Kernel 2.6.6 Released

[Bana]

Get it fresh, kernel 2.6.6, get 'em while there hot! This time around looks like the default is 4k kernel stacks (I think Fedora's 2.6.5 already has this as default) and Linus highlighted these improvements since 2.6.5:

"NTFS, XFS, FAT and CIFS updates. IDE cache-flush at shutdown fixes. ppc, sparc, s390 and ARM updates (and a few x86-64 fixes)."

Full Changelog at kernel.org
Kernel.org

[Picomp314]

no thanks, my 2.6.5 custom build will do till nvidia adds support for 4KSTACKS and REGPARM

[Ug]

I tend to leave my kernel alone.

[dpw2atox]

using 2.6.6 currently and 4k stacks was not enabled by default for me. i like using custom kernels personally......without using it i wouldn't be using libata for my serial ata controller which definantly works better than the default silicon image module.

[ghaefb]

Yesterday compiled 2.6.6, I had 3 random freezes.. now I'm back to my custom 2.6.5
wtf

[Finalzone]

I got a Kernel Panic from booting. What can cause the problem.

[boyzonder]

Kernel panic could be caused by lot's of things, amongst others:

- Compiling for the wrong architecture :-)

- Compiling things as modules that should not have been compiled as modules. Just to give you an idea, this is the case for drivers your kernel needs to access the root drive (driver for SCSI / SATA controller, for instance), RAM disk and initrd support, ext3 (or whichever filesystem you use) driver, and probably some more. If you compile these as modules then your kernel won't be able to find them in the kernel image and the poor penguin will panic.

Hope this helps you in the right direction!

[Finalzone]

Thank you very much

[Varkk]

Just a quick question, how many people have enabled the pre-emtible kernel option when compiling for their desktop machines? I have it enabled on my one at home and it is absolutly brilliant. It is kind of annoying that it isn't enabled by default in FC2 (Although it is best to have it turned off for servers and that is RedHat's main market so I understand why they did it that way)

[Bana]

I have heard that preemtibility isn't that much different than regular. Do you have any hard numbers? (performance wise?) or does it just feel faster?

[Varkk]

Well basically with preemption on I can have some big task running in the background without my music playing getting lagged and stuttery and the desktop doesn't lag. I have had these problems especially on my RH9 laptop. With FC2 and 2.6.6 with preemption enabled the desktop etc runs fine. I think the background computational tasks go a bit slower but I don't care about that so long as I can browse the web and listen to music etc while doing it. Some of this may be due to ALSA being superior to OSS and the improved task scheduler between 2.6 and 2.4 but I also noticed it felt better between stock FC2 kernel and my 2.6.6 build. As I said preemption is not something you would enable on a backend server but for a personal desktop it is great.

[owakroeger]

When I loaded FC2 from RH9, I noticed that everything seemed to run slower, and really bog down, sometimes, if I was running some task in the background. What is 'pre-emlible', and where do I go to enable/disable it?