Linux 2.2.7 Released

MazMart was the first to report that a new stable kernel. Linus decided to name it 2.2.7- a surprise move that enraged and shocked, but since it was the next available digit we shouldn't be all that surprised. Now if I only I had a T1- hemos would kill me if I seized control of the ISDN for something so selfish as as kernel.

Re:Linux uptime?

d00d, you overflowed your jiffies. Jiffies is the count the kernel uses to keep track of time since boot. On intel, with the default of 100Hz, it overflows in about 1.3 years ~ 500 days. You can change the default value, but its probably a bad idea because your changeing how often you processor is scheduled; your system will be considerably less responsive, etc. IIRC, Alan Cox wanted to fix this problem before 2.2 shipped, but Linus decided it wasn't that big of a deal.

USB Support

Hmm, the USB support in 2.2.7 appears to be an alternate development by Linus & friends rather than from the Linux USB project.

Anyone have any ideas why they wrote their own instead of working with Linux USB project's version?

The Linux USB projects sources seem farther along than what is included in the kernel.

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Re:USB Support

Yes, this has been a prime topic on the linux-usb list for a couple of weeks. You might want to search the archives for the "Alternate USB driver" thread.

Linus posted the original announcement for the usb-0.01 code with a note that he couldn't understand the UUSBD code and needed something simpler. Well, I couldn't understand it either (which of course doesn't mean much :). Anyway the way I see it, things could go to two opposite directions from here; The two drivers keep on going on their separate paths or that they somehow merge in the future. I couldn't really see any future for UUSBD with the former scenario since Linus controls what goes into the kernel.

The most likely scenario I'll see is that the internal structure is kept from Linus-USB (enhanced of course as time goes by) and that the good ideas and some of the higher level device class specific (etc.) code from UUSBD will be ported and merged to Linus-USB.

Patching..

Rob and others, why don't you just patch the source? The last full kernel source I downloaded was like 2.2.1 I think. Since then, I have been downloading the patches, and after a while, I tarball and gzip the full source all up and I have an exact copy as the 13+ meg file. Try it. :)
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Scott Miga

Automatic kernel patch distribution

If you send mail to [e-mail] with "subscribe linux-kernel-patch" in the body, you will automagically receive the latest patch, as soon as it is posted by the Linus.

If the patch is too big (> ~400k) you will receive a notification and the diffstat output.

The truly wicked could setup a procmail rule to feed mail from linux-kernel-patch directly to "patch -p1 -d /usr/src/linux" ...

Small Patch to get USB to compile

I have just posted it to linux-kernel:

--- drivers/usb/usb.h.bak Wed Apr 28 21:59:45 1999
+++ drivers/usb/usb.h Wed Apr 28 22:08:08 1999
@@ -363,8 +363,8 @@
void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *, u8 *);
void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *, u8 *);
#else
-extern inline void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *, u8 *) {}
-extern inline void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *, u8 *) {}
+extern inline void usb_audio_interface(struct usb_interface_descriptor *interface, u8 *data) {}
+extern inline void usb_audio_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *interface, u8 *data) {}
#endif

#endif

Linux uptime?

Well, a bit on the silly side, I just went through a horrible horrible bug in Linux 2.0.30. After somewhere around 500 days uptime... IT WRAPPED!
According to last, it went up at:

reboot system boot Tue Dec 16 22:51

(That would be 1997).

Now:
11:40pm up 22:21, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.00

Suddenly I was back at 0 uptime, and my logfiles went through a spasm with kernel error messages ending with this:

Apr 28 01:56:07 dream kernel: Call Trace: [do_gettimeofday+34/68] [sys_gettimeof
day+44/112] [system_call+85/124]
Apr 28 01:56:07 dream kernel: Code: f7 f1 ba 10 27 00 00 89 c1 31 c0 f7 f1 a3 dc
fa 1a 00 89 c3

Oh, well, still it didnt panic, altho a load of apps including X went haywire.

It sorta puts life into a perspective too. Last time I rebooted this machine I was 25. Now I'm 27. Agh.

Re:NT is only on sp4

Linux has far more releases than any closed source OS, because the philosophy behind closed source code is to never let your customer see a bug. Obviously this hasn't worked with NT. Open source on the other hand, releases every even marginally working piece of software. This software is then viewed and 'fixed' by a large number of people, then resubmitted to whoever is maintaining that code.

With closed source software, about 10% of the time is spent writing the code, then the rest is spend debugging. Debugging takes many many worker hours in order to do correctly. This is why there are alpha and beta versions available for some things, but they are still being tested.

With open source, such things are not worried about. The user has access to the source code, and those thousands or hundreds of thousands of 'eyeball hours' looking at the code for problems, can be accomplished in a matter of days or even hours.

There have been times during the development of linux that Linus released a new kernel version more than once a day. I would imagine that this happens more with the unstable releases. For discussion on how to tell, see earlier posts.