See also: last week's Kernel page.

Kernel development

The current stable kernel is 2.2.10. Meanwhile, Alan Cox's release of 2.2.10ac10 is believed to have fixed the file corruption problem. The fact that 2.2.11 still has not been released, though, is probably a measure of how confident they want to be that the problems are fixed, before they move on.

For those that want to catch up on the messages related to file corruption with 2.2.9 and 2.2.10, all related articles (with hardware-related problems deleted) can be downloaded in a single file from this site.

Resource management issues started annoying Linus, so he took some time out of his schedule to rewrite the resource management package (kernel/resource.c).

"I got tired of the problems with the resource management - lack of hierarchy, and the stupid and utterly horrible static allocation.

So I rewrote it. The new one can generate resource trees: you can claim a piece of the pie, and then within that piece you can continue to do resource management. And the new one doesn't have any arbitrary limits or magic constants (0 is IO, 1 is MEM is gone, gone, gone)."

Instructions and patches for getting NFSv3 working on Linux are provided at this web-site, maintained by Michael Kaminsky. Michael also pointed out a couple of problems with the current NFS code.

The source code for NwFs 1.4.5, the Netware Filesystem (FENRIS), is now available for download. Of course, to play with NwFs, you'll need to be able to create a Netware partition ... NWDISK is the tool needed, but it has not yet been released.

Tomasz Motylewski released mbuff-0.5 for 2.2 and 2.0, announced in this note. Mbuff is a character device that implements the mmap method on any size of vmalloc'ed kernel memory. It is heavily dependent on the bttv.c driver, though, which Alan Cox pointed out was changed heavily in 2.3.10pre5 in order to support the Ultrasparc. Mbuff patch author Tomasz Motylewski commented that the new bttv does not work with the Intel architecture as a module, so he stuck with the older version to maintain portability.

Patches/Releases over the past week

• Version 0.3.1 of Willy Tarreau's patch to dump oops to a diskette.

• a new version of Chris Wing's patch to support 32-bit UIDs, last released a year ago

• a patch for SGI's kdb, version 0.4

• strace 4.0

• Pentium III SSE support from Jason Hartman

• ext2 ACL support for 2.2.10 and 2.3.10

• FAT filesystem patch for 2.3.10

• devfs v114 from Richard Gooch

• Generic PPP, highly experimental

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

For other kernel news, see: Kernelnotes Kernel traffic Kernel Newsflash

Next: Distributions