What I thought was more interesting (Linus noted "Nothing really exciting happened since -rc7...") was the exchange between Linus and Peter Zijlstra, in particular this Linus eruption:
> And I *do* know that the real world simply isn't simple enough that we could
> ever do a perfect job, so don't even try - instead aim for "understandable,
> maintainable, and gets the main issues roughly right".
It's striking that his manner is blunt and over-general... and his technical content is also blunt and over-general. He's known for his pragmatic and effective engineering decisions.
not everyone agrees with linus. ingo molnar supported peter zijlstra. with facts. something linus always wants but usually is too busy delivering (ehem..).
"the result of these commits is:
24 files changed, 417 insertions(+), 975 deletions(-)
Most of the linecount win is due to the removal of the dysfunctional power scheduling - but even without that commit it's a simplification:
The X32 ABI is interesting. Who'd have thought this many years after 64 bit becoming mainstream, (and decades after it becoming mainstream on servers) something like this would be needed.
Anyone has a good argument why NOT to use this for every non memory intensive application? I always thought that using 64bit pointers was a waste of memory when not needed and this x32 abi to me seems fantastic since it keeps the several advantages of newer 64bit cpus (more registers for example as mentioned in the article).
Well, Donald Knuth for one. Here's a blog entry I wrote about Donald Knuth and how he asked for this a while back. I think it makes a lot of sense and I'm really glad to see this maturing!
SGI's IRIX always had the ability to do since decades ago. Of course, like others have stated, the main reason is to conserve both memory (for pointers) and more importantly bus bandwidth (which is a mayor problem in MPI/SMP systems memory, especially in those IRIX supported with 128+ cpus in a NUMA configuration).
There are still many features where linux is just playing catch-up that commercial unix kernels had decades ago.
Is the X32 ABI meant so that one can run X32 programs on an x64 kernel as well, or does one have to decide to use X32 once and for all and then compile everything with this ABI?
"...making slow start suboptimal" caught my eye, but I didn't understand the rest. Is this for a specific circumstance or general? Did they find something better than slow start or did they break it, causing it to be suboptimal?
It is you. Since 2005 (early days of 2.6), there has been four to five major releases per year. 3.4 is the second release for this year, so it seems to continue the trend almost perfectly.
The jump to 3.x was a more or less arbitrary decision made by Linus because the 2.6 version numbers were getting very large. Switching to 3.x should basically be the same as any other kernel upgrade, possibly with some additional issues with software that assumes things about the form of the kernel version number. There shouldn't be any distros holding back from upgrading; in fact Ubuntu 12.04 uses a 3.2 kernel.
There is no 'major version jump' difference between the two. The reasoning was simply "2.40 is getting unwieldy as a number, so I'm going to start 3.0 here".
[+] [-] christianbryant|14 years ago|reply
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/19/97
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibotty|14 years ago|reply
"the result of these commits is: 24 files changed, 417 insertions(+), 975 deletions(-)
Most of the linecount win is due to the removal of the dysfunctional power scheduling - but even without that commit it's a simplification:
15 files changed, 415 insertions(+), 481 deletions(-)
while it lifts the historic limitations of the sched-domains approach and makes the code a whole lot more logical."
[+] [-] thornofmight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewvc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slug|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|14 years ago|reply
Well, Donald Knuth for one. Here's a blog entry I wrote about Donald Knuth and how he asked for this a while back. I think it makes a lot of sense and I'm really glad to see this maturing!
http://blog.reverberate.org/2011/09/making-knuth-wish-come-t...
[+] [-] supar|14 years ago|reply
There are still many features where linux is just playing catch-up that commercial unix kernels had decades ago.
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