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Linux kernel 2.6.28

Dec 24, 2008
Fedora kernel

Linus just released the 2.6.28 kernel. It’s already compiling for tomorrows rawhide. Fedora 9 & 10 will probably move to it in a few weeks. Typically, we wait until the dust settles and the first -stable release comes out. I was asked recently what bits we’re excited about in .28 for Fedora. To be honest, I didn’t give a great answer. It’s just not a “OMG, THIS RELEASE IS AWESOME” kind of release. There’s nothing in there that I was disappointed not to get into .27 for F10′s release. In fact, lots of the bits in there we were already carrying in the Fedora kernel (the DRM bits for example). Asides from that, it’s the usual churn of bug fixes, new drivers, and probably some interesting new bugs.

What about F11 ? Looking at the current schedule, we’ll get at least .29 in. I’m not sure we’ll have enough time to pull in .30 at this stage. All depends on how quickly .29 stabilises. Version numbers are so hand-wavy anyway. I wish when people asked me ‘what version is fX going to be’, they’d really ask ‘is feature xyz going to be merged by fX’. But people sure are hung up on numbers.

People tend not to notice kernel features these days for the most part. Which in a way is a good thing. (means it’s working). Unless it’s something that gets a lot of press like “unified x86 architecture” “tickless kernel” “modesetting”. There are dozens of features every release, but people don’t really get excited about a lot of them, and for good reason. They’re mostly dull from a userspace programmer/end-user perspective.

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4 Comments

  1. jldugger  •  Dec 25, 2008 @02:14

    Ext4 marked stable isn’t exciting?

    It’s interesting you mention users asking for features; I recall reading on the Ubuntu kernel mailing list someone asking when support for ext4 would be added by default, days after Ted T’so said he started running it as root on his system. So it’s not like additional clarity makes these people any less crazy.

  2. davej  •  Dec 25, 2008 @02:27

    I never really got overly excited about ext4 to be honest. It’s great that we’ve got more mileage out of ext* to tide us over until btrfs lands, but that’s probably to pique my (and others) interest a lot more.

    Also, we carried the .28 ext4 patches in our .27 kernel for Fedora, so it’s kind of old news :-)

    It’s still not as proven as the earlier revisions obviously, and I know Eric Sandeen and others have been chasing some issues recently. It’s kind of irritating that only when it starts getting used in all sorts of oddball configurations that filesystems really get the testing they need to shake out the more harder-to-trigger bugs.

    That said, we have much better stress testing tools these days than we did when ext3 went into the tree, so some of the dumber bugs get caught before they even hit Linus’ tree.

  3. zdzichu  •  Dec 25, 2008 @14:30

    For me, block device queue stopping is exciting. At last I could put hdapsd to work.
    And unified x86? It wasn’t exactly exciting for common folk, like me.

  4. davej  •  Dec 25, 2008 @17:41

    I’m curious how well that stuff will work in practise. The thing that has me wondering, is that if your laptop was busy doing something, there’s no guarantee the process that does the write to the sysfs knobs to park the heads is going to get scheduled.
    I suppose for the common case of an idle laptop it’ll work, and 99% is ‘good enough’.

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