2.6.0-test coming soon? [LWN.net]

William Lee Irwin asked the question: will there be a 2.6.0-test release soon? All is working well for him, and it seems maybe time to look toward getting the kernel out to a wider testing audience.

Unfortunately, it does not look like things will happen anywhere near that quickly. From Alan Cox's response:

IDE is all broken still and will take at least another three months to fix - before we get to 'improve'. The entire tty layer locking is terminally broken and nobody has even started fixing it.... Most of the drivers still don't build either.

There are other little issues to deal with as well. For example, the process of feeding 2.4 fixes into 2.5 stalled some time ago, and is only now getting restarted again. Some developments - the driver model work and asynchronous I/O come to mind - are still very much in progress. Al Viro had all kinds of plans for the VFS and initramfs, but seems to have disappeared from the kernel list for now. The loadable module problems are mostly taken care of, but things are still changing there too. And so on.

So the truth of the matter is that the 2.5 kernel is still not stable in a number of ways. The feature freeze is holding reasonably well, but it was always understood that features that had been merged would finish their development - and that has not yet happened. Trying to widen the test community at this point is likely to just turn a lot of people off to 2.5 altogether. Truly stabilizing a kernel takes a long time.

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2.6.0-test coming soon?

Posted Jan 16, 2003 9:57 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

--For all I know, Al may be as disgusted with the whole 2.5 mess as I am. How long do we have to wait for 2.4 to get up to speed with back-ports from 2.5?

--According to kernel.org, Linux Kernel 2.4.0 was released on January 4, 2001. Kernel 2.5 was released Nov 25, 2001!

--Looks like the whole kernel development process is out of control, with *long* stretches of time between stable-series patches, (2.4.19 == August 2 2002, 2.4.20 == November 28,2002) and nothing *useful or usable* coming out of 2.5 yet.

--Linus needs to re-think the whole mess; all of us poor end-users want the latest features, (Reiserfs 4, anyone??) but they're not making it into 2.4. Hell, even the 2.4 kernel needs a hackaround just to get it to *boot* on a TRANSMETA processor! (See Knoppix support boards for details.)

--Don't get me wrong - I love Linux and what it *does* for me. But Kernel 2.5 hasn't done much of anything for *anybody* yet, after more than a year of development. WTF??

2.6.0-test coming soon?

Posted Jan 17, 2003 21:49 UTC (Fri) by EricBackus (guest, #2816) [Link]

"all of us poor end-users want the latest features, (Reiserfs 4, anyone??) but they're not making it into 2.4"

And that's as it should be. The 2.4 kernel is supposed to be stable, which means you don't put the latest features into it. In fact, a big problem with 2.4 was that it wasn't very stable, and what you're asking for would make that worse. If you want the latest features, you should be using 2.5.

The fact that 2.5 has been too unstable to use, and that the entire development cycle is too long, those are big problems but breaking 2.4 isn't the solution.

2.6.0-test coming soon?

Posted Jan 23, 2003 13:22 UTC (Thu) by MikeDiack (guest, #3036) [Link]

Sadly - it's not difficult to see why this has all happened.

This is _not_ criticising Linus or any of the gang, the simple truth is,
much as for any other software project, people aren't paying enough
attention to the freeze processes.

eg the Feature Freeze at Oct end, is best described as warm and slushy.
(i.e. there have been some new features since, and in some cases the ones in place at the time have been unusable, not just merely buggy)
The code freeze that had been talked for c. Jan 5 has slipped because the
Feature Freeze has slipped etc...

I do think that the scope of the releases would be better defined
at the start of the project, after all most of the Linux kernel gang
have been working on Linux for a long time and thus should know what/how
much is feasible in a 1-2 year window based on previous experience.
(The old point being that it's easier to give good estimates if you've
got some previous experience in the problem domain).