Torvalds officially releases Linux 3.0
Linux 3.0 is official here, but users expecting a swathe of fundamental changes to the kernel will find little to surprise them as the project celebrates its twentieth birthday.
Announced by Linux founder Linus Torvalds - on his Google+ profile, oddly enough - Linux 3.0 was expected to be earlier this month, but the discovery of a small bug in pathname lookups by Hugh Dickins lead to some last-minute changes being required.
While the version number takes a leap, Linux 3.0 isn't all that new: in reality, it's little more than 2.6.40 with a revamped numbering scheme. Now, Linux kernels - which form the heart of the GNU/Linux open-source operating system - will be identified with two numbers, rather than three.
"I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0," Torvalds explained on the Linux Kernel Mailing List back in May. "The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let's face it - what's the point of being in charge if you can't pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I'm just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You'll like it."
It's a fundamental change in the way versions are tracked, and is likely to cause a few problems for early adopters: while Linux 3.0 adds a work-around for applications that expect a kernel to have a kernel version number to have three digits, many packages track compatible kernel versions by looking for the '2.6' at the start. These will choke on an upgrade to 3.0, and require updating beforehand.
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Announced by Linux founder Linus Torvalds - on his Google+ profile, oddly enough - Linux 3.0 was expected to be earlier this month, but the discovery of a small bug in pathname lookups by Hugh Dickins lead to some last-minute changes being required.
While the version number takes a leap, Linux 3.0 isn't all that new: in reality, it's little more than 2.6.40 with a revamped numbering scheme. Now, Linux kernels - which form the heart of the GNU/Linux open-source operating system - will be identified with two numbers, rather than three.
"I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0," Torvalds explained on the Linux Kernel Mailing List back in May. "The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let's face it - what's the point of being in charge if you can't pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I'm just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You'll like it."
It's a fundamental change in the way versions are tracked, and is likely to cause a few problems for early adopters: while Linux 3.0 adds a work-around for applications that expect a kernel to have a kernel version number to have three digits, many packages track compatible kernel versions by looking for the '2.6' at the start. These will choke on an upgrade to 3.0, and require updating beforehand.
source
