Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters All in one big page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current kernel release is 2.4.4, which was released on April 28. This release contains, of course, the zero-copy networking code, and a number of other enhancements and bug fixes. It also evidently contains some new bugs - the complaint level for 2.4.4 appears to be higher than with some of the other 2.4.x releases. The "run children first" change to the fork() system call (discussed in the April 19 LWN Kernel Page) seems to have caused quite a few problems, and it has already been reverted in Linus's 2.4.5pre1 prepatch. A number of other problems have been reported as well; people without a burning need to upgrade to 2.4.4 might just want to wait for 2.4.5. As noted, Linus has since released 2.4.5pre1 with some additional fixes. Alan Cox, meanwhile, is at 2.4.4ac3 with a rather longer set of fixes. Trashing your filesystem with dump. It has been known for a very long time that using dump to back up live filesystems can result in corrupt backups. It turns out that, with Linux kernels through 2.4.4, dumping a live filesystem has the potential to corrupt the filesystem in place, even if the dump process has no write access. Alexander Viro reported the bug which makes this possible. It can happen only on SMP systems, and is not easy to trigger, but it is there. Essentially, if the filesystem allocates a new metadata block for the filesystem, and a separate process reads that block at the wrong time, the wrong data will be written back to disk. The fix is relatively straightforward, and has already been incorporated into 2.4.5pre1. Linus pointed out an interesting little fact as part of this discussion: dump will not work correctly on 2.4-based systems in any case. The filesystem keeps quite a bit of useful information in the page cache - and will do so even more in the future. dump, however, works with the raw device, which deals with the buffer cache instead. The two are not always synchronized, and it is possible that dump will end up reading the wrong data. In case that's not clear enough: So anybody who depends on "dump" getting backups right is already playing russian rulette with their backups. It's not at all guaranteed to get the right results - you may end up having stale data in the buffer cache that ends up being "backed up".
For now, there is really no easy way to fix dump for 2.4. If you're using it, this might be a good time to go looking for a different tool. A 2.4 swap bug - maybe. A discussion of Linux swapping behavior turned to an interesting aspect of how the system handles swapping. Swap space, of course, is used to hold copies of pages which have been moved out of memory. It turns out that when a page is restored to main memory from swap, its slot in the swap file is not released. Thus, in some situations, Linux can "run out" of swap space even though much of that swap space is taken up by data that is not currently swapped out. According to Alan Cox, this behavior is forcing some large systems to remain with the 2.2 kernel. At first blush, the proper course of action seems simple: when a page is swapped back into memory, its swap slot should be freed. As is often the case, though, life is not that simple. Some of the twists that come up here (as pointed out by Stephen Tweedie) include:
The proper solution, thus, would appear to be to retain the copy in the swap cache for as long as there is no real virtual memory pressure. Once things get tight, it's time to start throwing things away. In some cases, though, (such as the one where the swap copy of a page is valid), it may be better to toss out the memory copy of the page. Moral: virtual memory is never simple. SGI releases XFS 1.0. SGI has announced the release of XFS 1.0. The 2.4 kernel now has another journaling filesystem in a stable release state; XFS also offers a number of features for users with intense I/O bandwidth requirements. It claims to work with NFS, and comes with an installer for Red Hat Linux 7.1 systems. Perhaps not wanting to be left out entirely, IBM has released JFS beta 3 release 0.3.0. ECN enabled on kernel.org. The kernel.org FTP server has enabled ECN (the Explicit Congestion Notification protocol). If you find you're now having a hard time downloading that new kernel, there's a chance you're behind a broken firewall which doesn't handle ECN properly. See Jeff Garzik's ECN page for help if you find yourself in that situation. Other patches and updates released this week include:
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet |
May 3, 2001
| ||