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See also: last week's Kernel page.

Kernel development


Stable kernel prepatch 2.2.15pre5. Alan Cox has released 2.2.15pre5, the next step toward the 2.2.15 stable kernel release.

Development kernel 2.3.42 released. Development kernel 2.3.42 has been released. This patch includes an alternative UHCI (Uniform Host Controller Interface) driver for Linux USB, an apparent complete removal of Sparc AP1000 support, a driver for TMS380 PCI adaptors, the new version 4 automounter, Trident 4DWave support, a new Am8570 serial comunications controller driver, a reworking of the NSC PC108 and PC338 IrDA (infrared) driver, and a Crystal Semiconductor CS89[02]0 driver.

Kernel.org to carry cryptographic software. H. Peter Anvin has announced that, as of February 14, the kernel.org FTP/web site and its mirrors will begin hosting cryptographic software. This policy change results from the change in U.S. export regulations; it means that useful cryptographic code may soon start to show up in the standard Linux kernel.

Updated 2.3 job list posted. Alan Cox has posted an updated list of things to fix before 2.4 come out. Alan claims it's getting shorter, but it's still pretty long... Some reports have come back as to progress on various items on the list, including a note from James A. Simmons with an update on his work with the fbcon races and the fbdev drivers. David S. Miller also commentedthat the merge of the network fixes should be done soon. "75% done, the remaining bits should be doable in 2 seperate code merges. I think I can get this done over the course of the upcoming 2 weeks."

The Wonderful World of Linux 2.4. Joe Pranevich has sent us the very latest version (he promises) of his Wonderful World of Linux 2.4. This is a "document-in-process" and will continue to be updated until Linux 2.4 is released. It is really worth a read; there is a lot of fun stuff coming. Here are some highlights:

  • Enterprise-class support: "Linux 2.4 can also handle much larger "enterprise-class" hardware than could previous Linux kernel revisions. For example, Linux 2.4 now includes support for more than 4 gigabytes of RAM on any hardware that can support it, (including Intel hardware,) more than 16 ethernet cards, more than 10 IDE controllers, multiple IO-APICs, and other seemingly pointless abuses of good hardware."
  • ISA device support:"Linux 2.4 includes, for the first time in the kernel, support for ISA Plug-and-Play devices."
  • Block devices: "One completely new feature in the Linux 2.4 kernel is the implementation of a "raw" I/O device. A raw device is one whose accesses are not handled through the caching layer, instead going right to the low-level device itself. "
  • File system support: "OS/2 users will finally be able to write to their filesystems from within Linux. (This change is a long time in coming and I hope that there are still OS/2 users out there to enjoy it.)"
  • Video cards: "One of the biggest changes in this respect is the addition of the Direct Rendering Manager to the Linux kernel. The DRM cleans up access to the graphics hardware and eliminates many ways in which multiple processes which write to your video cards at once could cause a crash. This should improve stability in many situations. "
  • Speech synthesizers: "When thinking of Linux, the words "user friendly" do not generally come immediately to mind. Therefore, one might be surprised to learn that Linux 2.4 (and some later editions of the Linux 2.2 kernel) supports speech synthesizer cards. This driver and the appropriate hardware will allow vision-impaired Linux users to hear all Linux output, including messages very early in the boot process. Very few Operating Systems can boast such low level support for these devices. "
  • and still much more ...

This week on linux-kernel. It appears to have been a pretty quiet week, with very few large, intense discussions. We presume everyone has been busy getting ready for LinuxWorld, preparing for talks, BOFs, etc. We'll cover a few minor issues that did come up.

Lock granularity. Michel W Zappe brought up the topic of lock granularity and the question of whether Linux 2.3.X was still deficient in this area. Manfred pointed him to a special patch from SGI that measures lock contention and cautioned that "fine grained locks are sometimes slower that one big lock under realistic loads". Stephen Tweedie finished with a summary of the work done early in 2.3 to eliminate all contention points found via kernel profiling. "The one place where we still have a big bottleneck on SMP is the network bottom half. There is code to deal with that (the "softnet" work), but it's not yet in the 2.3 tree."

Progress on keyboard lockup problems. Some progress has been made the past week nailing down some keyboard lockup problems that have been reported with 2.3.X. Miles Lane posted a reminder that the problems were still occurring as of 2.3.41. Linus responded and several other people contributed with error messages and additional testing. As a result, at least some of the problems were attributed to the keyboard not being disabled during the mode set. Linus issued a patch that corrected this in at least some instances.

Other patches and updates released this week include:

Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet


February 3, 2000

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