KernelTrap - release

Git 1.6.0 Released

Jeremy — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:46:18 +0000

"The latest feature release GIT 1.6.0 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer, Junio Hamano, announcing the latest stable release of the distributed version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds. Among the current changes, Junio noted, "with the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now installed outside your $PATH, except for 'git', 'gitk' and some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical reasons." He continued, "by default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking, introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5." Julio highlighted several other changes, including the addition of a '.sample' extension to the default trigger scripts to be sure they don't execute in a default install, and the removal of the 'stupid' merge strategy. Other changes include:

"Git-gui learned to stage changes per-line; Reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the 'git' binary; When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even when the same object is available in a loose form, we now try harder to fall back to these redundant objects when able; performance of 'git-blame -C -C' operation is vastly improved; even more documentation pages are now accessible via 'man' and 'git help'; longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been addressed; pager. configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the default paging behaviour per command; git-cvsserver learned to respond to 'cvs co -c'; 'git-diff -p' learned to grab a better hunk header lines in BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to chapter and part boundary in TeX documents; error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather than '403 forbidden' as we used to issue everywhere; git-merge has been reimplemented in C."

DragonFly BSD 2.0, HAMMER Filesystem

Jeremy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:48:18 +0000

"Hurrah! 2.0 has been released!" said Matthew Dillon, announcing the eighth major release of DragonFly BSD. This release is the first to include HAMMER, a new clustering filesystem that already boasts an impressive list of features, including: "crash recovery on-mount, no fsck; fine-grained snapshots, snapshot management, snapshot-support for filesystem-wide data integrity checks; historically accessible by default; mirroring: queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; undo and rollback; reblocking; multi-volume, maximum storage capacity of 1-Exabyte." Other highlighted changes in this release include, "native fairq-queue implementation using ALTQ, for PF", and "native connection state recovery to PF, so router reboots do not drop active TCP connections."

The latest version of DragonFly BSD can be downloaded from a mirror. The download page explains:

"DragonFly CDs are 'live', which means that the CD will boot your system and let you log in as root (no password). You can use this feature to check for hardware compatibility and play with DragonFly a little before actually installing it on your hard drive."

2.6.26, "A Longer-Than-Usual Release Cycle"

Jeremy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:13:55 +0000

"It's been almost three months since 2.6.25 (87 days to be exact, I think), making this a longer-than-usual release cycle. Or maybe it just feels that way, and we're always getting close to three months these days," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26 Linux kernel, adding, "but it's out there now." He continued:

"The diffs from -rc9 are pretty small, with with the bulk actually being Documentation updates (almost 80% is just added docs). The rest tends to be one-liners for some regressions or otherwise pretty small patches. Several regressions did get fixed in the last few days, thanks to everybody involved."

Click the 2.6.26 tag to review all the previous release candidate announcements building up to this release. Source level changes can be reviewed via Linus' 2.6 gitweb kernel tree. The latest kernel can be downloaded from the Linux Kernel Archives.

Git 1.5.6, "Relatively Small Impact Changes"

Jeremy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:04:03 +0000

"As promised, this cycle was short and the release is with only relatively small impact changes," said Git maintainer Junio Hamano, announcing the release of Git v1.5.6. He noted that both gitk and git-gui have been updated. To improve portability, when running "git init", git now autodetects whether or not a filesystem is case insensitive, and updates a new configuration variable accordingly. Dependencies on the 'cpio' and 'curl' binaries have also been removed. Among the changes improving performance, the "git clone" command has been rewritten in C. Other changes include:

"'git bisect help' gives longer and more helpful usage information; 'git branch' (and 'git checkout -b') can be told to set up branch..rebase automatically, so that later you can say 'git pull' and magically cause 'git pull --rebase' to happen; 'git cherry-pick' and 'git revert' can add a sign-off; 'git commit' mentions the author identity when you are committing somebody else's changes; 'git log' and friends learned the '--graph' option to show the ancestry graph at the left margin of the output; 'git send-email' now can send out messages outside a git repository; 'git svn' learned --add-author-from option to propagate the authorship by munging the commit log message; new object creation and looking up in 'git svn; has been optimized."

GCC 4.3.1, Bug Fixes

Jeremy — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:20:14 +0000

Jakub Jelinek announced the availability of GCC 4.3.1 saying, "GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds the standard tag, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.3.1 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

GCC 4.2.4, Bug Fix Release

Jeremy — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:41:10 +0000

Joseph Myers announced the availability of GCC 4.2.4 saying, "GCC 4.2.4 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.2.4 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

OpenBSD 4.3 Released

Jeremy — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:37:23 +0000

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.3," began OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt. "This is our 23rd release on CD-ROM (and 24th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install." He added, "as in our previous releases, 4.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system". Four platforms were listed as new or extended, including: sparc64 gained SMP support, "this should work on all supported systems, with the exception of the Sun Enterprise 10000"; hppa K-class servers are now supported; mvme88k gained SMP support on a couple of systems, and support for the 88110 processor was added. Numerous drivers were listed as new or improved, including a huge list of network drivers:

"The bge(4) driver now supports BCM5906/BCM5906M 10/100 and BCM5755 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the cas(4) driver now supports Cassini+ 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the em(4) driver now supports ICH9 10/100 and 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the gem(4) driver now supports the onboard 1000base-SX interface on the Sun Fire V880 server; the ixgb(4) driver now supports the Sun 10Gb PCI-X Ethernet devices; the msk(4) driver now supports Yukon FE+ 10/100 and Yukon Supreme 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the nfe(4) driver now supports MCP73, MCP77 and MCP79 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the ral(4) driver now supports RT2800 based wireless network devices; the cmpci(4) driver now supports CMI8768 based audio adapters; the it(4) driver now supports ITE IT8705F/8712F/8716F/8718F/8726F and SiS SiS950 ICs; new bwi(4) driver for the Broadcom AirForce IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device; new et(4) driver for the Agere/LSI ET1310 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet device; new etphy(4) driver for the Agere/LSI ET1011 TruePHY Gigabit Ethernet PHY; new iwn(4) driver for the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN IEEE 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N wireless network device; new upgt(4) driver for the Conexant/Intersil PrismGT SoftMAC USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device."

A more complete list of changes can be found here. ONLamp also recently posted an interview titled, "Puffy and the Cryptonauts: What's New in OpenBSD 4.3". Theo noted, "profits from CD sales are the primary income source for the OpenBSD project -- in essence selling these CD-ROM units ensures that OpenBSD will continue to make another release six months from now."

2.6.25, "Long Promised"

Jeremy — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:48:01 +0000

"It's been long promised, but there it is now," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, "special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries." Linus added:

"The full changelog from 2.6.24 is 7.5M, with a 12MB compressed patch. Tons and tons has changed, but if you've been following the -rc releases, you'll already know about the big things. The changes from the last rc (-rc9) are fairly small and mostly pretty trivial, and the shortlog is appended. So it's mostly one-liners, with some updates to drivers (net and usb) and to networking that are a bit larger (although a number of the driver updates are things like just new ID's etc)."

More information about the latest release can be found on the KernelNewbies Linux 2.6.25 wiki page.