my experiences with kernel 2.4.0...
i just compiled 2.4.0. very impressive! unfortunately, it's starting to
look like dselect. i'd say they increased config options by about 50%. it
took quite awhile to go through everything. if you use 'make oldconfig',
have a cup of coffee at your side; it'll take a while!
there are some very interesting and innovative new options. one of them
talks about being able to update firmware on your CPU. sounds really cool,
but i'm not sure if i'm interpreting this correctly. can you "flash" the
CPU the way you can a bios chip? i've never heard of such a thing; doesn't
seem possible.
as promised, 4front technologies GPL'd some of its older oss drivers like the
AWE stuff, and it works great. lots of new sound cards are natively
supported. TONS of firewire and USB stuff (i'll be getting a USB zip drive,
and will report about that soon). even the diamond rio found its way into
the kernel.
netorking was redone from the ground up. i noticed that some historically
problematic drivers which supported a whole plethora of cards, like the
rtl8129, have been "broken up" to support less cards. this means more
drivers, but hopefully those drivers will work more reliably. as promised,
ipchains has been replaced by netfilter, although you have the option of
continuing to use ipchains. i recommend people to keep ipchains for now.
there are some tricky configuration issues involved. for example, if you
say to "fast switching", packets can bypass the netfilter. i'm sure stuff
like that will change as people start to complain...
there is now _native_ support for framebuffers for just about every card
i've ever seen. notably, native support for the voodoo3/banshee (yeah!).
i guess you get one "penguin" at bootup for each CPU, so SMP people may
think they're seeing double. had me do a doubletake...
if you can't find the hard drive/floppy/cdrom options under "block devices",
don't panic. despite what you see, linux still does support hard drives,
and there's no plan to stop supporting them. :) all these options are
under a new heading "ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support". i have no idea why they
were shaved off of block devices.
linus and alan have a new plan for device files which will "modernize"
linux. 10 years ago, device files ruled; they were a simple, organized way
to access hardware. however,
# ls /dev/ | wc --words
1375
it's a zoo. take a look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt! and
nobody really ever uses more than 10 anyhow. the new way of doing this is
to have an almost empty /dev/, and let the kernel create the device files
when a driver registers itself, on the fly. so 1375 goes down to 10. this
is still optional and experimental under linux 2.4. i suspect it'll still be
optional under 2.6. this is a _major_ paradigm shift from standard unix.
one last thing -- i noticed that 'make oldconfig' didn't work perfectly.
there were some options which didn't propagate. for some of the device drivers
which have been split (i think tulip is another one), make oldconfig will
give you neither one, for some reason. so you'll *definitely* want to scan
your config file to make sure you have everything you need. heaven forbid
the "support ext2" option doesn't propagate... ;)
have fun!
pete
