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Linux 4.12 Released
- sp332 9y agoThis is a bit... opaque. Here is a lot of more-readable information about what's in the release, and some links to more editorial content. https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.12 https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.12
- sctb 9y agoThanks, we've updated the link from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?h=v4.12 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... to the official release announcement.
- ganeshkrishnan 9y agoIf you use ubuntu, install the kernel from here: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.12/ http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.12/
- hobozilla 9y agoThank you, exactly what I needed.
- blfr 9y agoI have always been tempted. Is there any reason not to?
- Insanity 9y agoI wonder this as well. Might a kernel update not break some applications or make the system less stable?
- eat_veggies 9y agoIt's probably safe since rolling release distributions upgrade just the kernel and work fine. I'd watch out for the graphics drivers though--sometimes you need to recompile them with the new kernel headers or just use the DKMS version.
- Avshalom 9y agoLinus is pretty big on kernel updates not breaking userland it's been the topic of several flames. Not that that's perfect or a guarantee but it is a priority among the devs.
- jug 9y agoYes, he hates that with a vengeance, here's the classic thread. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
- dotancohen 9y agoThat's actually a bit recent to be "classic" but it is a great example.
- mamon 9y agoI've bought new laptop recently with Kaby Lake processor and put Ubuntu 17.04 on it, so the kernel upgrade was kind of necessity. No adverse effects observed, and on the plus side: somewhat better battery life, Asus USB-C docking station working correctly, including Gigabit Ethernet port, resolved issues with sleep/resume.
- johnbellone 9y agoWhat laptop if you don't mind me asking?
- mamon 9y agoDell XPS 13 (9360). I know, they sell those with Ubuntu pre-installed, but they are hard to come by in my country, so i bought Win10 version and installed Linux myself
- dom0 9y agoLinus Torvalds breaks into a childish tantrum of (edit: correction: swearing rants are technically coherent), public swearing at people whenever anyone anywhere in Linux kernel development breaks any userspace app. As a consequence, userspace regressions are rare. (Might contain traces of hyperbole—still; Linus' behaviour is largely unacceptable nonetheless)
- wtallis 9y agoLinus is very well known for his rants, but you've definitely mischaracterized them. He's seldom incoherent, and the ones that are vulgar enough to make for juicy sensationalized "news" are only ever directed at contributors who are experienced enough to know better than to break userspace or something badly wrong like that. His more level-headed corrections of well-meaning inexperienced developers don't make the news.
- dom0 9y ago"only ever directed at contributors who are experienced enough". That's not strictly true, see e.g. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2017-February/133837.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2017-Februa...
- saghm 9y agoProps to Daniel for defending the contributor, as I'm guessing they wouldn't feel comfortable arguing back with Linus.
- icebraining 9y agoTo me it reads like redirecting blame to the contributor by appearing to "defend" him. Linus was obviously replying (and chastising) the person who sent him the code, and who was supposed to review it beforehand, not the original author.
- dullgiulio 9y ago
- shp0ngle 9y agoIt might make some hardware unusable. If you are relying on some hacks or proprietary drivers for wifi support or GPU support (as is normal in Linux world), it might break.
- cmurf 9y agoIt can happen. There are a bunch of bots that do regression tests, Fedora's Rawhide provides daily debug builds of the kernel with merges in-between the rc's, so there are are some real humans also using the kernel through its development. If you check the 4.11.1 changelog as an example you can see the kinds of things that can crop up. Fedora current releases tend to rebase around x.y.2. So you could use that as a way to weigh your kernel conservatism.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoSo maybe a stupid question for me - but since all the answers here say that new kernels generally don't break userland, then... what do I get from an update? Security fixes? Faster syscalls? Because otherwise I can't think of changes that would affect me in any way without updating rest of the userland.
- Santosh83 9y agoMajor distros backport security fixes. I'd say improved hardware support is 90% the reason to upgrade to a new kernel. Algorithmic improvements (like bfq) and new syscalls/subsystems are infrequent and one might not be able to make use of them immediately unless libs/userland adapt quickly.
- agnivade 9y agoI have been consistently updating linux kernels on by ubuntu machines. Apart from docker images going awry. I haven't experienced any other issue.
- old-gregg 9y agoNot Ubuntu, but Debian: have been running Debian stable with unstable kernels for a while. Never saw any issues. Application packages generally do not have hard dependencies on specific kernel versions but, as always, YMMV.
- 0xFFFE 9y agoI do the same, haven't had any issues so far.
- chrisper 9y agoWell, sometimes there could be a bug lingering around. But that could be the case with any software. Probably just keep the old kernel around as well. Just in Case.
- valarauca1 9y agoNo, you generally should. Those Linus tirades about We Dont Break Userland are why. The only way application interact with the kernel is via SystemCalls, which once they go public are -never- retracted, and never significantly change. This is why the kernel has system calls like 'mlock' and 'mlock2', because the first call ended up being incorrect but YOU CANT TURN BACK NOW! Or a better example `stat`, `stat64`, and `statx`
- legulere 9y agoDrivers might break though.
- johnbellone 9y agoI hear what you are saying but I wouldn't say that stat vs stat64 is incorrect or wrong. It is due to 32 vs 64 bit fields inside of the stat struct. But yeah, it all comes down to maintaining ABI and not breaking userland.
- daurnimator 9y ago> The only way application interact with the kernel is via SystemCalls Well yes, but more than the syscall contracts are e.g. the layout of /proc and /sys. Which have broken userspace before.
- dotancohen 9y ago> I have always been tempted. Is there any reason not to? There is a small chance that something will break, which is usually either the wifi or graphics drivers on desktop systems. Now let me ask you, is there any _reason_ for you to upgrade? Another poster mentions better laptop battery life but it could easily go the other way on some systems. Are you having trouble with any hardware? Unsupported webcam, etc? If not, then you're encouraged to upgrade the kernel as a learning experience but if your priority is stability and you don't have an evening to risk investing, then you should probably wait for Ubuntu to provide the update.
- voltagex_ 9y agoMarvell mwifiex cards seem to be broken past ~4.9. git.marvell.com is down so I can't check for new firmware, either.
- pizza234 9y agoIn real world, it may give you zero tanglible improvements (only virtual ones), against a variable amount of maintenance overhead. Aside the obvious manual download and installation, if you use ZFS and Ubuntu LTS for example, it's messy, because the shipped ZFS version won't support the most recent kernel, so you'll have to separately download the ZFS packages from the most recent Ubuntu. This is just an edge case of course. Also, distributions like Ubuntu LTS now provide stable kernel upgrades, so that you're not significantly far from the latest versions (16.04.3 will ship shortly, and will likely have 4.10 or more recent). Ultimately, it really depends on your machine. If you have recent hardware (eg. Skylake), then definitely new versions will bring compatibility (along with updated `linux-firmware` package). I've been using mainline versions for the last years, due to recent hardware, and didn't have any problems (aside the ZFS issue, which made me move to BTRFS).
- gigatexal 9y agosudo apt add-repo'able? thanks for pointing this out
- _arvin 9y agoyou can download "ubuntu kernel update utility" (ukuu) for an easier way to install and remove kernels, but you likely won't find a PPA that'll deliver you point releases as they come for the latest mainline
- _arvin 9y agofor anyone needing further instructions, you'll want the generic .deb files for your architecture (not low-latency unless you know what that is): linux-headers-4.12.0-041200_4.12.0-041200.201707022031_all.deb linux-headers-4.12.0-041200-generic_4.12.0-041200.201707022031_amd64.deb linux-image-4.12.0-041200-generic_4.12.0-041200.201707022031_amd64.deb then just $ sudo dpkg -i *.deb in the folder containing the files, and then a reboot, and $ uname -a to verify you're on the correct kernel
- sdca 9y agoThis lacks linux-tools and thus breaks cpu frequency and cpu governor management tools (cpupower, TLP, etc). For reasons unknown Fedora's RawhideKernelNodebug repo includes that package but Ubuntu's doesn't :)
- jhoechtl 9y agoAnd don't forget about the updated firmware drivers https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/all/linux-firmware/download https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/all/linux-firmware/downlo... When going latest kernel it makes sense to have the latest firmware otherwise certain kernel features wont work.
- alien_ 9y agoShameless plug: I wrote a small tool which allows users to update the kernel to the latest version or rc build, since this is not really a ppa exposed as apt repository: https://github.com/cristim/kernel-update https://github.com/cristim/kernel-update
- mariocesar 9y agoCould someone say something about the new "BFQ I/O scheduler"? I was not aware of the work being done, and the goal to have a more reponsive desktop
- zackelan 9y agohttp://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/ http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/ https://lwn.net/Articles/601799/ https://lwn.net/Articles/601799/ tl;dr: > CFQ separates each process's I/O requests into a separate queue, then rotates through the queues trying to divide the available bandwidth as fairly as it can. > The BFQ I/O scheduler also maintains per-process queues of I/O requests, but it does away with the round-robin approach used by CFQ. Instead, it assigns an "I/O budget" to each process.
- ausjke 9y agoCFQ is best for mechanical hard drives not sure if it is updated for SSDs, deadline and noop seem better for SSD
- the8472 9y agoThere's another new IO scheduler for SSDs: Kyber, https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9672023/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9672023/
- gigatexal 9y agoanyone do benches say using fio with this vs. the default scheduler? nvm: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-412-io&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-412...
- the8472 9y agoAiui kyber is designed for providing consistently low latency, e.g. for desktop users. And maybe specific user-facing server workloads? Those benchmarks mostly seem to test throughput, so are not good at showing the intended effect. You would want to see something that shows 99th percentile latency of individual reads/writes.
- postwait 9y agoTechnically it's systemd/linux.
- shmerl 9y agoUnfortunately, proper AMD Vega support didn't make it in.
- vanderZwan 9y ago> In the diff department, 4.12 is also very big, although the reason there isn't just that there's a lot of development, we have the added bulk of a lot of new header files for the AMD Vega support Not the one downvoting you but: are you sure?
- avar 9y agoLinus says it's a large release, here's a numeric breakdown of recent kernel releases, showing number of commits, diff | wc, and a diffstat with/without the drivers/ directory: v4.7..v4.8: 14552 1331854 5068427 42175318 11363 files changed, 627754 insertions(+), 279373 deletions(-) 6657 files changed, 329595 insertions(+), 167605 deletions(-) v4.8..v4.9: 17392 1419476 5372905 44206994 11179 files changed, 632159 insertions(+), 354871 deletions(-) 5993 files changed, 214842 insertions(+), 120945 deletions(-) v4.9..v4.10: 14249 1463146 5668517 49833479 11726 files changed, 744012 insertions(+), 249810 deletions(-) 5884 files changed, 329130 insertions(+), 115189 deletions(-) v4.10..v4.11: 13891 1227388 4763853 39671475 12506 files changed, 530154 insertions(+), 232410 deletions(-) 6230 files changed, 209555 insertions(+), 95502 deletions(-) v4.11..v4.12: 15736 2025692 7383431 88754335 12396 files changed, 1300537 insertions(+), 267064 deletions(-) 5829 files changed, 215764 insertions(+), 124745 deletions(-) Via: parallel -k 'r=v4.$(({}-1))..v4.{} ; echo $r: ; (git rev-list $r | wc -l; git -c diff.renameLimit=10240 diff $r | wc; git -c diff.renameLimit=10240 diff --shortstat $r ; git -c diff.renameLimit=10240 diff --shortstat $r -- ":!drivers/") | sed -r "s/^ *//; s/^/ /"' ::: {8..12}
- microcolonel 9y agoThat is to say, a net addition of over a million lines in one release.
- joecool1029 9y agoI think atomic mode-setting for the intel DRM driver being default now is the most interesting feature for my configurations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager#Atomic_mode_setting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager#Atomi...
- KenoFischer 9y agoBreaks rr I believe :(. In fact there were two regressions of that sort introduced this release cycles. One was caught early enough to get fixed, I guess the other wasn't.
- 616c 9y agoWhere can I read of the details of that. RR has always seemed like magic to me as a non-systems programming amateur.
- KenoFischer 9y agoMailing List threads: http://marc.info/?t=149861183900003&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=149861183900003&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=149864742900002&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=149864742900002&r=1&w=2 Oh and the one that got fixed: http://marc.info/?t=149609949000002&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=149609949000002&r=1&w=2
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- jug 9y agoYay! I think this is the one that means unusually much to me, as the nouveau NVIDIA GTX 970 fix is part of it. Pretty much all popular Linux distros "fails" (black screen on boot unless the nomodeset boot option is used) on this fairly common graphics card, until proprietary drivers are installed. Apparently 4.12 fixes a VRAM detection issue. I guess regarding the shenanigans by NVIDIA where they put 3.5 GB on this gfx card, and then 0.5 GB more in a slower variant (that I supposed is presented differently to the kernel). They went into a lot of trouble and bad PR for that so I think it's safe to say they won't do it again anytime soon. Here's the bug thread: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89664 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89664
- gonzerelli 9y agoI had to disable my GPUs and use Intel so I could get inside and manually install NVIDIA driver. I don't have much experience with setting boot options. Shouldn't have to take 2 years to fix, though, but I guess it was a weird card.