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Kernel development

Jon is taking a break this week. That, combined with a major power failure that took out his temporary replacement for a while makes for a light kernel page this week. We apologize for the inconvenience, but this is Jon's first real break in quite some time. He'll be back next week.

The current kernel release is still 2.4.9. Despite warnings from Jon that Linus would likely ship 2.5 in his absence, it hasn't happened. Linus shipped a couple of prepatches instead. The latest is patch-2.4.10-pre11, which includes only a few minor updates, plus Andrea Arkangeli's major VM merge. Prior to that, Linux released patch-2.4.10-pre10. This patch included a continuing merge with Alan's releases, a USB init fix, and some NFS locking fixups. The only other update this past week was 2.4.10-pre9, which included the beginning of a migration to the new min/max solutions along with NTFS and IrDA updates.

Alan had a pair of releases this past week, which for him seems like a slow week. His latest release is 2.4.9-ac12. It includes a 3c507 ring buffer fix that may affect other similar drivers, a number of reiserfs fixes and a Matrox driver update, among many others. His other update for the week was 2.4.9-ac11 which merged in 2.4.10pre9 and fixes the sign check error in death signal.

Preemptible kernels. Robert Love sent in news of a patch to make the Linux kernel preemptible. He says this patch will make for better system response by making user space programs preemptible. The patch will work with XFS but only if another supplied patch is also applied. More importantly, preemption is no longer marked experimental with SMP.

In addition to this patch, Love posted another patch, this one coming from MontaVista. This is a latency measurment patch for the preemption patch. According to Love, some users noticed latency even with preemption enabled, most notably with mp3 files. This patch will help with the examination of that problem.

Other patches and updates released this week include:

Jonathan Day noted that the latest FOLK patch (2.2.5) is out, with even more VME support. It also includes KGI, a kernel-based CORBA broker, and Parallel Port SCSI support, along with updates to i2c/lm_sensors, XFS, JFS, the VAX architecture, and the purple kitchen sink.

Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet

September 20, 2001

For other kernel news, see:
Kernel traffic
Kernel Newsflash
Kernel Trap
2.5 Status
Other resources:
L-K mailing list FAQ
Linux-MM
Linux Scalability Effort
Kernel Newbies
Linux Device Drivers

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