On Lucid: Why upgrade to Maverick kernel

[wirawan0]

Background: I am using Ubuntu Lucid for work, thus I want stability. I don't want to play around with Linux distros (to try them out) one by one on this machine until finding one that's suitable for my need. I want to stick with Lucid as the underlying distro for a few years until it becomes too old that I inevitably have to upgrade.

I was posting a question in

http://blog.avirtualhome.com/2010/07/14/how-to-compile-a-ubuntu-2-6-35-kernel-for-lucid/

which unfortunately was considered an inappropriate question [for the blog article], and was deleted zealously by the site owner.

Here's my question, OK:

What are strong reasons to upgrade my kernel from 2.6.32 to 2.6.35?
Sorry I did not really follow kernel development, but there are some
annoying things in my linux desktop (laptops, actually) that I wonder
would not be there under 2.6.35.

My question was cast in the context of Ubuntu Lucid as the underlying distro on my machine. I want to get a scoop of what's improved in the new kernel that warrants the upgrade from the original 2.6.32 line of Lucid kernel to the Maverick's 2.6.35 line. Currently 2.6.32 does OK on Lenovo Thinkpad T400, except for occasional flickering and (sometimes) blackout upon resume from suspend:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/777956

Wirawan

[Peter]

Just to clarify, your comment was posted on the page Git Packages for Ubuntu, not on post you quote, which would have been appropriate.

Here are the summaries of kernel changes:

Kernel 2.6.33
This version features Nouveau (a reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia graphic cards), Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRBD (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), support for cache compression, Xen PV-on-HVM support, drivers for virtual network and graphic cards from VMWare, swappable KSM pages, and many new drivers and many small improvements and bugfixes

Kernel 2.6.34
This version adds two new filesystem, the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware ballon driver, the "kprobes jump" optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the "perf lock" tool, cross-platform analysis support), support for GPU switching, several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (RFC 5082) and private VLAN proxy arp (RFC 3069) support, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements.

Kernel 2.6.35
Linux 2.6.35 includes support for transparent spreading of incoming network load across CPUs, Direct-IO support for Btrfs, an new experimental journal mode for XFS, the KDB debugger UI based on top of KGDB, improvements to 'perf', H.264 and VC1 video acceleration in Intel G45+ chips, support for the future Intel Cougarpoint graphic chip, power management for AMD Radeon chips, a memory defragmentation mechanism, support for the Tunneling Protocol version 3 (RFC 3931), support for multiple multicast route tables, support for the CAIF protocol used by ST-Ericsson products, support for the ACPI Platform Error Interface, and many new drivers and small improvements.

These are the summaries for the vanilla kernel, I haven't been able to find similar summaries for Ubuntu specific patches.

[wirawan0]

Ah.. sorry about that. I must not have been paying attention. But thanks a bunch for your scoop. That's helpful! FYI I just installed 2.6.35 from ubuntu backports (since I was lazy to do the compilation myself). With some minor workable issues, apparently 2.6.35 works fine with Ubuntu 10.04. Thanks Peter.