interupting the flow.