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Stable kernel 2.6.25 released
Linus has released the 2.6.25 kernel.
After nearly three months of
development and the merging of over 12,000 patches from almost 1200
developers, this kernel is now considered ready for wider use. Highlights
of this release include the ath5k (Atheros wireless) driver, a bunch of
realtime work including realtime group scheduling, preemptable RCU, LatencyTop support, a number of
new ext4 filesystem features,
support for the controller area
network protocol, more network namespace work, the return of the timerfd() system call, the page map patches (providing much
better information on system memory use), the SMACK security module, better
kernel support for Intel and ATI R500 graphics chipsets, the memory use controller, ACPI
thermal regulation support, MN10300
architecture support, and much more. See the KernelNewbies
2.6.25 page for lots of details, or the full
changelog for unbelievable amounts of detail.
(Log in to post comments)
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 17, 2008 13:51 UTC (Thu) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] I know there's a lot of stuff in there, but you've not mentioned the TASK_KILLABLE work which I think has a hell of an impact on end-users. No longer must you reboot a machine because you typed 'ls' in an NFS-mounted directory after you wandered out of range of your access point. Now, just press ^C, ls will die and you get your prompt back. NFS is only the beginning. Liam and I have covered the pieces that bug us. Now it's really up to users to tell us where their tasks are hanging. $ ps -eo pid,stat,wchan:40,comm |grep D will give us useful information.
TASK_KILLABLE Posted Apr 17, 2008 14:09 UTC (Thu) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709) [Link] Wow, I look forward to having that on my machine. Finally... I can't tell you how much that annoyed me (and similar hangs) in the last 10 years...
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 17, 2008 14:09 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] For what it's worth, the sysadmins at work literally jumped for joy when they heard of this. (This is using the word 'literally' correctly, too, rather than the too-common usage meaning 'not literally': they jumped up and down.)
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 18, 2008 0:17 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link] That is an amazingly useful feature. Kudos.
TASK_KILLABLE Posted Apr 18, 2008 8:42 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] TASK_KILLABLE has been on my radar - I mentioned it in a merge window summary early in the 2.6.25 cycle. Always meant to look at it a bit more, but it fell through the cracks somehow. That happens to me a lot.Apologies, anyway. This is, indeed, a worthwhile development. The dreaded "stuck in D state" problem has been there for as long as I've worked with Unix-like systems - a long time. It's about time somebody made things work better.
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 19, 2008 1:41 UTC (Sat) by michaelk (subscriber, #1978) [Link] > Now, just press ^C, ls will die and you get > your prompt back. Willy, you say ^C (i.e., SIGINT), but looking at fatal_signal_pending() the only signal that seems to be matched is SIGKILL, so I'd have thought ^C wouldn't be sufficient. What am I missing?
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 19, 2008 7:27 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] You are entirely correct in that ^C by convention sends a SIGINT to the current foreground process. The kernel translates unhandled terminating signals into SIGKILL, so all I have to do in my patchset is check whether SIGKILL is pending. If the process has installed a handler for SIGINT, pressing ^C will have no effect and you will have to resort to kill -9. So I was being sloppy when I said ^C, but most processes do not install a handler for SIGINT, and so will receive a SIGKILL when the user presses ^C. One notable task which does install a handler for SIGINT is bash, so trying to do filename completion on a down NFS server will cause bash to only be killable by -9. That's a user experience I'd like to improve, but I haven't come up with a good solution yet. I have some bad solutions: - fork() in bash to do filename completion. Who wouldn't love a fork() to happen every time they press tab? ;-) - Introduce new readdir() variants which indicate they're interruptible (not just killable), then percolate that knowledge all the way down the stack. IIRC, Linus already NACKed that idea. Thanks for asking the question. Signal handling is a complex beast, and I initially thought that I was going to have to do a more complex check for fatal_signal_pending(), but I just implemented the check for SIGKILL first, and to my surprise ^C worked, so I dug a little deeper and found the translation. Rewarded for being lazy ... who doesn't love that ;-)
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 19, 2008 8:21 UTC (Sat) by michaelk (subscriber, #1978) [Link] > The kernel translates unhandled terminating signals into SIGKILL Where does that translation occur? I couldn't see it.
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 19, 2008 8:31 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]
I see two places where we send SIGKILL in kernel/signal.c. The first is in
__group_complete_signal():
if (sig_fatal(p, sig) && !(p->signal->flags & SIGNAL_GROUP_EXIT) &&
!sigismember(&t->real_blocked, sig) &&
(sig == SIGKILL || !(t->ptrace & PT_PTRACED))) {
[...]
do {
sigaddset(&t->pending.signal, SIGKILL);
signal_wake_up(t, 1);
} while_each_thread(p, t);
The second is in zap_other_threads():
sigaddset(&t->pending.signal, SIGKILL);
signal_wake_up(t, 1);
I'm pretty sure the first case is where it happens.
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 19, 2008 11:14 UTC (Sat) by michaelk (subscriber, #1978) [Link] > I'm pretty sure the first case is where it happens. Yes, looks right to me. Thanks for the pointer.
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 21, 2008 1:18 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] I think leaving bash hung-up until a system administrator sends KILL to it is acceptable in this circumstance. I'd say the same about server applications I've written which have a signal handler only to write a log message explaining why they died (otherwise you have mysteries where the server isn't running and no-one knows why... until they discover a division by zero error weeks later and realise it had exited on SIGFPE) The real frustration isn't that Ctrl-C doesn't work, but that nothing works, and you've fixed that. Having Ctrl-C be effective in such circumstances most of the time is merely a welcome bonus. Similarly making these processes able to be killed by the OOM killer is also a bonus. Is this an example of genuine innovation from Linux (even if it is one that most people won't understand) ? Or is it copied from some other Unix which I'm not familiar with ?
^C vs SIGKILL Posted Apr 21, 2008 5:52 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] I think you only find it acceptable because it's such a huge improvement over what went before ;-) This idea, as far as I'm aware, is the product of Linus' Big Brain back in 2002. The strange thing is that nobody bothered to do it before now.
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 17, 2008 19:35 UTC (Thu) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] better kernel support for Intel and ATI R500 graphics chipsets Pardon my ignorance, but what does that exactly mean? The patches in question seem to make the kernel aware of the device, but not much else. I'm asking this as I'm interested in the kernel / X.org driver disconnect -- is there a page/site which would explain the current state of graphics drivers within the kernel? (or to put it another way, why are graphics drivers being included in X.org instead of directly in the kernel?)
Stable kernel 2.6.25 released Posted Apr 18, 2008 0:56 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] to answer your final question (why are drivers in X instead of the kernel) it basicly boils down to historic reasons, it's always been done that way. X works on many different systems with different kernels and it used the same drivers on all of them. there's work being done currently to define an interface between kernel drivers and X that will shift this boundry significantly, but they will need to keep much of the old code around to support other (and older) systems
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 18, 2008 1:34 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] > [W]hy are graphics drivers being included in > X.org instead of directly in the kernel? The following is based on what I've read as I've followed X events myself, not on any particular first-hand knowledge I have, as I most certainly don't, at least in this area! If aspects or even the entire picture are wrong, please, someone correct me! This is to a large degree historical legacy. X11 thru xfree86 and therefore its in-practice successor xorg were/are designed to be a specific platform agnostic *ix graphics interface. As such, formerly, the push was to keep for-the-most-part unified drivers in X, only putting in the various kernels enough functionality to expose the hardware interface, interrupts and etc, to the user-space X. Back when X was more a networkable protocol with remote (from the user perspective) client and local server aspects and less a direct driver of the 3D hardware common today (to the point where 2D is legacy and now not necessarily included at all, the 3D hardware handles it), that made a lot of sense. Today, as direct (and therefore local) 3D hardware interaction becomes more important, with extension support now and planned traditional X emulation on 3D OpenGL direct implementations a generation or two in the future, the latency and other issues related to all those kernel/userspace transitions now necessary to directly access that hardware are taking their toll, and the push is in the opposite direction. Development into the future is pushing toward each platform implementing its own native drivers and code, with higher level common "stub" drivers in X. As mentioned, this is likely to take the form of kernel drivers implementing OpenGL directly on the hardware, while exposing a common interface to software, both 2D/3D direct, likely mostly in the kernel, and a traditional 2D X, likely implemented mostly in X as a mini-driver interfacing with the kernel drivers. Note that a specific goal of this transition is to maintain and actually improve X's traditional network transparency. By design, it's not going away anytime soon. One improvement will be that due to the layering, it should actually be possible (over a suitable link and with a certain loss in speed, but acceptable in certain applications none-the-less) to do 3D over the network as well, while that aspect is currently extremely limited. The effect is likely to be somewhat like trying to run software 3D today, limited and slower than direct hardware access 3D, but it'll be possible, where it basically isn't today. However, that's a way off still, with a number of intermediate steps in the middle. Linux and the BSDs (among others, Solaris, OSX...) will need to gradually increase their driver functionality in step with xorg's development (and xfree86 still exists too, AFAIK, with at least some of the BSDs having moved rather more slowly to xorg and only now defaulting to it, with both still options) and exposure of mini-drivers and a new common direct hardware access OpenGL API that the kernel drivers can all be written to implement on their side of the interface. We're talking several years of effort, on a journey that's likely to have various unexpected twists and turns of its own, such that the eventual implementation may not look much like it has been described here at all, altho chances are it'll be fairly close and only in the journey will we find the necessary different paths that end up being taken. Confusing to the newbie it certainly can be, but that's what I've gathered from the various articles I've read. Hope it clarifies things a bit for you as it has for me. Duncan
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 18, 2008 9:49 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link] GLX, which is the X11 extension for OpenGL support, has supported networked connections since the beginning. And it does work... when I was a student I ran a graphical application from my dorm room to a SGI workstation on the other side of campus, and it was quite useable.
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 18, 2008 17:01 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] The kernel isn't going to do OpenGL. Doesn't want to do OpenGL. Doesn't need to do OpenGL. OpenGL is huge. The kernel is interested only in mediating userspace access to your graphics hardware. So it does not need to care whether you are sending co-ordinates mixed with color information in the form of 16-bit "half precision" floating point values, which is something you might do with OpenGL -- but instead only cares about whether your userspace program has permission to write to this particular part of the card's RAM, or to twiddle some particular register in the chipset. And yes, like the other poster said, OpenGL already runs fine using GLX on a remote machine, so long as you have enough bandwidth, and a good enough driver. nVidia's (sadly proprietary) driver, plus a cheap 1000baseT network, is enough to play relatively recent 3D games on one machine, with the display on another. I've seen Quake 3 played that way a few years back, and one of the MMORPGs. Network transparency already applies just the same to 3D graphics as with 2D.
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 20, 2008 23:07 UTC (Sun) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] The kernel isn't going to do OpenGL. Doesn't want to do OpenGL. Doesn't need to do OpenGL. OpenGL is huge. The kernel is interested only in mediating userspace access to your graphics hardware. Do correct me if I'm wrong -- isn't the job of the kernel to not only mediate access, but also to abstract hardware? Allowing a user-space program to twiddle a particular register (chip specific, by implication) sounds like weaselly half-a-driver here and half-a-driver there approach. The second part of the driver allegedly lives in user-space, but for all intents and purposes it's an extension to the kernel -- this "user-space" program is directly banging the hardware. Shouldn't the kernel provide a set of primitives on which a hardware-neutral OpenGL / Xorg is built in userspace ?
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 21, 2008 13:18 UTC (Mon) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683) [Link] OpenGL is a massive abstraction, what might make sense is for the kernel to provide an abstraction that is more low level and closer to the hardware than OpenGL that a generic OpenGL implementation can be built on. This is essentially what the Gallium3D people are working on making, although I can't recall how much of that stuff is gonna be in kernel. Modern 3D hardware can be driven primarily by writing to it's memory so the driver can actually run in userspace for little or no penalty, possibly even requiring fewer transitions from kernel to userspace and so actually being faster, this however applies slightly less to older less general graphics hardware. To find out lots about this sort of thing poke around on the nouveau wiki since the direction taken by them is likely to be the direction taken by other open source drivers, and they are moving some things into the kernel that are at the moment userspace only things.
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 19, 2008 1:31 UTC (Sat) by wolfgang.oertl (subscriber, #7418) [Link] Another new feature worth mentioning is that drivers/md/dm-raid1.c (for mirroring) finally does read balancing, not just reading from the first mirror (the older md implementation in drivers/md/raid1.c has had this already). The patch name is "dm raid1: handle read failures" (2008-02-08).
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 19, 2008 10:15 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] What does this mean, exactly, for someone who set up a Fedora 8 server with software raid1 using the standard tools in anaconda? Have I not been getting read balancing, but will get it when F8 moves to 2.6.25?
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 20, 2008 2:10 UTC (Sun) by wolfgang.oertl (subscriber, #7418) [Link] I'm not familiar with Fedora, but you can check whether your setup uses the device mapper or the "md" drivers: type "mount" - if you see lines like /dev/mapper/some-thing then dm is used, and you don't have read balancing yet. OTOH if /dev/md0 and similar is mounted, this is not an issue. Another option is to monitor drive activity with some GUI tool to see whether reads are distributed to all drives of the raid, or have a look at /proc/partitions to check the read counters.
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 20, 2008 4:46 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Really?nix@loki 10 /home/nix% df -Pk / Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted onOh, I can't be using md then: odd, I didn't know they had RAID-5 md-raid yet. Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]Hint: dm allows for a stack of block devices, and you can layer md both above it and (more usefully) below it. This particular system is using the fairly common configuration of LVM-atop-MD, thus is a dm-atop-md system. Checking whether you are using the device mapper is not the same thing as checking whether you are using dm-raid.
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 20, 2008 11:59 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] Well, I am using the mapper. And if I dd from the /dev/mapper/VolGroupxx/LogVolxx/ to /dev/null and then do the same with /dev/sdax, which is the first member of the raid1 array, I get about 61MB/sec in both cases. So I guess I'm not getting read balancing in F8. Or, come to think of it, is the read balancing that fine-grained? I recall somebody telling me, a while back, that it only balanced reads from different processes, and not from the same process, or something like that.
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 20, 2008 12:21 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I can't imagine dm could tell which process was originating the request, even if it wanted to. It's all one by that point.
dm-raid1 improvements Posted Apr 20, 2008 12:44 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] Seemed odd to me, too. Another odd thing is that this kernel release, which I had not really thought was anything all that special, actually has not one, but at least two bombshell features. How did I miss the loud outcry which surely occurred when read balance support in raid1 was lost? And why have both its return, and the new TASK_KILLABLE functionality gotten so little notice?
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