
The 5.7 kernel is out - thuva4
https://lwn.net/Articles/821829/
======
freedomben
> _a new, Microsoft-blessed exFAT filesystem implementation_

For those of us who lived through the "Linux is cancer" days, we are truly
living in interesting times :-)

~~~
stefan_
Ehh, Microsoft only opened exFAT _after_ smartphones dropped all SD card slots
and it was no longer possible for them to extort Android device manufacturers
with patent licensing.

~~~
asveikau
> after smartphones dropped all SD card slots

Last I checked, only at the high end and Google devices, and substantially
less true in non-US markets.

Careful with proclaiming such a bubble to be universal. I am sure in mountain
view some PMs make decisions based on "oh but we killed the SD card years ago"
but they don't have actual power to do that.

~~~
solarkraft
It's fun to see bubble-driven remarks like "no phones have SD card slots
anymore" or "there are no headphone jacks on phones nowadays". Welp, you can
influence that and I won't buy a phone without either.

~~~
fdgbd23
>I won't buy a phone without either

You used to be able to say the same for phones without holes in their screen
or TV sets without internet connectivity.

~~~
asveikau
Or a phone with a removable battery. I am personally disappointed by that one.
A lot of phones are skimping on internal batteries these days and it kills the
life of the phone fairly quickly.

The previous phone I had, since I had been burned repeatedly by phones I was
otherwise happy with but the internal battery didn't last a year, I decided to
shop around for the few remaining Android phones with decent performance that
had an easily replaceable battery. I had to pick a model from late 2016.

~~~
jason0597
Personally, I don't have a problem if the battery isn't easily removable. I
don't think I'll find myself in the situation of needing to hot-swap batteries
on the move before I get home, today's battery technology has ensured
sufficient energy density to make all-day long battery life a reality.

What I ask of manufacturers is that at least the battery isn't glued or
soldered in, and that there are clear instructions on how to unscrew the back
of my phone to replace the battery after it starts dying out. That, and make
it easy to take off the back (no adhesives (looks at you apple), and no taking
out the front screen to access the battery), and make it easy to buy a genuine
battery from the manufacturer's website.

I think that's a good compromise of thinness, ease of manufacture and ease of
replacability.

~~~
einpoklum
> today's battery technology has ensured sufficient energy density to make
> all-day long battery life a reality.

That is a sad comment.

Yesterday's battery technology ensured sufficient energy density to make _all-
week_ long battery life a reality. Yes, those were much weaker phones
computationally, but I'm fine with staying with just phone calls, SMS and
calendar when I'm low on battery, for an extra week...

~~~
jason0597
In some aspects, smartphones have become toys. Scrolling through
reddit/facebook/twitter doesn't really make it worth having a smartphone,
since those are all dumb activities.

However there are certain features that a smartphone gives which I wouldn't
give up. Navigation with google maps, being able to do banking services on the
go with my bank's app, being able to review flashcards with the Anki app,
having my railcard/tesco clubcard/nectar card on my phone and never losing it,
being able to check any important emails, checking the news if something
breaking happens and I need to know instantly.

Heck, we praise Apple for bringing services like calling an ambulance for you
if your pulse shows a certain pattern matching a heart attack (via the apple
watch), and we also praise smartphones for actions like alerting people for
emergencies like a terrorist attack or issuing weather warnings. I wouldn't
give up any of those features just to have a dumb nokia phone with a week-long
battery life.

Highly recommend you check out this:
[https://www.blloc.com/](https://www.blloc.com/)

~~~
einpoklum
Why give them up? Have 75% of the battery life be used for all of those
activities, but build the phone so you could still make calls and send text
messages for a longer while later.

Also - Smartwatches are silly IMHO; and people can be alerted just fine with a
voice or text message.

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srl
Not mentioned in the change summaries as far as I can tell, but this contains
a (for me critical) fix to the intel graphics drivers (i915):
[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/1600](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/1600).

~~~
dnr
Will this fix my "i915 0000:00:02.0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0" that's
makes my screen freeze for 5 seconds multiple times a day??? It's been driving
me slightly crazy.

~~~
dyingkneepad
We can't know the answer. What you are describing is a GPU hang and GPU hangs
are a whole class of bugs, it pretty much means "the hardware was misused and
now it doesn't know how to move forward, so we reset it" (and the reset is why
you get the 5s freeze, your graphics card was essentially rebooted). When this
happens, i915.ko creates a nice file in your file system that you can use to
create a bug report. Please check dmesg and do so.

~~~
dnr
Thanks for the overview. I know HN isn't the place for this but just for the
record: there are no other i915 messages in dmesg (certainly nothing about a
file with debug info).

This is on Ubuntu 19.10, kernel 5.3.0, and it started happening after a minor
update, so I figured it would probably get fixed in another minor update. That
didn't happen, so then I thought I'd better update to a newer kernel before
reporting anything. Then 20.04 was almost here, so I decided to wait for that.
Hopefully I'll get around to that soon and discover my particular bug has been
fixed, otherwise I'll try to report it.

~~~
dyingkneepad
Seeing the hang message without anything else is surprising to me. I don't
know why you're seeing that.

You can try kernel-ppa [0] to see if it's fixed in newer kernels, it's very
simple and you don't need to compile anything. I would recommend you to test
5.7 from there, and if that doesn't work you can try drm-intel-nightly or drm-
tip: those are the upstream graphics trees. If you report a bug, the first
thing the devs are going to ask you is test these trees, so it might be worth
trying before you even open a bug report.

[0]:
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds)

~~~
dnr
Just a quick followup: I installed 5.7 (still on Ubuntu 19.10) and no hangs
yet.

I got a bunch of warnings about missing firmware so I manually downloaded some
i915 firmware files from the linux-firmware repo. I assume that's just an
Ubuntu packaging quirk. I'm not sure if they were actually needed or not.

------
chungy
Not yet finished kernelnewbies summary of changes:
[https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.7](https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.7)

------
KenoFischer
Oh, already? I got a patch in to fix PTRACE_SYSEMU on aarch64, but I still
have a few patches queued up to fix a few more issues there. I had hoped to
get them all into the same release so there is only broken and not broken
releases, rather than broken, semi-broken and non-broken releases. Oh well,
ptrace on aarch64 has a few other big issues anyway that wouldn't have been
mergeable during the RC window, so I suppose I should just try to get that in
for 5.8.

~~~
_-___________-_
I hate to break it to you, but there are only semi-broken releases ;)

~~~
KenoFischer
Well aware, but I was hoping to say to people "Just use 5.7 and it'll be
fine". At the moment I have to say "Don't use anything prior to 5.7, unless
you have a recent stable backpoint. In either case, some things are fine
others aren't - I'll hope to have it fixed by 5.8". Which is fine, but more
complicated ;).

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SCdF
OK so let's say that I want to run a relatively stable linux install (so not
the arch bleeding edge methodology), but I _do_ want to run the latest linux
kernel, or as close to it as possible.

What are my choices? Or is the only choice to alter my interpretation of the
word "stable"? :-)

~~~
udlv6Yy
Fedora is the distro you want. It's not bleeding edge, but everything is up-
to-date and the kernel is 1-2 releases old. It has a 6 month release cycle and
13 month support window iirc.

I find it a lot more stable than arch and Debian Sid.

~~~
St_Alfonzo
I use Fedora with dnf automatic[1] on all of my machines. Only problem is my
Desktop PC, which has a nvidia gpu with the official nvidia driver installed.
Every few weeks there is a new kernel version which often only works with the
brand new nvidia driver version. I use grub to choose the previous working
kernel version until I take the time to download and install the new nvidia
driver.

[1][https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/automatic.html](https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/automatic.html)

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paxys
Linux* kernel

~~~
uwu
*GNU/Linux kernel

~~~
ChrisRR
No, the kernel is just linux

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raverbashing
> was this one deprecating the long-standing 80-column limit for kernel source

Amen!

Let's try to get rid of the "80 column limit" dogma and move on to more
flexible and realistic limits, in all languages.

~~~
dguest
Apparently it's been moved up to 100, and 80 is still _preferred_ [1].

I have a personal bias toward 80 because I like having multiple buffers side
by side (100 would also work).

I always assumed that the hard limit on column length was as much excuse to
reject sloppy merge requests as anything else: I don't mind a few 150 column
lines, but if every single line has to wrap a 100 column buffer there's
something wrong.

[1]:
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=bdc48fa11e46)

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badrabbit
Bpf-lsm is a welcome addition. I can see a new generation of endpoint defense
tools built on it.

[Meta] what's with all the auto-collapsed comments.

------
LockAndLol
And once again, no NVIDIA drivers but lots of AMDGPU stuff. How are people
still buying NVIDIA?

~~~
einpoklum
A much farther developed ecosystem for most/all aspects of computation,
including lots of free software. I know, nVIDIA are terrible with their close-
sourcing of almost anything and their OpenCL betrayal. But AMD is too much of
an inferior option for doing compute work.

------
ed25519FUUU
> _+However, never break user-visible strings such as printk messages because
> +that breaks the ability to grep for them._

Amazing it took this long for such a common sense formatting method to be
acceptable.

~~~
dyingkneepad
This is not a new rule, it's just a rule that was not written there. You can
probably find emails from Linus with nsfw-language bashing people for breaking
messages.

~~~
sersnth
The rule was already written there. The patch just reformatted things a bit.

