Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

[Posted April 8, 2009 by corbet]

Linus has released the 2.6.30-rc1 kernel prepatch and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "So the two week merge window has closed, and just as well - because we had a lot of changes. As usual. Certainly I had no urges to keep the window open to get those last remaining few megabytes of patches." Significant changes in 2.6.30 will include the integrity management architecture, the TOMOYO Linux security module, the preadv() and pwritev() system calls, object storage device support, the FS-Cache local filesystem caching layer, several new tracing features, the Nilfs filesystem, a number of other filesystem changes, and a huge number of new drivers. See the long-format changelog for all the details.

Still waiting

Posted Apr 8, 2009 5:43 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

for chastity management infrastructure :-)

Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

Posted Apr 8, 2009 7:34 UTC (Wed) by wzzrd (guest, #12309) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm just scanning the changelog, but it's huge. Can someone tell me offhand whether the dom0 patch - that LWN.net reported over a couple of weeks ago - has been accepted during the merge window?

Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

Posted Apr 8, 2009 7:42 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (1 responses)

I think not - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/819120/focus=8...

Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

Posted Apr 8, 2009 7:53 UTC (Wed) by wzzrd (guest, #12309) [Link]

Thanks! Those are pretty recent posts. I'll keep an eye on those.

Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

Posted Apr 8, 2009 14:47 UTC (Wed) by walovaton (guest, #57287) [Link] (3 responses)

fscache/cachefiles?? this look really interesting. Any idea if CIFS is planning to use this facility? it would be very useful for me.

Kernel prepatch 2.6.30-rc1

Posted Apr 8, 2009 16:18 UTC (Wed) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]

My impression is that it could support CIFS as well -- at least it used to be able to in the RHEL kernels before this bit of code was removed while awaiting upstream merger (correct me if I'm wrong).

cachefs deja vu?

Posted Apr 8, 2009 17:08 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link] (1 responses)

If memory serves, we did this once before, though it was a while ago, and for the same "general purpose" network FS caching idea. What's the difference between this go 'round and Howells' previous implementation?

(reference http://lwn.net/Articles/99597/ and http://lwn.net/Articles/100321/)

cachefs deja vu?

Posted Apr 10, 2009 18:28 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Among other things, its handling of things like SELinux is greatly improved (hence all that credentials work a few months back), the 'cachefs' caching filesystem is joined by 'cachefiles', which keeps the cache on a local FS; and it's now general enough to cope with complicated horrors like AFS.

As far as I can tell it works flawlessly and with almost zero setup required. It's particularly effective for boots-from-NFS systems, where NFS's near-total lack of caching otherwise seriously impacts their speed: with fs-cache in the way, after a while the cache is mostly populated and the system hardly needs to hit the network at all.