Same here. I''d rather wait until there are definately no major bugs yet... I remember when 2.4 was released, and there were a number of problems with the early versions, so I''ll wait a bit on 2.6.

The Artist Formerly Known as CmndrM

http://chaos.webhop.org

How can you know there are no critical problems left without at least trying? It''s pretty easy to configure your bootloader so that you can easily switch back to 2.4.x.

I for one am very happy with 2.6.0, because my Via KT400-based mainboard finally works without any problems - no more APIC/ACPI nightmares, no more timeouts on LAN when configuration is subtly changed, etc...

Yes, the scheduler is now O(1) instead of O(n), which is very good when lots of processes are running simultaneously. I think the n is the number of *running* processes, so idle background daemons didn''t matter anyway. I don''t think this particular change offers that much for the desktop.

Also, kernel preemption is something completely orthogonal to the scheduling algorithm. As you will know, there''s preemptive multitasking and cooperative multitasking. Cooperative multitasking means that a task has to have an explicit call to some kind of yield() function, otherwise it''ll never allow another task to run. Preemptive multitasking means that the kernel can preempt/suspend a task at *any* time to allow another task to run (of course, explicit yields, such as sleep(), select() are still available).
In 2.6.0, the kernel can be preempted (though this is configurable). This simply means that if the kernel is doing workhorse jobs, those kernel functions can be interrupted by another thread. This is nice for better realtime behaviour, and it forces a cleaner design of the kernel, but most users probably won''t really notice it (I certainly didn''t). After all, there are hardly any truly time consuming things that the kernel does.

cu,
Prefect

quote: Original post by matias suarez
What do you mean by ''proper preemption''? sorry to ask but i''m not deeply involved on *nix''es

In previous kernel versions (<=2.4), a process couldn''t be interrupted when it was executing a system call in kernel mode. So, if one program was in a particularly lengthy system call, then everything else would slow down. With 2.6, a process *can* be interrupted inside a system call, so everything should feel more resposive.

On a side note, some distributions have patched their 2.4 kernels to be preemptible, 2.6 style.

quote: Original post by Prefect
How can you know there are no critical problems left without at least trying? It''s pretty easy to configure your bootloader so that you can easily switch back to 2.4.x.

Yes, but at the same time, since I expect there still to be some bugs, I''m going to wait for a little bit. 2.4 works fine for me, so I won''t worry about it too much just yet.

The Artist Formerly Known as CmndrM

http://chaos.webhop.org

No more waiting for me Since the firewall machine I have in the basement needs a new harddrive, and I hadn''t had Linux installed for sometime now on my desktop (due to HD space), I decided to get a new drive for my desktop for Linux, and put the previous one into the firewall machine. Both will be running 2.6.0.

Right now, I am typing this up on my newly installed desktop machine: Debian (testing) running Linux Kernel 2.6.0 and KDE 3.1.4 Boots up quite a bit faster than my previous installation (although that was kernel 2.2 at the time).

PKELLY83 i see you are a WIT student?

Used to be there myself doing a BsC in Applied Computing...

with Mairead, Dick Lacey and the rest!

Happy times.

Are you working on any game projects?

Hardly anything Unix.

So when will Slackware-current have the new kernel? That''s what I''m waiting for. I can''t stand this RedHat 9 stuff much longer!

2.6.0 has been perfectly stable for me since i''ve started using it. You could''ve been using it long before now. As well as i use the MM patches which speed things up incredibly.

I''ve been using kernel-2.6.0-test10 with MM patches for quite a while. A lot of things have been simplified. espacially building it. NO One! should be afraid of compiling their own kernels.

first of all, all you have to do is type "make help" and itll tell you how to build it. Second of all, their configuration menu is much much smaller than kernel 2.x

-jason

quote: Original post by HexSkillz
Second of all, their configuration menu is much much smaller than kernel 2.x

Ahem, x = {0,2,4,6 ,...}

lol my bad

< 2.4.24