Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (422 mails)

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 5:30 AM, Matt Gray <mjg@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  reasonable enough reason.
>
> on the other hand, so much is revolutionary in this release including a
> genuinely awesome KDE4 desktop this time around, project Bretzn,
> opensource broadcom drivers, speedy kernel patch, bluez, and much more,
> that it is tempting to give this release the 12.0 moniker.
>
> if the multi-touch xinput extensions make it in I would be all for
> twelve, as that would make a huge boost to Meego/touch interface respins
> of suse on arm and intel.

Is there a read-me or draft press release that gives at least a basic
overview of the above?

My limited understanding is:

awesome KDE4 desktop this time - i thought we said that about KDE 4.4?
 What's so great about 4.6?

project Bretzn - never heard of it.  I doubt users are clamoring for it.

opensource broadcom drivers - nice, but my reading is that this is for
limited set of new devices.  I'd like to know more about the range of
supported devices before considering this a killer feature.

speedy kernel patch - most users are not impacted.  Those that are can
do this in 11.3 (as I understand it) via a boot time script.

bluez - I've at least heard of this, but don't know what it is.

multi-touch xinput extensions - very limited set of users, why update
the whole distro version for this?

===
If KDE 4.6 is really a huge improvement over 4.4 and we don't expect a
similar big jump in the 11.6 timeframe, then I see an issue.

If we bump to 12.0 because of KDE as the main reason, then we should
also bump to 13.0 when GNOME 3.0 is out.

That sounds like a poor way forward.

My vote is to wait for GNOME 3.0 to be released and bump to 12.0 with
the release that includes it.

===
OTOH, I'd love to see something like comprehensive and fully
integrated support of SSDs (including discard support) in a laptop
environment be the driver for the 12.0 moniker.

For environments with a single storage device (eg. a laptop) we are so
close, a last minute push could get everything into 11.4, but I think
it would need to be project priority and get several people involved.

--> current status as of current factory

The kernel support is there to a major extent with 2.6.37. (ext4 and
xfs only I believe)

(I'm ignoring btrfs since its still experimental, and VFAT because I
hope a Linux laptop would not use VFAT as a primary FS type.).

The userspace scripts for wiper.sh / hdparm are there already for 11.2
and 11.3 releases.  Bug fixes for both were rolled out via the update
channel a couple months ago.  Obviously factory has these.

A new userspace tool to invoke a new 2.6.37 ext4 background discard
feature is supposed to be in 11.4 (it may be in this milestone.  Part
of linux-utils. The util is trivial and basically just makes a ioctl
call.  The magic is in the 2.6.37 kernel.)

The gpart partitioning tools and yast partitioner module were updated
for 11.3 to align newly created partitions on Erase Block boundaries,
so that is already in.

All that's missing is read me files, press releases, a cron entry
automatically created to invoke the script if needed and possibly some
yast partitioner updates to inform the user that a drive is a SSD and
ask how they want discard handled.  (There are at least 3 options for
ext4 based filesystem.  Only one should be used as they provide
redundant functionality.  The choice is driven by multiple factors.)

And most importantly testing.

fyi:
For more background of what I'm talking about, see this wiki page I maintain:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_discard_%28trim%29_support

Thanks
Greg
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