[Preston] Linux-2.6.0

[Andrew King]

Hi there all!

Just thought I'd post some results here about where I've got with Linux 
2.6.0 (released in the past week) in case anyone wanted to know.  It 
looks like they've done an awful lot.

I used a dual Pentium II 400 machine with Debian 3.0r0 stable + apt-get 
upgrade installed.  There are a couple of things you apparently need to 
upgrade here, which this page: http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/799 goes 
over.

Anyway - everything went fine.  The original kernel wasn't SMP, and so 
only used the first processor, but things seem to be slightly 
significantly over twice as fast - i.e. KDE takes just five seconds to 
login with 2.6.0, once everything should be in disk cache, as opposed to 
13 seconds with non-SMP 2.4.18.

Two things I found through trial and error:

- If you have SCSI, make sure that you compile the relevant drivers in 
fully, rather than as modules, at least for the root disk.  Otherwise, 
it tries to mount the root filesystem before it knows how to talk to the 
disk on which it resides, which obviously doesn't work too well.
- Support for serial mice isn't enabled by default.

New features in 2.6.0, iirc, include:
- Pre-emptible kernel option (helps make things like the desktop more 
responsive)
- ALSA sound support
- NTFS *write* support isn't marked as experimental any more (should we 
trust this...?)
- Apparently lots of USB/wireless/bluetooth/firewire improvements

SMP question here: apparently if you have a multithreaded program 
running under Linux 2.4 on an SMP system with SMP support enabled and 
working, all threads under a particular process run on the CPU; i.e. it 
can't split threads belonging to the same process across different 
CPUs.  Can anyone tell me whether they know this to be true or not, and, 
if so, whether any of Linux 2.6, FreeBSD or NetBSD have this limitation?

Thanks,

Andrew