The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary – a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users – but it has yet to come down to earth.

"We've read the article at Webupd8.org with Mark Shuttleworth, and here is our opinion on the matter." ... "You have a kernel team because you think you need one, you feel the need to change the kernel. How many serious security flaws have there been in Ubuntu? And how many were specific to Ubuntu? "

This version features Nouveau (a reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia graphic cards), Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), a security extension for TCP called "cookie transactions", a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff)...

Ksplice Uptrack is a subscription service that lets you apply 100% of the important kernel security updates released by your Linux vendor without rebooting. Ksplice Uptrack is freely available for the desktop versions of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. This tutorial shows how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop.

module-assistant is a tool for building Debian kernel modules from source, without having to rebuild the whole kernel. It fetches module-source packages that have been prepared for the Debian distribution via apt and produces .deb packages. This tutorial shows how to use module-assistant in command-line mode and in interactive mode.

This version adds virtualization memory de-duplicacion, a rewrite of the writeback code which provides noticeable performance speedups, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a "perf timechart" tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers.

In my quest to grok the most popular kernel for GNU, I am making some distinct, albeit slow, headway into the inner workings of Linux. Before completely delving into the source code, I wanted to have a last overall look on kernel configuration

For the last couple of days, there has been a heated discussion going on over how a free kernel should behave in certain situations. It’s a tricky subject, if you’re not familiar with it.