HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-03) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Linux 4.12 Released
121 points by slyzmud
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/2/164___________________________________________________________________
KenoFischer - 39 minutes ago
Breaks rr I believe :(. In fact there were two regressions of that
sort introduced this release cycles. One was caught early enough to
get fixed, I guess the other wasn't.
sp332 - 4 hours ago
This is a bit... opaque. Here is a lot of more-readable information
about what's in the release, and some links to more editorial
content. https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.12
sctb - 4 hours ago
Thanks, we've updated the link from
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
to the official release announcement.
ganeshkrishnan - 4 hours ago
If you use ubuntu, install the kernel from here:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.12/
blfr - 3 hours ago
I have always been tempted. Is there any reason not to?
valarauca1 - 1 hours ago
No, you generally should.Those Linus tirades about We Dont
Break Userland are why. The only way application interact with
the kernel is via SystemCalls, which once they go public are
-never- retracted, and never significantly change.This is why
the kernel has system calls like 'mlock' and 'mlock2', because
the first call ended up being incorrect but YOU CANT TURN BACK
NOW! Or a better example `stat`, `stat64`, and `statx`
johnbellone - 26 minutes ago
I hear what you are saying but I wouldn't say that stat vs
stat64 is incorrect or wrong. It is due to 32 vs 64 bit
fields inside of the stat struct. But yeah, it all comes down
to maintaining ABI and not breaking userland.
legulere - 1 hours ago
Drivers might break though.
Insanity - 3 hours ago
I wonder this as well. Might a kernel update not break some
applications or make the system less stable?
mamon - 3 hours ago
I've bought new laptop recently with Kaby Lake processor and
put Ubuntu 17.04 on it, so the kernel upgrade was kind of
necessity. No adverse effects observed, and on the plus side:
somewhat better battery life, Asus USB-C docking station
working correctly, including Gigabit Ethernet port, resolved
issues with sleep/resume.
johnbellone - 37 minutes ago
What laptop if you don't mind me asking?
dom0 - 3 hours ago
Linus Torvalds breaks into a childish tantrum of (edit:
correction: swearing rants are technically coherent), public
swearing at people whenever anyone anywhere in Linux kernel
development breaks any userspace app. As a consequence,
userspace regressions are rare.(Might contain traces of
hyperbole?still; Linus' behaviour is largely unacceptable
nonetheless)
__jal - 1 hours ago
You might not like his method of cat-herding, but
historically, it has worked pretty well. That summarizes
the way I feel about them.It is a time-tested leadership
method to make an example out of a hapless mistake-maker to
keep the rest of the herd in line. And it isn't like that
sort of thing doesn't happen in the corporate world; it is
just that corporate dressings down (down-dressings?) don't
happen on public mailing lists.Not my preferred tactic, but
in the odd world of Linux kernel development, it certainly
works.
wtallis - 2 hours ago
Linus is very well known for his rants, but you've
definitely mischaracterized them. He's seldom incoherent,
and the ones that are vulgar enough to make for juicy
sensationalized "news" are only ever directed at
contributors who are experienced enough to know better than
to break userspace or something badly wrong like that. His
more level-headed corrections of well-meaning inexperienced
developers don't make the news.
dom0 - 2 hours ago
"only ever directed at contributors who are experienced
enough". That's not strictly true, see e.g.
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-
devel/2017-Februa...
saghm - 2 hours ago
Props to Daniel for defending the contributor, as I'm
guessing they wouldn't feel comfortable arguing back with
Linus.
wtallis - 16 minutes ago
I'm not seeing where the ire was directed at anybody new.
The two messages Linus sent were in reply to a pull
request from Dave Airlie, a very high-level and extremely
experienced developer. Daniel Vetter tried to chastise
Linus for chewing out some new contributor named Noralf,
but it appears that the real problem is that the problems
with Noralf's code went unfixed by intermediaries like
Vetter and Airlie and made it all the way to Linus.The
kernel shouldn't let bad code into the tree just because
the author is inexperienced. Subsystem maintainers are
supposed to be a very thorough filter, so that the
patches reaching Linus are up to standard. When bad code
makes it to Linus, it's his job to complain about it. And
based on that thread, it looks like he was complaining
about it, and was not directing the complaints at the
original author but at the people who were responsible
for reviewing and testing the code.
cmurf - 2 hours ago
Please, the rants are most definitely completely coherent.
shp0ngle - 3 hours ago
It might make some hardware unusable.If you are relying on
some hacks or proprietary drivers for wifi support or GPU
support (as is normal in Linux world), it might break.
eat_veggies - 3 hours ago
It's probably safe since rolling release distributions
upgrade just the kernel and work fine. I'd watch out for the
graphics drivers though--sometimes you need to recompile them
with the new kernel headers or just use the DKMS version.
Avshalom - 3 hours ago
Linus is pretty big on kernel updates not breaking userland
it's been the topic of several flames. Not that that's
perfect or a guarantee but it is a priority among the devs.
cmurf - 2 hours ago
It can happen. There are a bunch of bots that do regression
tests, Fedora's Rawhide provides daily debug builds of the
kernel with merges in-between the rc's, so there are are some
real humans also using the kernel through its development. If
you check the 4.11.1 changelog as an example you can see the
kinds of things that can crop up. Fedora current releases
tend to rebase around x.y.2. So you could use that as a way
to weigh your kernel conservatism.
old-gregg - 3 hours ago
Not Ubuntu, but Debian: have been running Debian stable with
unstable kernels for a while. Never saw any issues. Application
packages generally do not have hard dependencies on specific
kernel versions but, as always, YMMV.
chrisper - 3 hours ago
Well, sometimes there could be a bug lingering around. But that
could be the case with any software. Probably just keep the old
kernel around as well. Just in Case.
gigatexal - 2 hours ago
sudo apt add-repo'able? thanks for pointing this out
hobozilla - 4 hours ago
Thank you, exactly what I needed.
shmerl - 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, proper AMD Vega support didn't make it in.
vanderZwan - 2 hours ago
> In the diff department, 4.12 is also very big, although the
reason there isn't just that there's a lot of development, we
have the added bulk of a lot of new header files for the AMD Vega
supportNot the one downvoting you but: are you sure?
benchaney - 1 hours ago
I believe that is just header files. Actual support comes
after.
mariocesar - 4 hours ago
Could someone say something about the new "BFQ I/O scheduler"? I
was not aware of the work being done, and the goal to have a more
reponsive desktop
zackelan - 4 hours ago
http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/https://lwn.net/
Articles/601799/tl;dr:> CFQ separates each process's I/O requests
into a separate queue, then rotates through the queues trying to
divide the available bandwidth as fairly as it can.> The BFQ I/O
scheduler also maintains per-process queues of I/O requests, but
it does away with the round-robin approach used by CFQ. Instead,
it assigns an "I/O budget" to each process.
ausjke - 3 hours ago
CFQ is best for mechanical hard drives not sure if it is
updated for SSDs, deadline and noop seem better for SSD
kaixi - 2 hours ago
Why is this being downvoted? AFAIK, this is mostly true.
saghm - 2 hours ago
Random OT question: how can you tell when a comment that
isn't yours is being downvoted? I've seen comments like
yours a few times before, but I can't see the karma on
individual posts. Is there a karma threshold for being able
to see this (like the 500 karma threshold for being able to
downvote)?
jsjohnst - 1 hours ago
You can tell because the font color starts to fade out
till you can barely read the text.
saghm - 1 minutes ago
Interesting; I'm unable to notice this on the comment
being discussed with my current setup (Firefox on Linux)
the8472 - 2 hours ago
There's another new IO scheduler for SSDs:
Kyber,https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9672023/
gigatexal - 2 hours ago
anyone do benches say using fio with this vs. the default
scheduler?nvm: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articl
e&item=linux-412...
the8472 - 2 hours ago
Aiui kyber is designed for providing consistently low
latency, e.g. for desktop users. And maybe specific user-
facing server workloads? Those benchmarks mostly seem to
test throughput, so are not good at showing the intended
effect.You would want to see something that shows 99th
percentile latency of individual reads/writes.
gigatexal - 1 hours ago
yeah i came to that same conclusion. I may need to do my
own testing using Fio.
avar - 2 hours ago
Linus says it's a large release, here's a numeric breakdown of
recent kernel releases, showing number of commits, diff | wc, and a
diffstat with/without the drivers/ directory: v4.7..v4.8:
14552 1331854 5068427 42175318 11363 files changed,
627754 insertions(+), 279373 deletions(-) 6657 files
changed, 329595 insertions(+), 167605 deletions(-) v4.8..v4.9:
17392 1419476 5372905 44206994 11179 files changed,
632159 insertions(+), 354871 deletions(-) 5993 files
changed, 214842 insertions(+), 120945 deletions(-) v4.9..v4.10:
14249 1463146 5668517 49833479 11726 files changed,
744012 insertions(+), 249810 deletions(-) 5884 files
changed, 329130 insertions(+), 115189 deletions(-)
v4.10..v4.11: 13891 1227388 4763853 39671475
12506 files changed, 530154 insertions(+), 232410 deletions(-)
6230 files changed, 209555 insertions(+), 95502 deletions(-)
v4.11..v4.12: 15736 2025692 7383431 88754335
12396 files changed, 1300537 insertions(+), 267064 deletions(-)
5829 files changed, 215764 insertions(+), 124745 deletions(-) Via:
parallel -k 'r=v4.$(({}-1))..v4.{} ; echo $r: ; (git rev-list $r |
wc -l; git -c diff.renameLimit=10240 diff $r | wc; git -c
diff.renameLimit=10240 diff --shortstat $r ; git -c
diff.renameLimit=10240 diff --shortstat $r -- ":!drivers/") | sed
-r "s/^ *//; s/^/ /"' ::: {8..12}
microcolonel - 2 hours ago
That is to say, a net addition of over a million lines in one
release.
joecool1029 - 2 hours ago
I think atomic mode-setting for the intel DRM driver being default
now is the most interesting feature for my configurations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager#Atomi...
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