In brief

Listmanager. It appears that vger.kernel.org, the busy system which handles the bulk of the kernel-oriented mailing lists, is about to get a new mailing list manager. The new system is called "listmanager"; it is meant to be somewhat more efficient that the existing majordomo installation. The interface should stay about the same, though.

An early-stage version of the software has been posted for those who would like to play with it. Matti Aarnio, the author of the code, says: "Somebody will want to know if the sources will be available. Yes, but it is only my 3rd day of hacking at it yet..."

Btrfs and RAID. Speaking of early-stage software, David Woodhouse has posted an initial implementation of RAID5 and RAID6 support for Btrfs. It's not exactly functional yet, but a number of the pieces are in place. Some additional good news is that this work does not involve the addition of another RAID implementation to the kernel; instead, David has moved the MD implementation into common code so that it can be used in both places.

VFAT. Andrew Tridgell continues to work on the VFAT patent workaround patch. He has set up a directory on kernel.org which contains the latest version of the patch; there is also a README file which describes the interoperability problems which have been identified so far. Meanwhile, some developers are pushing for a return to the previous version of the patch, which simply took away the ability to create long file names. That patch removes some useful functionality, but it is also pretty well guaranteed not to cause interoperability problems.

Tridge does not appear to have given up on the long-name-only approach, though. Stay tuned; he may yet come up with a version which interoperates more universally.

Kmemleak. The kmemleak code was merged for 2.6.31; that means that testers are now beginning to post about memory leak reports. At this stage, it seems that kmemleak is still putting out a fair number of false reports - but it is also turning up real leaks. People who are interested in playing with kmemleak should (1) run 2.6.31-rc3 or later, and (2), look at these suggestions for evaluating leak reports posted by kmemleak author Catalin Marinas.

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