More stuff for 2.6.19

The flow of patches into the mainline repository continues at a high rate, with a few thousand of them having been merged since last week's summary. The most significant of these are (starting with the user-visible changes):

• The GFS2 cluster filesystem has been merged at last; it includes its own distributed lock manager implementation.

• New drivers: MCS7840 USB port devices. ELAN U132 USB controllers, ELAN Uxxx USB-to-PCMCIA adapters, Playstation 2 "Trance" vibrator devices, the VIA VT1211 Super-I/O chip, AMD K8 CPU temperature monitors, Philips TDA10086 and TDA826x tuner devices, DiBcom DiB0700-based USB bridges, Hauppauge Nova-T 500 tuners, TI Flash Media PCI74xx and PCI76xx host adapters, QUICC Engine communications coprocessors, and HP Quicksilver AGP GARTs.

• The NFS server code has a number of improvements, including the ability to do I/O in much larger chunks over TCP connections.

• eCryptfs, an encrypting filesystem, has gone in.

• Bound End-to-End Tunnel (BEET) mode support has been added to the IPSec code.

• A USB gadget driver which connects the gadget interface to the ALSA MIDI subsystem. The purpose is to allow a system to appear as a USB-connected MIDI streaming device.

• POSIX access control lists are now available in the tmpfs filesystem.

• If a string with the form |program is written to /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern, all core dumps will be piped to the given program instead of being written to disk.

• Some of the early containers patches have gone in, including separate namespaces for utsname information and SYSV IPC objects.

• The BSD secure level security module has been removed.

• The "floppy tape" subsystem has been marked for removal in 2.6.20; it is unmaintained, probably has no active users, and its 1.6GB storage capacity looks rather quaint in current times. Anybody who actually has worthwhile data on this medium probably should have copied it to something newer some time ago.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• SRCU - a version of read-copy-update which allows read-side blocking - has been merged.

• Much improved suspend and resume support for the USB layer.

• A new set of functions has been added to allow USB drivers to quickly check the direction and transfer mode of an endpoint.

• A somewhat reduced version of Wireless Extensions version 21. Most of the original functionality has been removed with the idea that the wireless extensions will soon be superseded by something else.

• Vast numbers of annotations enabling the sparse utility to detect big/little endian errors.

• A number of Video4Linux drivers have been converted to the V4L2 API.

• The flags field of struct request has been split into two new fields: cmd_type and cmd_flags. The former contains a value describing the type of request (filesystem request, sense, power management, etc.) while the latter has the flags which modify the way the command works (read/write, barriers, etc.).

• The block layer can be disabled entirely at kernel configuration time; this option can be useful in some embedded situations.

• The kernel now has a generic boolean type, called bool; it replaces a number of homebrewed boolean types found in various parts of the kernel.

• There is a new function for allocating a copy of a block of memory:

      void *kmemdup(const void *src, size_t len, gfp_t gfp);
  

  A number of allocate-then-copy code sequences have been updated to use kmemdup() instead.

• The latency tracking infrastructure patch has been merged.

• The readv() and writev() methods in the file_operations structure have been removed in favor of aio_readv() and aio_writev() (whose prototypes have been changed). See this article for more information.

As of this writing the merge window has not yet closed, so chances are that more significant changes could yet find their way into 2.6.19.

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