Linux has been going through many, many changes recently. One of the most impressive has been with the release of 2.6.21. With this release, there has been offered a ‘no tick’ for normal (32 bit) PCs.

What this means is that Linux can now understand: ‘If there’s nothing to do, don’t worry about it.’ It will take a siesta. Most people won’t really notice this, or care.. however, it means a lot to people like myself who are currently stuck with it as an operating system on our Laptops. It means that Linux won’t chew up our batteries as harshly as it did priorly.

I’ve been fighting the most recent stable release (2.6.21.3) for most of the week that it’s been out. The CPQ scheduler was broken, ALSA (sound) drivers are too old, and don’t work very well with my hardware, there is a problem with it’s clock system (if you put your laptop to sleep, if it wakes up, it will have a fit, not knowing that it was asleep, but rather, thinking that it just mysteriously lost time), the new headers break support for VMWare’s drivers, and also destroy any binary-only drivers available by removing system calls.

But, hey, all in the name of progress, right?

Anyhow, I’ve opted to backtrack to 2.6.21, the latest-not-a-sub-release-release, and base my code on Debian’s own 2.6.21 unstable sources.

I’ve updated ALSA, cleaned up some of the SCSI defines, fixed the clock, added a few suggestions by Intel for the 2.6.21 kernel, as well as many, many, many other changes, mostly laptop centric (support for Core Duo 2, a few driver updates, and even a forward-patch of BootSplash), however, these patches do increase the stability of 2.6.21, as well as add stable features (with the exception of BootSplash, which is just eyecandy).

If you are a laptop user who’s having difficulties with the broken/strange ACPI support, or, forbid, just want your old tools to work again, here’s a link to a diff from the STOCK 2.6.21 kernel, with Debian’s patches, my updates, a few Gentoo bugfixes, and even more.

My patches will also enable you to build flgrx, ipw3945, and many other things which you might find you have lost with 2.6.21.