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See the original image at linuxdevices.com

Linux gains new architecture

linuxdevices.com — The 2.6.25 kernel, currently in the final stages of testing, adds support for Marvell's Feroceon micro-architecture and "Orion" SoCs, with Debian support waiting in the wings. Hackers, start your NAS engines!

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  • ArthurSucks, on 03/27/2008, -6/+912.6 second boot times? I think I just came a little.
    • Sammi84, on 03/27/2008, -2/+34I had a whole nerdgasm.
    • clesch, on 03/27/2008, -3/+23And you care about your boot time of your embedded NAS because... ?
      • thcobbs, on 03/27/2008, -1/+15Because it won't be a NAS for long.
    • Naidim, on 03/27/2008, -4/+16Call me when ANY OS beats the Amiga's under 2 second boot time.
      • provost, on 03/27/2008, -3/+11palmOS
        • SteveMax, on 03/27/2008, -0/+2In which Palm? Every Tungsten, Zire and Treo I've tested takes way longer than an Amiga to boot.
        • t0ny, on 03/27/2008, -0/+5My LifeDrive takes like 3 mins to boot...
      • aldableep3, on 03/27/2008, -1/+21my N64.. im not even joking either any old cartridge based system is loading an OS and booting, its just instantaneous
        • Megatog615, on 03/27/2008, -2/+1No cartridge-based system runs an OS. They load the cartridge data into memory and then execute it with a simple bios. There is no kernel, they just get simple hardware access from the BIOS ROM.
          • aldableep3, on 03/28/2008, -0/+2can anyone confirm/disprove this? because im pulling my hair out trying to think whether or not megatog is right.. it might actually be console-specific
          • nmnnotmyname, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1It would be possible for it to have a kernel, but I know the N64 does not.
      • Nossie, on 03/27/2008, -0/+1boot roms dont count m8, if that was the case, old world macs would beat the amiga

        (no disrespect to the blessed amiga) only sayin :P
      • Langford, on 03/27/2008, -0/+1My Vic 20 boots very fast.
      • Fergy, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1SplashTop is pretty fast. But what we consumers really want is a computer that is never really off. Would you care if your pc would always use at least 1-4 watt but gave you instant boot times?
        http://www.overclock.net/hardware-news/309758-phor ...
    • sint4x, on 03/27/2008, -1/+11With this, you'd be 2.6 second man.
    • jackyyll, on 03/27/2008, -1/+57Rebooting is for windows users.
      • ehal256, on 03/27/2008, -3/+7starting up is for everyone. At least once :P
      • kazamx, on 03/27/2008, -0/+10I have to reboot at least once every six months. Dam new Nvidia drivers with every Ubuntu Upgrade.
        • eFiniTi, on 03/28/2008, -0/+2Just restart Xorg! Your leet operating system runtime is at stake!
        • Culyt, on 03/28/2008, -0/+0Unfortunantly the problem is generally that the new nvidia drivers stop working because your still using the older kernel. You carn't restart your kernel... yet... (or can kexec do that) Although if you could it would be effectively rebooting anyway since you would have to restart everything.
      • piesforyou, on 03/27/2008, -4/+4Rebooting is for people who care about their electricity bills.
      • carlosos, on 03/28/2008, -1/+3I guess you mean Windows 9x users...
      • Kamujin, on 03/28/2008, -4/+3Running Ubuntu 7.10 here and I get the "reboot required" message no less frequently then I did on Windows.
        The Linux never needs a reboot argument is a stupid one made by ignorant people.
        I still like Ubuntu better, but not for something as stupid as rebooting.
        • zman14321, on 03/28/2008, -0/+3After certain major updates ubuntu suggests a reboot. Windows in my experience would ask to reboot and if you said know beat you down with reminders every ten seconds until you gave in. Windows also asked me to reboot every time minor changes were made, and after being logged in for a couple of days the OS would have random hanging issues, be slower and less responsive. Also with windows bizarre problems often went away after reboot. With Microsoft's OS I had to reboot all the time. With gnu/linux its when I feel like it.
        • Buu700, on 03/28/2008, -0/+3In Ubuntu or any other *nix OS AFAIK reboots are only necessary after kernel upgrades and the like, but only to boot into the new kernel (i.e. you can just not reboot if you want to stay with the old kernel). In Windows, a reboot is required after every systemwide change (i.e. extremely often).
          • Giga, on 03/28/2008, -0/+2OS X asks to reboot after quite a few updates such as iTunes and wifi stuff.
        • jackyyll, on 03/29/2008, -0/+2[marc@debian-server ~]$ uptime
          3:35 up 114 day, 5:06, 5 users, load averages: 0.71 0.38 0.27

          Yeah, i get so many needed reboots.
    • tnoy, on 03/27/2008, -0/+3If you actually knew what the article is about, you'd know a 2.6 second boot time is nothing new.
  • lickmyback, on 03/27/2008, -0/+33Lighttpd + custom PHP interface + mega huge NAS box could be quite cute...
  • FizzanoMatrix, on 03/27/2008, -2/+14This could do some serious damage it looks like. RISC architecture's gonna change everything...
  • momsshizzle, on 03/27/2008, -48/+2Sweet! Not!! Linsux.
  • speel, on 03/27/2008, -1/+10Desktop use?
    • Sargasso_C, on 03/27/2008, -0/+2Maybe, wireless data silos. Maybe, wireless HD streaming servers. Maybe, even, wireless database services for inventory and transaction administration in retail areas. How about, integrating NATs as autonomous components in open urban wireless broadband networks? So many possibilities, so little imagination.
  • Ramsees79, on 03/27/2008, -17/+1More API Break? Great, that's all we need.
    Will Linux hackers make up their minds some time?
    • JohnFlux, on 03/27/2008, -0/+5Where does it say that they broke any API?
  • SQLserver, on 03/27/2008, -2/+40Linux runs on practically everything these days... It's amazing how portable and adaptable it is.
    • jbmcb, on 03/27/2008, -7/+3Of *Course* it runs NetBSD :)
    • yojiffyskippy, on 03/27/2008, -5/+4Practically everything isn't good enough.
      • daftman, on 03/28/2008, -0/+3So what's good enough? Run only a small range of hardware?
  • TomKarpik, on 03/27/2008, -16/+3FreeBSD.

    'nuff said.
  • DjArcadian, on 03/27/2008, -10/+2That computer looks like an old stackable stereo system.
  • TheZorch, on 03/27/2008, -2/+62You know I've notice way more Linux innovations in the past six months than I've seen come from Microsoft for Windows in FIVE YEARS.
    • earthmansurfer, on 03/27/2008, -1/+17Yeah, I think we are starting to see the sheer numbers of linux developers swarm the limited number of "paid" MS developers.
      Anyone have any numbers on this?
    • kazamx, on 03/27/2008, -2/+18Remember that there are 2 sorts of developer for Linux.

      Those who are paid, such as all the developers working for Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, a thousand different embedded projects, Governments, small companies and well lots of others. There are also all the people cracking out good code in their spare time. The difference is that the code developed is available for everyone to use, so less time is wasted on redoing the same thing over and over for each project.

      Microsoft needs to pay a developer to make pretty much everything. If Apple does something cool they need to pay a developer to copy it. In linux If Red Hat does something cool, Novell can just take it. When Novell does something cool Ubuntu can just take it. To keep ahead everyone needs to keep coming up with cool stuff to make themselves stand out.

      Open Source is the future, it can't be stopped.
      • WorLord, on 03/27/2008, -3/+0Actually, it was my understanding that Canonical's case was different. People work for Canonical (paid), but they only support Ubuntu. Ubuntu developers and packages (paid) number in the tens of people, and the rest of the work on Ubuntu is done by spare-time (unpaid) devs.

        I could be wrong, but I do remember reading that somewhere, I think in an interview with Mark Shuttleworth.
        • daftman, on 03/27/2008, -0/+1On the marketing side, they would say that they are "supporting" Ubuntu. However, on the technical innovation side, every distro share their technology since the source code are open. LInux distro maintainers make money through support, not through selling product. You would also find that the MAJORITY of money are made through selling support.
  • mike503, on 03/27/2008, -1/+4i ran 2.6.25-rc6 just a few days ago with the new e1000e driver - i had tons of dmesg'ed errors. i don't know how close it is to "release" ... i'm happy to see linux gaining more and more hardware support, but i would like to see it figure out some intelligent way of distributing the kernel in chunks instead of having to download an ever-growing archive that unpacked is over 250 megs now...
    • nmnnotmyname, on 03/28/2008, -0/+1Running GIT on my x86, its moving along pretty nicely. You have to do patching on the NVidia Glue layer and on the kernel if you use an NVidia card but it will hopefully all be good soon. Additionally, If you use an Xbox 360 wireless controller, the xpad360 driver will no longer compile - just take out the offending line and it compiles & works.
    • qwuinc, on 03/30/2008, -0/+1They've provided patches for as long as I remember, and if that's not enough, you could just use git. My linux-2.6 .git directory is 277 MiB, so it's not exactly a problem to keep the whole history :-)
  • lupicite, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6What is the difference between main kernel support *AND* Debian support? Debian is just a distribution, unless this is some use of the term I'm not familiar with.
    • kazamx, on 03/27/2008, -0/+2Good question, does anyone know?
      • WorLord, on 03/27/2008, -0/+3Debian kernels have a different build mechanism than standard kernels. There's a few extra steps involved, and in the end you get an installable series of *.deb package files out of it, as opposed to the standard VMLinz files. The *.deb files, when installed, do all the kernal installation jazz for you, including the creation of an initrd image and modification of the bootloader.

        "Debian Support" is, perhaps, a slight misnomer. I think it means that someone is going to make the Debs and add them to the debian repository soon.
        • antdude, on 03/27/2008, -1/+1So why was 2.6.24 skipped? Why is Debian waiting for 2.6.25? I am still on 2.6.22 and didn't see anything newer from testing areas.
    • 32bytes, on 03/27/2008, -0/+4Debian is a binary distro, and famous for supporting quite a lot of different arquitectures.

      Adding support for a new arquitecture in the kernel, does not magically compiles everything for the new arch.
    • tnoy, on 03/27/2008, -0/+3The kernel is practically useless without the userland tools.
  • apoc2050, on 03/27/2008, -1/+3Wide webpage is wide.
  • LOVEANDEQUALITY, on 03/27/2008, -8/+3UBUNTU!
  • ninja0, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6Gentoo :)
  • ShootTheCore, on 03/27/2008, -1/+2Anyone know what this means for the end user?
    • DontThinkSo, on 03/27/2008, -0/+3Nothing, probably - unless you decide you want to run linux on your NAS.
  • AppleMacStud, on 03/28/2008, -10/+1Perhaps this will help Linux go from an amazing and stunning 0.67% desktop market share to a phenomenal full 1%. (^__^)
    • nmnnotmyname, on 03/28/2008, -1/+6*This message brought to you by someone who knows nothing about Open Source. He will not be here for comments, however, busy sucking the ***** of Steve Jobs.
  • iwod, on 03/28/2008, -0/+5I dont understand what does it mean. So Those NAS are not already using Linux can finally install Linux on it?

    Would we finally see some huge performance increase in transfer speed. Coz all current NAS are really really slow.
  • gadgeek, on 04/08/2008, -0/+1getting an architecture into mainline is a huge boon for everyone, because it means that future versions of Linux will also run on the architecture. The chip becomes forward compatible. Special patches -- the biggest barrier to hacking -- are no longer needed. And Debian support means that pre-built binaries are available, too, so you don't even have to compile your own.
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