Comments on: Linux kernel 2.6.28

By: Boot tracing. | codemonkey.org.uk

Boot tracing. | codemonkey.org.uk — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:45:39 +0000

[...] resist playing with new toys, seeing as Santa didn’t bring me anything fun this year. In my previous post, I mentioned that 2.6.28 was for the most part, dull. Reading the excellent changelog summary at [...]

By: davej

davej — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 22:41:06 +0000

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’.

By: zdzichu

zdzichu — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:30:08 +0000

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.

By: davej

davej — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:27:23 +0000

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.

By: jldugger

jldugger — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:14:21 +0000

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.