It will work somewhat like that...

Posted Aug 16, 2008 14:01 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: It will work somewhat like that... by drag
Parent article: Something going on with Fedora

It added much better level of interactivity, better response.

Well, I haven't noticed better interactivity - the kernel might be better in this field, but it still takes a long time to start applications. What made a better desktop experience is the usage of multicore processors: if an application eats up 100% of CPU time, the rest of the system still works.

significantly better hardware detection and hotplug capabilities.

I've changed my monitor recently from a CRT to an LCD. Windows detected it fine, but under Linux I had to edit xorg.conf manually. Not much of an improvement...

I also no longer have to drop to root to mount USB drives.

Yes. Unfortunately it also means that the inserted CDs and DVDs are mounted at various places, usually not at /cdrom where it used to be. Again, I'd consider this a change, not an improvement.

I don't have to drop to root to switch networks or join a vpn...

Good for you - on my laptop Linux doesn't notice if I take it down from the docking station, I have to issue an 'ifconfig down; ifconfig up' to get the network working again. Of course, usually I have to reboot, because the graphics adapter doesn't switch to the internal LCD either, but let's blame it on the proprietary driver.

I now actually have suspend-to-ram that actually works.

Interestingly suspend-to-disk used to work for me in 2.4. Now, of course, it doesn't.

It will work somewhat like that...

Posted Aug 16, 2008 23:39 UTC (Sat) by strcmp (subscriber, #46006) [Link]

Starting applications looks like interactivity from a user's perspective, but for the kernel this counts as throughput: how long does it need to open all the files, read the data from disk (in the case of libraries this tend to be random reads, mainly determined by disk seek speed), parse the configuration data and setup the program. The interactivity drag talked about was scheduling threads when they are needed, i.e. no audio and video skips, fast reaction to mouse clicks.

It will work somewhat like that...

Posted Aug 17, 2008 12:48 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Three of your complaints seem to be based on running a third party proprietary video driver.

My free software driver detects the supported resolutions of connected displays at runtime
without any configuration. It works for my five year old LCD panel, my mother's old CRT, her
new widescreen panel, the projector at work, and so on. So X.org gets this right, but
obviously your proprietary driver has the option to screw it up

Replacing the only connected display in a single set shouldn't require a reboot either.
Detecting the change needs an interrupt, the proprietary driver ought to use this interrupt to
initiate the necessary reconfiguration. Alternately you could bind the change to a keypress
(my laptop has a button which seems labelled for this exact purpose).

Suspend to disk is most commonly blocked by video drivers that can't actually restore the
state of the graphics system after power is restored. This is excusable when the driver has
been reverse engineered despite opposition from the hardware maker (e.g. Nouveau) but seems
pretty incompetent if it happens in a supposedly "supported" proprietary driver from the
company that designed the hardware.

Nothing Linus or anyone else working on 2.6 could have done would have made proprietary
drivers stop being third rate. If you go look at Microsoft's hardware vendor relationships
you'll see they have the same exact problem, and they have to endlessly threaten and bribe
vendors to get them to produce code that's even halfway decent.

As to the other comments... the mount point for detected media is configurable by your
distribution or by you (the administrator) so if you're sure you'd like CDROMs mounted in
/cdrom it's not difficult to arrange for that, and still keep the auto-mounting (it's also not
difficult to disable the auto-mounting if you just don't like that). Newer 2.6 kernels also
support (but your hardware may well not) auto-detecting inserted or removed CDs/DVDs without
needing to poll the drive. Surely even if you want the mount point to be /cdrom, it's
convenient that with 2.6 + udev any CD ROM drive connected to your laptop (whether from the
base station, via USB or whatever) gets a symlink called /dev/cdrom ?

Of course if all your hardware was really well supported in 2.4 then you'll notice less
improvement from 2.6. Infrastructure-wise it seems much nicer to me. Less hard-wired
assumptions and more exposure of events to userspace.

It will work somewhat like that...

Posted Aug 18, 2008 14:45 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Nothing Linus or anyone else working on 2.6 could have done would have made proprietary drivers stop being third rate.

Except not changing the internal interfaces every other week...

the mount point for detected media is configurable by your distribution or by you

Surely. The problem is that I've never found where it could be configured. Also I used to have a /dev/dvd link that was lost somewhere between upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy (which was a bad decision). I have a feeling that distributions tend to make first time installation working fine, but they still have problems with upgrades. I'm pretty sure that upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista is also quite painful, but while Windows users need to update only every 3-4 years, Linux users have to update much more often.

all your hardware was really well supported in 2.4 then you'll notice less improvement from 2.6

Actually 2.4 supported my hardware at that time better than 2.6 supports my hardware now. And it's not just graphics card - xawtv used to be able to control the volume, but not it just doesn't work. It's annoying enough that I'm using Windows more and more at home.