Day 2: Keynote: World Domination: Classified Progress Report and Briefing

Alan gave us that keynote and came to listen to it too

.
That's a new concept I should have thought of: do a remote controlled talk and sit in confy chairs to watch it

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Anyway, here are a few random talks from Alan's talk:

2.2.39 may be the last 2.2.x series kernel and now only very few carefully tested changes are merged in
Vendors are asked to submit 2.4 drivers along with 2.2 now, and most drivers will only go in 2.4 now.
For Alan, 2.4.0 works fairly well. Alpha and x86 work out of the box.
There are patches for
- ARM
- IA64
- PPC
- S/390 (the cool thing is that on that platform, you can run both 2.2 and test 2.4)
- Sparc
- MIPS is being worked on
What will be in 2.5? When will it come out? See Alan's slide

More seriously, Linus will delay 2.5 until 2.4 is reasonably stable to encourage people to debug the current tree before writing yet more not quite stable code in 2.5
2.4 now boots properly on machines setup for a PnP OS, which could fail miserably on 2.2. This code was required for proper operation of things like sound on a vaio laptop.
Now that linux supports 64G of Ram on ia32, there is the issue of 32bit PCI cards that can't address more than 4G of Ram, so new APIs were written for that.
Hotplug PCI is now supported and code to do PCI DMA access properly was also written.
Networking has been thoroughly fixed and cleaned. Space.c is almost gone.
As for SCSI, it was improved a bit, but the old error handler should really go away in 2.5 (The new error handling code will just take offline devices that are misbehaving because resetting the device and then the whole card can actually cause more harm than help).
The old error handling code will be removed in 2.5 to force drivers to be updated.
Block drivers have been changed too. The elevator function can be tuned
The problem with character drivers is that we still have some very old drivers that use cli()/sti() and that no one has fixed because hardly anyone has those cards anymore. Some network driver was broken from 2.2.0 to 2.2.12 because no one had the card anymore and it took until 2.2.12 for someone to actually try 2.2 with his card.

Those few notes do not give credit to Alan's talk though, it's kind of a "you had to be there" talk. Sorry

[picture]
Don't you like his tourist costume?

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2001/01/27 (19:04): Version 1.0