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Kernel developmentStable 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:
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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