Since last week's summary, there
have been over 4200 patches merged
for the 2.6.33 development cycle. That makes a total of 8152 patches
for this merge window, as of this writing.
User-visible changes include:
If there are any remaining reiserfs users out there: that filesystem
has seen a major rework of its internal locking to eliminate use of
the big kernel lock.
The Super-H architecture has gained perf events support for a number
of system types.
The exofs filesystem (for object storage devices) now has multi-device
mirror support.
There is a new "discard" mount option for ext4 filesystems,
controlling whether ext4 issues TRIM commands for newly-freed space.
It defaults to off due to fears about how well this feature will
really work once hardware begins to support it.
It is now possible to configure a kernel without ext2 or ext3 support,
but still mount filesystems with those formats using the ext4 code.
The Nouveau reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver has been merged, but
without the accompanying firmware; see this article for more
information.
The "ramzswap" device, formerly known as compcache,
has been merged into the staging tree.
There is now support for the "BATMAN" mesh network protocol in the
staging tree.
The "perf" tool now has a "diff" mode which will calculate the change
in performance between two different runs and generate a report.
The semantics for the O_SYNC and O_DSYNC open-time
flags have been rationalized, as described in this article.
The MD layer now supports barrier requests for all RAID types. The
device mapper, too, has improved barrier support.
Block devices: The VMware paravirtualized SCSI HBA device,
LSI 3ware SAS/SATA-RAID controllers,
PMC-Sierra SPC 8001 SAS/SATA based host adapters,
Apple PowerMac/PowerBook internal 'MacIO' IDE controllers,
Blackfin Secure Digital host controllers,
TI DAVINCI multimedia card interfaces, and
BCM Reference Board NAND flash controllers.
Miscellaneous: Dynapro serial touchscreens,
Altera University Program PS/2 ports,
Samsung S3C2410 touchscreens,
National Semiconductor LM73 temperature sensors,
Nuvoton NUC900 series SPI controllers
SuperH MSIOF SPI controllers,
OMAP SPI 100K master controllers,
ST-Ericsson AB4500 Mixed Signal Power management chips,
Freescale MC13783 realtime clocks,
Freescale MC13783 touchscreen devices,
SHARP LQ035Q1DH02 TFT displays, and
TI BQ32000 I2C realtime clocks.
Networking: RealTek RTL8192U Wireless LAN NICs,
Agere Systems HERMES II Wireless PC Cards (Model 0110), and
Analog Devices Blackfin on-chip CAN controllers.
Sound: AD525x digital potentiometers and
Texas Instruments DAC7512 digital-to-analog converters.
Systems and processors: Neuros OSD 2.0 devices,
Nintendo GameCubes,
Freescale P1020RDB processors,
Freescale p4080ds reference boards,
Arcom/Eurotech ZEUS single-board SBC systems,
ATNGW100 mkII Network Gateway boards, and
Acvilon BF561 boards.
USB: Xilinx USB host controllers and
OMAP34xx USBHOST 3 port EHCI controllers.
The scsi_debug module can now emulate "thin provisioning" devices.
The detect() callback in struct i2c_driver has lost
the unused kind parameter. Also, struct
i2c_client_address_data is no more; address lists are represented
with simple unsigned short arrays instead.
The spinlock renaming
patch has been applied. Developers working near low-level code
will see the new arch_spin_lock_t type being used with
non-sleeping (even in the realtime tree) locks.
Video4Linux2 has a
new subdevice API, called media-bus, intended to help in the
negotiation of image formats between the sensor and the controller.
There is a new mechanism for grabbing and saving kernel messages on a system
crash; see this article
for more information.
The per-CPU variable allocator has been replaced, and there is a new
set of operations for working with these variables; see this article for a brief
introduction.
This merge window should close in the very near future, so the 2.6.33
kernel is, at this point, close to being feature-complete. Any final
additions will be noted in next week's edition.
Posted Dec 24, 2009 9:48 UTC (Thu) by hensema (guest, #980)
[Link]
While I have the policy of using ext3 for all new filesystems I create, I still do have dozens of reiserfs filesystems in operation. They're not going away anytime soon. They've been almost trouble free in operation for years, albeit I think that fact can be attributed to the extensive patching SuSE has done to reiserfs in their kernels.
So please don't just assume there are no users of reiserfs left just because its main developer is in prison. I may not like the man personally, never did, but reiserfs is and has been a very good filesystem.
