March 6, 2002
Of note in this week's update are the merge of the new AMD 64bit architecture, included in 2.5.5, and the merge of JFS in the latest 2.5.6 prerelease.
Check the latest update at http://kernelnewbies.org/status/
A couple patches with with poetic names (futexes and radixes comes to mind) have been floating around recently. Please let me know if you'd like me to add some of them to the list. Enjoy!
-- Guillaume
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Kernel 2.5 status - March 6th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.6-pre2)
Features:
Merged
o in 2.5.1+ Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer (Jens Axboe) o in 2.5.2 Initial support for USB 2.0 (David Brownell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, etc.) o in 2.5.2 Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups (Al Viro, Manfred Spraul) o in 2.5.2+ New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar) o in 2.5.2+ New kernel device structure (kdev_t) (Linus Torvalds, etc.) o in 2.5.3 IDE layer update (Andre Hedrick) o in 2.5.3 New driver API for Wireless Extensions (1/2) (Jean Tourrilhes) o in 2.5.3 Support reiserfs external journal (Reiserfs team) o in 2.5.3 Generic ACL (Access Control List) support (Nathan Scott) o in 2.5.3 PnP BIOS driver (Alan Cox, Thomas Hood, Dave Jones, etc.) o in 2.5.3+ New driver model & unified device tree (Patrick Mochel) o in 2.5.4 Add preempt kernel option (Robert Love, MontaVista team) o in 2.5.4 Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading (NGPT team) o in 2.5.4+ Porting all input devices over to input API (Vojtech Pavlik, James Simmons) o in 2.5.5 Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) (ALSA team) o in 2.5.5 Pagetables in highmem support (Ingo Molnar,
Arjan van de Ven)
* in 2.5.5 New architecture: AMD x86-64 (Andi Kleen, x86-
64 Linux team)
o in 2.5.6 Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM) (JFS team)
o Pending Finalize new device naming convention (Linus Torvalds) o in -ac 32bit UID quota support (?)
o Ready Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike) o Ready HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update (Krzysztof Halasa) o Ready Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team) o Ready New kernel config system: CML2 (Eric Raymond) o Ready Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma,
Rusty Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o Ready per_cpu infrastructure (Rusty Russell)
o Beta New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5) (Keith Owens) o Beta Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling (Erik Mouw, Dave Jones, Russell King, Arjan van de Ven) o Beta Serial driver restructure (Russell King) o Beta New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe) o Beta NAPI Network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim, Robert Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov) o Beta Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team) o Beta New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel) o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton, etc.) o Beta Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour) o Beta Better event logging for enterprise systems (evlog team) o Beta Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team) o Beta Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell) o Beta Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro) o Beta EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) (EVMS team) o Beta LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0 (LVM team) o Beta Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman) o Beta First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman) o Beta Dynamic Probes (Suparna Bhattacharya, dprobes team) o Beta Video for Linux (V4L) redesign (Gerd Knorr) o Beta Scalable CPU bitmaps (Russ Weight) o Beta Page table sharing (Daniel Phillips)
o Alpha Better support of high-end NUMA machines (NUMA team) o Alpha Add Asynchronous IO (aio) support (Ben LaHaise) o Alpha Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse,
David Hinds)
o Alpha Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton
Altaparmakov)
o Alpha More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay
Schullist, from Procom donated code)
o Alpha Full compliance with IPv6 (Alexey Kuznetzov,
Jun Murai, Yoshifuji Hideaki, USAGI team)
o Alpha UMSDOS (Unix under MS-DOS) Rewrite (Al Viro) o Alpha Scalable Statistics Counter (Ravikiran Thirumalai) o Alpha Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (Matt Robinson, LKCD team) o Alpha Add support for NFS v4 (NFS v4 team) * Alpha ext2/ext3 HTree directory indexing (Daniel Phillips,
Christopher Li, Ted Ts'o)
o Alpha Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons) o Started More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, from Procom donated code) o Started Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) (Alan Cox, Robert Love, Neil Brown, etc.) o Started Change all drivers to new driver model (All maintainers) o Started Reiserfs v4 (Reiserfs team) o Started Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface (ISDN4Linux team)
o Draft #2 New lightweight library (klibc) (Greg Kroah-
Hartman)
o Draft #3 Replace initrd by initramfs (H. Peter Anvin,
Al Viro)
o Planning Add thrashing control (Rik van Riel) o Planning Remove all hardwired drivers from kernel (Alan Cox, etc.) o Planning Generic parameter/command line interface (Keith Owens) o Planning New mount API (Al Viro) o Planning New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Dave Jones)
Cleanups:
Merged
o in 2.5.3 Break Configure.help into multiple files (Linus Torvalds) o in 2.5.3 Untangle include file dependancies (Dave Jones, Roman
Zippel)
o in 2.5.4 Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h (Arnaldo Carvalho
de Melo)
o in 2.5.4 Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h (Daniel Phillips,
Jeff Garzik, Al Viro)
o in 2.5.6 Killing kdev_t for block devices (Al Viro)
o Ready Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type (Al Viro) o Ready ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes (Al Viro) o Ready Remove dcache_lock (Maneesh Soni, IBM
team)
o Beta file.h and INIT_TASK (Benjamin LaHaise) o Beta Proper UFS fixes, ext2 and locking cleanups (Al Viro) o Beta Lifting limitations on mount(2) (Al Viro)
o Started Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Dave Jones, Randy
Dunlap)
o Started Reorder x86 initialization (Dave Jones, Randy
Dunlap)
Have some free time and want to help? Check out the Kernel Janitor TO DO list for a
list of source code cleanups you can work on. A great place to start learning more
about kernel internals!
Quoted 2 lines
o in -ac 32bit UID quota support (?)
I'm surprised this is still pending, it's been in -ac for ages...
Quoted 2 lines
o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton,
etc.)
IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
Also Andrew, where's the listing for the delayed allocation patch you're working on. It looks like it's just about ready to go to beta stage...
Quoted 2 lines
o Alpha Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton
Altaparmakov)
Is this still in alpha stage?
Quoted 2 lines
o Alpha Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons) o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?
Quoted 4 lines · Mike Fedyk
Quoted 2 lines
o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton,
etc.)IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
Agreed. It isn't "incompatible" per se but it is certainly not the intention anymore. With kernel preemption, we plan to cleanly tackle the lock hold times.
But maybe that is what the above means ... not "low-latency" per se but the general reduction in lock hold times and improvement of algorithms. This is something Andrew, myself, and others are working on. It is the follow up work to preempt-kernel.
Robert Love
Quoted 7 lines · Robert Love
Quoted 4 lines · Mike Fedyk
Quoted 2 lines
o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton,
etc.)IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
Quoted 8 lines
Agreed. It isn't "incompatible" per se but it is certainly not the intention anymore. With kernel preemption, we plan to cleanly tackle the lock hold times.
But maybe that is what the above means ... not "low-latency" per se but the general reduction in lock hold times and improvement of algorithms. This is something Andrew, myself, and others are working on. It is the follow up work to preempt-kernel.
Yes, this is what the above means: reducing lock hold times in the appropriate places. Robert, I'll add you name for this item too, since you are working on this with Andrew. It will make it clearer that it is not just referring to the old "low-latency" patch.
-- Guillaume
Quoted 3 lines · Mike Fedyk
Quoted 2 lines
o Alpha Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons) o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?
It's stable enough that at least bits of it should probably start being pushed to Linus soon. This and the input layer changes probably make up for quite a high percentage of my current diff.
Signature · 2 lines
| Dave Jones. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk | SuSE Labs
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines
Quoted 3 lines
o Alpha Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons) o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?
It's stable enough that at least bits of it should probably start being pushed to Linus soon. This and the input layer changes probably make up for quite a high percentage of my current diff.
The input stuff should again be synced. The only thing I like to see is the creation of a touchscreen and others directory in drivers/input. We had this discussion on the ARM list this morning.
As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part. At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess. The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.
Now the console stuff needs more work. That shouldn't go in yet. The changes break things else where. The changes that affect people are struct kbd_struct[] is gone. Also a few of the ioctl32.c files get broken. The next big thing is the removal of fg_console but this will break alot of keyboard drivers. Which again I push for people to move their keyboard drivers over to the input api.
Quoted 5 lines · James Simmons
As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part. At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess. The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.
If this stuff is being cleaned up, I still have a large chunk of fixes locally in my tree that need to be pushed up to linuxconsole CVS. Is the linuxconsole stuff going to be synced up all at once, or is still going to be progressive? If it's progressive, I'd still like to get my stuff cleaned up before pushing it into CVS..
Regards,
Signature · 1 line
Paul Mundt <[email protected]>
Quoted 11 lines · Paul Mundt
Quoted 5 lines · James Simmons
As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part. At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess. The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.
If this stuff is being cleaned up, I still have a large chunk of fixes locally in my tree that need to be pushed up to linuxconsole CVS. Is the linuxconsole stuff going to be synced up all at once, or is still going to be progressive? If it's progressive, I'd still like to get my stuff cleaned up before pushing it into CVS..
It will be progressive. Just watch out for the recent updates in CVS.
. ---
|o_o | |:_/ | Give Micro$oft the Bird!!!! // \ \ Use Linux!!!! (| | ) /'_ _/`\
___)=(___/
Quoted 2 lines · Mike Fedyk
IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
huh? that's news to me -
I have run both simultaneously -
they are more or less orthogonal....
Joe