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See also: last week's Kernel page.

Kernel development


The current development kernel remains 2.3.42. There is a 2.3.43 prepatch out there (in its sixth revision) for the daring. Much of this patch is devoted to the IA-64 code, but it also includes a Integraphics CyberPro VGA driver (for Netwinders), PCI documentation updates, a number of Alpha tweaks, the long-awaited integration of the new RAID code, an Interphase ATM card driver, and a Qlogic ISP1x80/1x160 SCSI driver. It also appears to include the massive rewriting of hundreds of file_operations structure initializations to use the gcc tagged syntax.

Those interested in the IA-64 port may want to have a look at the documentation notes that come with the 2.3.43 prepatch. They show that the port still has some rough edges - as should be expected for an initial release. Among other things, there are security holes and kernel modules don't work. The IA-64 patch also managed to slip in a simple kernel debugger - something Linus has always resisted until now.

The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.14. Work on 2.2.15 continues, with the current prepatch being 2.2.15pre7. It is presented as the "final cleanup and debug," meaning that a real 2.2.15 should be forthcoming shortly.

Users of the 2.0 kernel series (and there are a lot of those, still) may want to look at the latest 2.0.39 prepatch: 2.0.39pre3. This patch contains almost exclusively crucial bugfixes.

Jim Pick is new kernel.org webmaster. H. Peter Anvin has announced that Jim Pick, the guy behind kernelnotes.org, has been hired to be the new webmaster at kernel.org. Jim is also an active Debian developer and generally good guy. This should be good news for the kernel source archive.

Device drivers talk posted. Jeff Garzik of MandrakeSoft has put up the slides to his Linux Expo Paris talk on writing portable device drivers for Linux 2.4.

O'Reilly's Linux Device Drivers book, written by Alessandro Rubini, is being updated for the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels by none other than your humble LWN kernel page editor Jonathan Corbet. Those who are interested may want to have a look at this interview on the O'Reilly site about the book and the process of updating it to the current state of the Linux kernel.

While nothing has been set in stone, it appears that the second edition of the book may be released under an open content license.

IBM releases its journaled filesystem. At LinuxWorld IBM announced that it was making its Journaled File System (JFS) available to the Linux community. Code is available now, and has been released under the GPL. It is certainly an important contribution.

IBM's press releases somehow neglected to point out that JFS for Linux, while available now, doesn't actually work. Porting the code is a large job, with quite a bit left to do; see the JFS README file for a list of some of the outstanding issues. IBM is certainly not to be faulted for releasing an early-stage port; that is, after all, how things are often done in this community. But one should not expect to see JFS turn up in the 2.4 kernel.

SGI has also released, with less fanfare, a new development version of its XFS filesystem for Linux.

Other patches and updates released this week include:

  • Richard Gooch is back after a one-month break with devfs v153 and v154. He also released devfsd v1.3.1.

  • SUBTERFUGUE 0.0 has been released by Mike Coleman. According to the announcement: "SUBTERFUGUE is a framework for observing and playing with the reality of software; it's a foundation for building tools to do tracing, sandboxing, and many other things. You could think of it as 'strace meets expect.'"

  • Jeff Garzik posted a new driver for RTL-8139 fast ethernet adapters.

  • Andrew Pam has been posting current international crypto patches for the 2.3 kernels on his web site.

  • Trond Myklebust has posted NFSv3 0.18.3, which provides client-side version 3 NFS for the 2.2.14 kernel. There is also a version for 2.3.42 available.

  • Comedi 0.7.36, a set of drivers for data acquisition boards, has been made available by David Schleef.

Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet (whose ugly face can be seen in this LinuxWorld picture posted by LinuxToday).


February 10, 2000

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