See also: last week's Kernel page.

Kernel development

Alan Cox's 2.2 jobs list contains the list of things that still need to be fixed before 2.2 goes out.

Insufficient jiffies? This week's big debate was what to do about the "jiffies wraparound" bug. "Jiffies" is an internal kernel variable which is incremented each clock tick; it is used in a number of places to deal with short intervals of time. Given its resolution, it overflows and wraps back to zero after about 490 days of uptime. This problem has been around forever, but changes in the 2.1 kernel make the effects of the wraparound much more severe; in some cases, at least, the system dies.

The problem is widespread through the Linux kernel, and any fix requires changing a lot of code. That makes a fix for 2.2 unlikely, especially since Linus is not worried about the problem.

Alex Buell is looking for a wider audience for his Framebuffer HOWTO before moving its status to 1.0. If you are interested in reviewing his HOWTO and providing comments, check out the current draft and drop Alex a line.

A call went out to create a white paper on Linux kernel performance. The point here is to evaluate the performance characteristics of the current kernel, and to look at ways in which the design of the kernel can be improved for better performance and scalability. Participants are being recruited; see the announcement if you're interested.

An announcement has been made regarding the (perhaps unfortunately named) NADS (Network Architecture Discovery and Switching) project. This project seems to be trying to allow for networks to be served by multi-homed servers without the need to use subnetting. This is a school project, so something will actually likely be completed by their deadline.

Work on the NFS server continues, headed up by H.J. Lu. A milestone was reached this week when an obnoxious Solaris interoperability bug was tracked down and squashed. The rescue of NFS (version 2, UDP) for 2.2 is looking to be near completion.

A new version of the system and kernel log daemon is out. Version 1.3-27 fixes a number of problems and works with latter-day 2.1 kernels.

Since we're a weekly publication, chances are we'll be behind a rev or two on the kernel release by the time you read this page. Up-to-the-second information can always be found at LinuxHQ.

Next: Distributions