If I had to guess, Linus is playing it safe, and making sure the patches that
I'm sure he already has works properly before releasing 2.0.11. After all the
heat he and the other developers have gotten from this list, how can we blame
him?
>
>4) Given that there have been a plethora of complaints on various
> newsgroups and mailing lists, why HASN'T this been done?
That is EXACTLY why. A buggy 2.0.11 will probably draw a lynch mob.
>5) I know that the CMD640 is a busted chip. If I could perform an
> exorcism on these machines and get rid of them, I would. But do we
> HAVE to introduce NON WORKING patches into production level kernels to
> try and excise those annoyances?
It was my understanding that the 2.0.9 patches were to fix a different problem
with the CMD640, but it broke something on those machines that it already worked
on. Now, to integrate the pre- and post- 2.0.9 code, and make both work...
>
>And the amazing part is that we are so busy introducing bugs INTO the
>kernel, we've taken no notice of some of the EXISTING bugs. Despite many
>reports of bugs in the signal handling code and stuck processes, both by
>myself and others, we still have a huge system cluster with processes
>hanging by the truckload. I'd like to claim non-standard hardware, bad
>software, and the like, but too many others are experiencing the same
>problems.
Actually, I have had a problem that's been plaguing me since I switched to the
1.3.x series, (about 1.3.72 or so), in that sys_reboot doesn't reboot my
machine anymore. I suspect it's a configuration problem,
but has anybody else had this problem?
All in all, though, I must applaud Linus for all of his efforts. The Linux
kernel is a large and complicated program, and when the inevidible bug arises,
he always succeeds in fixing it. I think that all the heat he has been
receiving recently is unfair after all the work he has put in for us in the
past. I am confident that the IDE problems will be fixed as well, and even
if we have to wait another 3 weeks for them, that will be faster than
any commercial vendors that I know of!
-Steve C.
.sig under construction