Good pile of fixes made it worth to release current klibc git master. Patches came from Gentoo, Google and Openembedded. For details see klibc 1.5.24 release announcement. Craig Small gives a very bad advice on his recent post Debian Linux on HP DV6-6023TX. As soon as one loads such a binary graphics driver your Linux kernel is marked as tainted. Due to be running a proprietary module your box may behave strangely and is certainly not debuggable. Be aware that in such a case you are no longer running a free and open OS.
What he actually wants is a very recent 3.0 linux image from experimental and to google for vga switcheroo, which leads to the following commit with explanations for
/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch: vga_switcheroo: initial implementation (v15).
This release has several ipconfig (klibc dhclient) enhancements, arm porting fixes and usual cleanups: For details see klibc 1.5.22 release announcements or klibc git.
This new release features /run usage and xz support. For the details see the release announcement of latest initramfs-tools. The upload itself fixes 18 (19) bugs in the Debian BTS and has also a cute lilo support patch hiding under "initramfs-tools: Fix handling of numeric root= arguments to be udev-friendly" coming from Ubuntu. (; Ben Hutchings revamped the bootloader linux-2.6 hooks in order that update-initramfs no longer calls any bootloader by itself. Thank you for all the contributions. The development docs got nicely refreshed too.
I'll collect here links to the various linux-2.6 distribution trees based on the longterm release 2.6.32. I won't go into details of bigger external patches (grsec, openvz, rt, xen, ..), which in consequence also aligned themselves on 2.6.32.
Important bug fixes usually are connected to some bug report, which may be publicly viewable. So from the patch and changelog entry one can usually assume if a certain patch satisfies the stable criteria and forward it for 2.6.32 longterm inclusion (+ other branches where it might apply). If the patch applies and compiles fine with the Debian tree one can assume that the patch will be fine for upstream 2.6.32 as Debian with small exceptions mostly follows the longterm release: 2.6.32 branch of Debian linux-2.6 (Comment: This is currently only a svn mirror but this bug is worked on for next release).
The canonical 2.6.32 linux-2.6 longterm repository is of course on kernel.org maintained by gregkh. Opensuse publishes it's kernel-source on gitorious including all branches and the especially interesting SLE11-SP1 2.6.32 branch. Fedora was following till late Autumn 2.6.32 and the F12 branch has the relevant patches. Ubuntu released 10.04 with 2.6.32 as in a collaborative decision they also based their drm on 2.6.33 (same story as in Debian, thus particularly relevant for us). Oracle had a 2.6.32 that was maintained until Sept 2010 or such.
It is already bad that kernel source in Red Hat doesn't really follow upstream 2.6.32 longterm release itself. For 2.6.18 of course no such option existed, but for 2.6.32 this policy already shows a certain snobbery. Red Hat 6.0 Beta at least shipped kernel-2.6.32-37.el6.src.rpm with broken out patches - since then no patch series or git tree to be seen from RH. This strange move got since picked by lwn - RH "obfuscated" kernel source.
Maximilian, along with the other members of the Debian kernel team, has the overwhelming job of maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian. It s one of the largest package and certainly one where dealing with bug reports is really difficult as most of them are hardware-specific, and thus difficult to reproduce.
He s very enthusiastic and energetic, and does not fear criticizing when something doesn t please him. You ll see.
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Maximilian.
Who are you?
My name is Maximilian
Attems. I am a theoretical physicist in my last year of PhD at the
Technical University of Vienna. My main research area is the early phase of a
Quark-Gluon Plasma as produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. I am
developing simulations that take weeks on the
Vienna
Scientific Cluster (in the TOP 500 list). The rest of the lab is much less fancy and boils down
to straight intel boxes without any binary blobs or external drivers (although
lately we add radeon graphics for decent free 3D). Mathematica and Maple are
the rare exceptions to the many dev tools of Debian (LaTeX, editors, git,
IDE s, Open MPI, ..) found at the institute, as those are unfortunately yet
unmatched in Free Software for symbolic computations. The lab mostly runs a
combination of Debian stable (testing starting from freeze) for desktops and
oldstable/stable for servers. Debian is in use for more than 10 years. So
people in the institute know some ups and downs of the project. Newcomers like
my room neighbors are always surprised how functional a free Debian Desktop
is. 
What s your biggest achievement within Debian?
Building lots and lots of kernels together with an growing uptake of the officially released linux images.
I joined the Debian kernel team shortly after Herbert Xu departed. I had been
upstream Maintainer of the linux-2.6 janitor project for almost a year brewing
hundreds of small cleanups with quilt in a tree named
kjt for
early
linux-2.6. In Debian we had lots
of fun in sorting out the troubles that the long 2.5 freeze had imposed:
Meaning we were sitting on a huge diverging monolithic semi-good patchset.
It was great fun to prepare 2.6.8 for Sarge with a huge team enthusiastic in
shipping something real close to mainline (You have to imagine that back then
you had no stable or longterm release nor any useful free tools like git. This
involved passing patches around, hand editing them and seeing what the result
does.)
From the Sarge install reports a common pattern emerged that the current Debian
early userspace was causing lots of boot failures. This motivated
me to develop an alternative using the new upstream initramfs features. So I got
involved in early userspace. Thanks to large and active development team
initramfs-tools got a nice ecosystem. It still tries to be as generic and
flexible as possible and thus gains many nice features. Also H. Peter Anvin
(hpa) gave me the official
co-maintenance of klibc. klibc saw uptake and good patches from Google
in the last 2 years. I am proud that the early userspace is working out
fairly well these days, meaning you can shuffle discs around and see your box
boot.
Later on we focused on 2.6.18 for Etch, which turned out to a be good release
and picked up by several other distributions. Only very much later
we would see such a sync again. With 2.6.26 for Lenny we got somehow
unlucky as we just missed the new longterm release by one release.
We also pushed for another update very late (during freeze) in the release
cycle, which turned out to semi-work as too much things depend on linux-2.6.
For Squeeze 2.6.32 got picked thanks to discussions at Portland Linux Plumbers
and it turned out to be a good release picked up by many distributions and
external patchsets. The long-term support is going very well. Greg KH is doing
a great job in collecting various needed fixes for it. Somehow we had hoped
that the Squeeze freeze would start sooner and that the freeze duration would be
shorter, since we were ready for a release starting from the actual freeze on.
The only real big bastard on the cool 2.6.32 sync is Red Hat. Red Hat
Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form. They
released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the
GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied.
This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet
generated the sharp and snide comments in press it deserves. Red Hat should
really step back and not make such stupid management moves. Next to them
even the semi-maintained Oracle Unbreakable 2.6.32 branch looks better:
It is git fetchable.
What are your plans and those of the kernel team for Debian Wheezy?
Since 2.6.32 many of the used patches landed upstream or are on the way
(speakup, Kbuild Debian specific targets, ..). The proper vfs based unionfs is
something we d be looking forward. We haven t yet picked the next upstream
release we will base Wheezy on, so currently we can happily jump to the most
recent ones. There are plans for better interaction with Debian Installer
thanks to generating our udebs properly in linux-2.6 source itself. Also we
are looking forward to using git as tool of maintenance. We d hope that this will
also allow for even better cross distribution collaboration.
Concerning early userspace I plan to release an initramfs-tools with
more generic userspace for the default case and finally also a klibc
only for embedded or tuning cases.
What do you like most in Debian?
For one thing I do like the 2 year release cycle. It is not too long to have
completely outdated software and on the other hand it gives enough time to
really see huge progress from release to release. Also at my institute the
software is is recent enough without too much admin overhead. For servers the
three years support are a bit short, but on the manageable side.
I do enjoy a lot the testing distribution. For my personal use it is very stable
and thus I mainly run testing on my desktop and work boxes. (Occasionally
mixing in things from sid for unbreaking transition or newer security fixes).
Debian is independent and not a commercial entity. I think this is its main
force and even more important these days. I enjoy using the Debian platform a
lot at work thus in return this motivates me to contribute to Debian itself. I also like the
fact that we strive for technical correctness.
Is there some recurrent problem that hinders the progress of Debian?
The New Maintainer process is a strange way to discourage people to
contribute to Debian. It is particularly bureaucratic and a huge waste of time
both for the applicant and his manager. It should be completely thrown
overboard.
One needs a more scalable approach for trust and credibility that also enhances
the technical knowledge for coding and packaging of the applicant.
NM is currently set in stone as any outside critics is automatically rejected.
Young and energetic people are crucial for Debian and the long-term viability of
the project, this is the reason why I d consider the New Maintainer process
as Debian s biggest problem.
Note from Rapha l Hertzog: I must say I do not share this point of view on the New Maintainer process, I have witnessed lots of improvements lately thanks to the addition of the Debian Maintainer status, and to the fact that a good history of contribution can easily subsume the annoying Tasks & Skills questionnaire.
Another thing I miss is professional graphics input both for the desktop
theme and the website. I know that effort has been done there lately and
it is good to see movement there, but the end result is still lacking.
Another trouble of Debian is its marketing capabilities. It should learn to better sell itself. It is the distribution users want to run and use not the rebranded copies of itself with lock-in sugar . Debian is about choice and it offers plenty of it: it is a great default Desktop.
Linus Torvalds doesn t find Debian (and/or Ubuntu) a good platform to hack
on the kernel. Do you know why and what can we do about this?
The Fedora linux-2.6 receives contributions from several Red Hat employed
upstream sub-Maintainers. Thus it typically carries huge patches which are not
yet upstream. As a consequence eventual userland troubles get revealed quite
quickly and are often seen there first. The cutting edge nature of Fedora
rawhide is appealing for many developers.
The usual Debian package division of library development files and the library
itself is traditionally an entry barrier for dev on Debian. Debian got pretty
easily usable these days, although we could and should again improve a lot
more in this sector. Personally I think that Linus hasn t tried Debian
for years.
I have the feeling that the implication of the Debian Kernel team in LKML
has been on the rise. Is that true and how do you explain this?
Ben Hutchings is the Nr.1 contributor for
2.6.33.
He also is top listed as author of patches on stable
2.6.32.
Debian is not listed as organization as many send their linux-2.6 patches from
their corporate or personal email address and thus it won t be attributed to
Debian.
There is currently no means to see how many patches get forwarded for
the stable tree, but I certainly forwarded more then fifty patches.
I was very happy when Greg KH personally thanked me in the
2.6.32.12 release.
In the Squeeze kernel, the firmwares have been stripped and moved into
separate packages in the non-free section. What should a user do to ensure
his system keeps working?
There is a debconf warning on linux-2.6 installation. It is quite clear
that the free linux-2.6 can t depend on the firmware of the non-free
archive (also there is no strict dependency there technically).
On the terminal you d also see warnings by update-initramfs on the
initramfs generation for drivers included in the initramfs.
The debconf warning lists the filename(s) of the missing firmware(s). One can then apt-cache search for the firmware package name and install it via the non-free repository. The check runs against the current loaded modules. The match is not 100% accurate for special cases as the one where the device might be handled well by this driver without firmware, but is accurate enough to warrant the warning.
The set of virtualization technologies that the official Debian kernel
supports seems to change regularly. Which of the currently available
options would you recommend to users who want to build on something
that will last?
KVM has been a smooth ride from day zero. It almost got included instantly
upstream. The uptake it has is great as it sees both dev from Intel and AMD.
Together with libvirt it s management is easy. Also the performance of virtio is
very good.
The linux containers are the thing we are looking forward for enhanced chroots
in the Wheezy schedule. They are also manageable by libvirt.
Xen being the bad outside boy has an incredible shrinking patchset,
thus is fair to expect to see it for Wheezy and beyond. For many it may
come a bit late, but for old hardware without relevant CPU it is there.
Many tend to overstate the importance of the virtualization tech. I d be much
more looking forward to the better Desktop support in newer linux-2.6. The
Desktop is important for linux and something that is in heavy use. The much
better graphics support of the radeon and nouveau drivers:
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This release is "slightly" delayed due to lots of physics calculations for my final PhD year at the TU Vienna with all fixes that piled up since last summer: Support for newer GNU make 3.82, x86_32 signal fun, the self explantory KBUILD_REPRODUCIBLE and various cleanups: For details see klibc 1.5.21 release announcements or klibc git.
I seem to have a sweet spot for having troubles with printers in stressy times. For restarting a stopped specific queue under CUPS it is easiest to specify:
cupsenable <queuename>The symmetric command for stopping is cupsdisable.
At the mini-DebConf Paris 2010 the Debian linux-2.6 team released latest 2.6.32-27 adding stable 2.6.32.25 plus security fixes and drm/intel fixes from the Ubuntu shared drm 2.6.33 tree.
Beside the productive Debian kernel team meeting, whose minutes will be forthcoming, the mini Debconf had a great welcoming setup and friendly chats. We enjoyed an impulsive Saturday evening at Chatelet in middle of the funny Parisian Halloween mess. Frans Pop contributions to Debian has already been honoured: Frans Pop obituary by Steve McIntyre. One less known fact is that he hacked in upstream linux-2.6 too. Latest linux-2.6 git lists him with 80 commits. A bigger part of his work was testing latest linux-2.6 on different architectures. There are lots of patches with "Reported-by: Frans Pop <elendil>" and "Tested-by: Frans Pop <elendil>". Also in this field he was aiming for big coverage and a special responsive tester.
I am very sad to have missed the opportunity to meet you in person. You are missed. Rest in peace, my friend.
This release fixes an important ipconfig regression from Lenny due to a badly tested monster patch 4efbcf90f60. ipconfig should now perform better then ever, thanks to the inflow of fixes since Lenny release. This RC fixes are scheduled for Squeeze and it already landed in Sid.
1.5.19 had no release announcement, but fixed compilation on x86_32, the syscall handling on sh4 (initramfs-tools is said to boot fine with it), valgrind ipconfig warnings and added getrusage() for the mksh port.
Thanks to hpa for giving me the official co-maintenance of klibc. Thanks to all contributors.
P.S.: See klibc git repo.
Apparently this statements also holds true for frozen yogurt. An Austrian A1 spokes person has confirmed that the HTC Magic will not receive a 2.1 or 2.2 Android update. One can only wonder about the sugar HTC puts on top of regular Android that hinders themself to update their products. The Austrian A1 carrier sells you the device for a 18 month contract, but actively only supported it for 6 month. I must revise my previous positive review of the HTC Magic.
Some HTC speaker had promised earlier this year an upgrade to at least 2.1: HTC Magic 2.1 upgrade. A SFR speaker had promised an update to current Android: HTC Magic and Nexus One 2.2 upgrade.
The Webkit Android Browser can be easily tricked into leaking your user and passwords: Android Luecke. Beside the obvious that as a user one shouldn't give out to much data to untrusted third party this opens lots of Google accounts for criminal activity. The inability of the carrier to provide a secure and uptodate device is massively deceiving and certainly not appropriate handling of their defects liability.
Landau, L. D.; Lifshitz, E. M. (1976). Course of Theoretical Physics is still the most interesting and solid base that is to be considered as a reference and inspiration in Theoretical Physics.
The reference for "Classical Electrodynamics" is the book by J.D. Jackson. "Advanced Quantum Mechanics" by J.J. Sakurai is a popular student choice. Compendium of Relations contains various formulas and relations of the Standard Model. The Lecture Notes on General Relativity by S. Carroll are a solid introduction for an initiate relativist. "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell" by A. Zee is amazing. Quantum electrodynamics can be explored in the books by "The Quantum Theory of Fields" by S. Weinberg or "Quantum field theory" by L.H. Ryder or Quantum Chromodynamics in M.E. Peskin & D.V. Schroeder "An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory". The lecture notes on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) might be interesting for people diving into the particle physics standard model. "Finite-temperature field theory: Principles and Application" discusses systems in equilibrium but at finite temperatures and chemical potentials and thus connects to cosmology of the early universe.
The field of Statistical Field Theory has the classic "Quantum Many-Particle Systems" by J.W. Negele and H. Orland or the more recent "Quantum Field Theory of Many-Body Systems" by X-G. Wen or "Ultracold Quantum Fields" by H.T.C Stoof, D.B.M. Dickerscheid, K. Gubbels.
String Theory is so diverse that you'll find lots of different approaches, recommendations are Graduate Course in String Theory by A. Uranga, Applied Conformal Field Theory by P. Ginsparg, Lectures on String Theory by D. Tong or more introductory the book "A First Course in String Theory
" by B. Zwiebach or the dense "Superstring Theory" by M. Green, J. Schwarz and E. Witten, "String Theory" by J. Polchinski. "Quantum Field Theory of Point Particles and Strings" by B. Hatfield assumes no previous stringy background and is known for excellent explanation of the path integral formalism. M. Nakahara wrote the wonderfull bridge to maths: "Geometry, Topology and Physics".
So please when looking for "references" in theoretical physics venture on solid grounds and don't get distracted by sketchy notes.
Update: Peter West pointed out that the The Feynman Lectures on Physics are missing as a timeless reference.
The overdue dash sync from 0.5.3 took a month to be done, but now klibc is shipping newer dash 0.5.6 then actual unstable dash.
Fixes for this release include fstype support for btrfs and ext4 without journal. Moving README's around so that they can be shipped for avid readers: README.ipconfig go :) The goodie from this time is the sh4 build fix form the very active Debian sh4 porters. ipconfig, nfsmount and kinit have now simpler DEBUG build. ipconfig build warnings got shot by a Google patch.
If your patch hasn't made it yet, please ping me for next queue: klibc git repo, Unofficial patch queue.
P.S.: Ubuntu Lucid pushes out klibc 1.5.17 thanks to Colin Watson.
Heavy Ion collisions try to recreate conditions very shortly after the Big Bang. Thus the created quark gluon plasma is often the Little Bang, due to recreating this very hot conditions. Not only fixes ipconfig regressions due to fixes in 1.5.16, but ipconfig should no longer discard useful packages. We also fixed a long standing klibc sparc specific socket bug (#444087): sparc lists socket system calls, but does not provide all of them natively. So one is better off on sparc to use sys_socketcall.
Thanks to Jan Hauke Rahm the packaging switched to modern Source Format 3.0 (quilt) with debhelper 7 usage reducing cdbs overhead on build. This is a big switch and makes me very happy.
New addition include a $(make help) target in Makefile to ease klibc build. A small losetup got added to klibc-utils.
i386 and sparc build fine against current linux-libc-dev: klibc-1.5.17 released The upload reduced RC count by one as klibc builds against recent linux-libc-dev including 2.6.34-rc1. Also libklic-dev uses them directly once installed thanks to a patch from Ben Hutchings. The klibc build saw several fixes from a big and refined Google patch queue.
The klibc-utils mount grew several useful features and ipconfig saw lots of bug fixes (send requested optional hostname, raise field length for rootpath DHCP option, ..): hpa klibc 1.5.16 release announce, Git klibc repo.
Update: According to build log there is still work todo for i386 and sparc. :)
Experimental 2.6.33 will do the switch to UUID based root args, if you haven't switched already. Please test it out and report bugs on it, before we add the libata switch to squeeze 2.6.32.
2.6.32-9 includes 2.6.32.9 and several other fixes. For the following 2.6.32-10 Ben Hutchings pulled in newer drm for lots of intel fixes: Status of kernel X drivers. It also features radeon and nouveau KMS modules. Current 2.6.32 is stabilizing well and we are seeing lots of external patches lining up.
Update: Sorry due to jet lag got aboves version number wrong. You might want also to checkout: The season I have mostly been building kernels.
When you just read the following sentence:
"usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer".
You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone. I love the fact that phones are ready to get a decent OS. I bought the phone for better connectivity and to get GPS goodness. 90 days later seems a good time to review the pros and cons:
Next.
