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Kernel development


The current development kernel release is 2.3.4. The patch for this release is huge, almost 3MB. The larger changes are with the PowerPC architecture and the ISDN drivers, as well as the addition of the DECnet protocol. Interestingly, the fix for the ICMP denial-of-service attack appears to not have been included.

The current stable release remains 2.2.9. A new release with the denial of service patch should be forthcoming shortly, but was not available as of this writing. (There is a 2.2.10 prepatch available in the testing directory).

Naming of USB devices remains a hot topic. Linus has pretty much entrenched himself behind a scheme wherein a USB configuration event (attachment or removal of a device) causes a complete rescan of the bus and, perhaps, the renaming of devices which were already present on the bus and in use. This sort of renaming could cause some surprises, to say the least - what happens to your printcap file if the printers change names? But Linus maintains that this is the only means by which any sort of rational, consistent behavior can be obtained. See this posting for details on why he feels this way.

Linus may well be right. But one real implication of this whole discussion is that true USB support may be more distant than we think. A fair amount of user-space code is going to be required to deal properly with USB devices so that users do not have to contend with all of the ugliness that is otherwise exposed. This problem also extends beyond USB devices; other busses like Firewire and the new removable PCI bus will present the same sorts of challenges. The hardware situation on modern systems is getting much more dynamic, and Linux will have to adapt to that change.

The FENRIS Netware file system for Linux will be available for downloading on June 4 from www.timpanogas.com. It appears that the code is being released under the GPL.

Some of the patches and updates that were released this week:

  • Richard Gooch is up to devfs v106. He has also released devfs v99.1 which is a backport of v106 for the 2.2.9 kernel.

  • IBM has released (in beta form) a driver for their ServRAID family of controllers.

  • H.J. Lu has released knfsd 1.3.3.

  • Mikael Pettersson released a patch allowing the system to access the performance monitoring counters in modern x86 processors.

  • Donald Becker put out a new version of the 3c59x ethernet driver. This version is a 1.0 release candidate, if all goes well...

Section Editor: Jon Corbet


June 3, 1999

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