Sections:
Main page
Linux in the news
Security
Kernel
Distributions
Development
Commerce
Announcements
Back page
All in one big page

Kernel development

The current kernel release is 2.2.7, put out unceremoniously with no announcement to be seen as of this writing. The patches continue to roll in, and the stable kernel series continues to stabilize. One begins to hope that the 2.3 series begins before too long so that there will be exciting new features to talk about again...

Documentation of Linux kernel tuning parameters is the objective of a new project that is just getting underway. This effort, of course, is inspired by the fallout from the Mindcraft report, and the real realization that information on how to tune Linux systems is hard to come by. "Use the source" is not the right sort of answer for Mindcraft, or for a lot of other Linux users who simply want to get the best out of their systems. This documentation project is looking for people with writing skills to help out; according to the announcement sent out by Rik van Riel, they currently have more technical ability than time or writing skills. Please have a look if you think you can help out.

What is the status of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) project? Some curiosity on the subject led to the posting of pointers to The Linux USB web page. A quick perusal there reveals that this project seems to be proceeding nicely. A fair amount of functionality is in place now, with more on the way. The latest release, as of this writing, happened on April 25.

An audio CD filesystem. Senko Rasic came up with an interesting idea: make a new file system which presents an audio CD as a set of .WAV files. Access to audio CD data thus becomes an easy thing. See his posting for some details and a pointer to the software.

A new version of mount has been released; this version is intended for people using the NFSv3 beta patches on 2.2 kernels. See the announcement for more.

TCP networking flakes out after 48 days of uptime on 64-bit systems. Or, at least, it did until David "punk kid" Miller posted a patch for the problem. It seems there was a bit of confusion between the 64-bit system and the 32-bit timestamps that TCP uses. When it was pointed out that the patch was very quick in coming, David responded to the contrary: clearly, the bug is already more than 48 days old...

A new version of strace is out under the new maintainership of Debian leader Wichert Akkerman. See his announcement for more. There is also a new release of the PPSkit, the nanosecond timekeeping patches for the 2.2 kernel; details in the announcement.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

April 29, 1999

For other kernel news, see:
LinuxHQ
Kernel traffic

Next: Distributions