The 2.6.39 merge window concludes

There have been just over 2,200 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline since the second installment in this series; that makes 8,757 total changes for this development cycle. The 2.6.39 merge window is now closed, so the feature set for this kernel development cycle should be complete. User-visible changes merged in the final part of the merge window include:

• Beginning user namespace support has been merged. User namespaces are a sort of container where processes can safely be given root access within the container without being able to affect the rest of the system. Full container support is a long-term project, but the user namespace patches get the kernel one step closer.

• It is now possible for a suitably privileged process to write to a processes /proc/pid/mem file.

• The "group isolation" tunable for the CFQ I/O scheduler has been removed; group isolation is always provided now that the performance issues associated with that mode have been fixed.

• There is a new "mtdswap" block device which allows swapping directly to memory technology devices.

• New hardware support includes:
  • Processors and systems: Samsung Laptop SABI interfaces, WMI Hotkeys for Dell All-In-One series, Intel Medfield platform thermal sensors, and Asus Notebook WMI interfaces.

  • Miscellaneous: MSM chipset SMD packet ports, Texas Instruments TWL4030 hardware monitoring controllers, ST-Ericsson AB8500 voltage monitors, Maxim Semiconductor MAX8997/8966 PMICs, Maxim 8997/8966 regulators, Texas Instruments TPS61050/61052 boost converters, Ricoh R5C592 card readers, and OLPC XO-1.5 ebook switches.

  • Video4Linux: Technisat USB2.0 DVB-S/S2 receivers, Silicionfile NOON010PC30 CIF camera sensors, DiBcom 9000 tuners, 3com homeconnect "ViCam" cameras, OmniVision OV9740 sensors, ST Microelectronics STV0367 demodulators, OMAP3 camera controllers, Divio NW80x-based camera controllers, and ITE Tech IT8712/IT8512 infrared transceivers.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• The dma64_addr_t type is no longer used in the kernel; it has been removed.

• The videobuf framework in the Video4Linux2 subsystem has been replaced by a newer "videobuf2" version.

• The media controller subsystem, intended to allow the system to export information about the topology of complex media subsystems to user space, has been merged.

• printk() and friends have a new "%pB" format specifier which prints a backtrace symbol and its offset.

• The m68k and m68knommu architectures have been merged in the kernel source tree.

• A support library for BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem) encoding and decoding has been added.

• Some low-level interrupt-related functions have changed names:

  Old	New
  get_irq_chip()	irq_get_chip()
  get_irq_chip_data()	irq_get_chip_data()
  get_irq_msi()	irq_get_msi_desc()
  irq_data_get_irq_data()	irq_data_get_irq_handler_data()
  set_irq_chained_handler()	irq_set_chained_handler()
  set_irq_chip()	irq_set_chip()
  set_irq_chip_and_handler_name()	irq_set_chip_and_handler_name()
  set_irq_data()	irq_set_handler_data()
  set_irq_handler()	irq_set_handler()
  set_irq_nested_thread()	irq_set_nested_thread()
  set_irq_noprobe()	irq_set_noprobe()
  set_irq_type()	irq_set_irq_type()
  set_irq_wake()	irq_set_irq_wake()

  The prototypes for these functions are otherwise unchanged.

The 2.6.39 kernel now goes into the stabilization phase of the development cycle. If the usual pattern holds, we can expect to see on the order of 2000 fixes merged between now and the final release, which is likely to happen in early June.

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  Provides volatile block device driver on top of mtd partition
  suitable for swapping.  The mapping of written blocks is not saved.
  The driver provides wear leveling by storing erase counter into the
  OOB.