By Jonathan Corbet
January 30, 2008
As of this writing, some 3800 patches have been merged into the mainline
git repository since the release of 2.6.24. That is fewer than one might
have expected, but Linus's travel to linux.conf.au is slowing the process
somewhat. Expect more than the usual amount of interesting stuff to be
merged relatively late in the merge window period.
User-visible changes include:
- New drivers have been added for Globe Trotter HSDPA wireless cards,
HIFN 795x crypto accelerator chips, Xceive xc2028 and xc5000 tuners,
Cirrus Logic CS5345 analog-to-digital converters, several Beholder TV
tuners, Syntek DC1125 cameras, Silicon Labs Si470x FM radio receivers,
Atmel AT91CAP9 processors, Qualcomm MSM7X00A processors, Marvell Orion
system-on-a-chip devices, Marvell Feroceon processors, SuperH 7203 and
7263 processors, SGI IP28 systems, R6040 Ethernet adapters, Broadcom
NetXtremeII 10Gb network adapters, RTL8180 and 8185-based wireless
network cards, Microchip EN28J60 Ethernet chips, and, finally, Atheros-based
wireless network adapters.
- The Seagate ST-02/Future Domain TMC-8xx and PSI240i SCSI drivers have
been removed due to lack of interest and maintenance.
- Salsa20 stream cipher support has been added to the crypto layer (at
least for the x86 architecture - it's an assembly implementation).
- Some realtime work has gone into the scheduler; in particular, the
kernel will be more aggressive about moving tasks between processors
when multiple realtime tasks are contending for the same CPU. The
implementation of cpusets has been made to work more with the
scheduler domains mechanism. The option to make the big kernel lock
preemptible has been made the default; eventually the non-preemptible
version will go away altogether. High-resolution timers can be used
for preemption, making fair scheduling more accurate. The group
scheduling feature has been enhanced with realtime support.
- The Preemptible
read-copy-update patches have been merged.
- Support for the LatencyTop
utility has been merged.
- Kprobes support for the ARM architecture has been added.
- The new CLONE_IO flag to clone() causes I/O contexts
(used in the CFQ block I/O scheduler) to be shared with the new child
process.
- The idle class for I/O scheduling has been changed to not be 100%
idle when the device is busy; as a result, it is far less likely to
cause priority inversion problems and is no longer limited to
privileged processes.
- A long list of new ext4
features, including large file support, (very) large filesystem
support, journal checksumming, multi-block allocation, and more, has
been added in.
- The splice() system call now supports TCP receive streams.
- Controller area network
protocol support has been merged.
- The network traffic shaper, long obsolete and scheduled for removal,
is gone.
- Quite a bit of work has been done on the network namespace code which
was first merged in 2.6.24. Extending namespace awareness through the
entire networking subsystem is a big job which is, at this point,
mostly complete.
Changes visible to kernel developers include:
- Chinese translations of a number of core kernel development
documents have been added to the tree.
- There have been a great many changes to the low-level device model
APIs dealing with kobjects and ksets. These changes have, in turn,
forced a large number of adjustments throughout the tree. See
Documentation/kobject.txt for an
overview of the new API.
- There is a new set of security module functions for dealing with
filesystem mount and unmount operations.
- The chained scatterlist API has been augmented with the sg_table patches.
- There have been some changes to the block request completion API. See
this article for a
description of the new way of doing things.
As of this writing, the merging process has just begun, so expect a long
list again next week. Among other things, the x86 tree update, with 908
changesets, is waiting on the wings. There is quite a bit of code yet to
be merged for this development cycle.
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