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Article posted on Mar 20

No 2.6.16 for Finnix 87.0

Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 20, 2006, 9:10 pm

Linux 2.6.16 was released today, and man is it a big update. Some fairly large changes, the one that caught my eye was the inclusion of Oracle's OCFS2 clustering filesystem. I will definitely be looking at that.

However, 2.6.16 is a BIG update, 5369 commits to be exact. At this point, I don't feel comfortable incorporating this kernel into Finnix 87.0 without any point releases. Too many new Kconfig features, and the number of commits leaves me weary of lingering bugs. Instead, I will be using Debian testing's current kernel and patchset, 2.6.15_2.6.15-8, with the following changes (all are standard according to previous Finnix releases):

x86: Debian's 2.6.15-1-686-smp_2.6.15-8 config file, modified to run on i486 instead of i686; in short, i486 and above, with SMP support. (Previous versions were lowered to i586, but after doing some research, I determined that there is no speed degredation going from i586 to i486. Of course there is minor degredation going from i686 to i586, but remember that this is a recovery CD, and compatibility is preferred over speed.)
PowerPC: For 32-bit, Debian's 2.6.15-1-powerpc-smp_2.6.15-8 config file (previous versions were only uniprocessor for the 32-bit kernel). For 64-bit, Debian's 2.6.15-1-powerpc64-smp_2.6.15-8 config file.
x86: SKAS3 v8.2
x86: Patch to increase the kernel command line to 512 bytes
Some kernel modules built into the kernel
Sound and V4L support removed

At the moment, the following tasks are left:

Finish writing finnix-thumbdrive, a script to assist in formatting a USB thumb drive and copying over necessary files from the CD.
Add automatic loading of thermal modules for PowerPC during initrd.
Update shutdown script to copy needed binaries and libraries dynamically. At the moment, the libraries for needed binaries are specified statically in the shutdown script, and could break if library support changes.
Write documentation for new overlay support.

Development snapshots with the "new" 2.6.15 kernel will be available from snapshots.finnix.org tomorrow afternoon, so give them a try if you can.