Version 2.6.11 of the Linux kernel has been released. The 2.6.10 kernel has only been the third from the 2.6.x branch that has seen more than semi-permanant use on any of my systems. 2.6.5 and 2.6.2 are the only other releases that I have had reasonable success with; 2.6.6 – 2.6.9 caused me nothing but headaches.

2.6.10 has been my favourite of the lot, and I have it humming along beautifully on a number of Slackware boxes. Udev is a brilliant feature and despite having to un-learn the devfs system, I really like the way it operates. Keeping device management entirely in userspace just makes sense.

One of the more interesting inclusions in 2.6.11 is infiniband support. This feature has been hyped up quite a bit, and I might be inclined to agree with the hype – if only I had a multi-million dollar super computer to actually justify using it on. Maybe I will enable infiniband support on my P200 64MB system with its 10Base-T network card and watch it soar!

Seriously though, I will try a few dummy compilations tonight and see how she goes on my dev-box. I have never been able to get framebuffering to work with any 2.6.x kernel using an nVidia card for some reason, so maybe I will have a bit more luck with this latest kernel, although I don’t have high hopes.

UPDATE 2:
Kernel 2.6.11.2 has been released, which patches a number of bugs. Also, nVidia has released a new version of its drivers which will compile against this kernel.

UPDATE:
Well my first compilation was a success and 2.6.11 hums along nicely. Although, there is one big problem. The latest nVidia drivers will not compile against this kernel version.

There are a number of patches available for version 1.0-6629 of the driver, but if nothing else this shows the inherent problems with closed source drivers. If the nVidia drivers were open source, these patches would already be applied to the stable branch and released to the public, but now many people will have to play the waiting-game untill nVidia decides to release an updated version.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.