By Jonathan Corbet
June 1, 2011
In the end, 7,333 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline kernel
before Linus closed the merge window and decreed that the next release
would be called "3.0". There have not been vast numbers of exciting new
features added since
last week's summary
was written, but there are a few. The most significant user-visible
changes include:
- The namespace file descriptors patch,
which includes the setns() system call, has been merged.
This feature makes it easier to manage containers running in different
namespaces.
- The XFS filesystem now has online discard support.
- The Cleancache functionality has been
merged. Cleancache allows for intermediate storage of pages which
have been pushed out of the page cache but which might still be useful
in the future. Cleancache is initially supported by ext3, ext4, and
ocfs2.
- A new netlink-based infrastructure allows the management of RDMA
clients.
- It is now possible to move all threads in a group into a control group
at once using the cgroup.procs control file.
- The Blackfin architecture has gained perf events support.
- The btrfs filesystem has gained support for a administrator-initiated
"scrub" operation
that can read through a filesystem's blocks and verify checksums.
When possible, bad copies of data will be replaced by good copies from
another storage device. Also supported by btrfs is an
auto_defrag mount option causing the filesystem to notice
random writes to files and schedule them for defragmentation.
- The no-hlt boot parameter has been deprecated; no machines
have needed it in this millennium. Should there be any machines with
non-working HLT instructions running current kernels, they can be
booted with idle=poll.
- Support for the pNFS protocol backed by object storage devices has
been added.
- New hardware support includes:
- Systems and processors: TILE-Gx 64-bit processors and
Blackfin SPORT SPI busses.
- Input: Qualcomm PMIC8XXX keypads.
- Media: Fintek consumer infrared transceivers, and
Fujitsu M-5MOLS 8MP sensors.
- Network:
GPIO-controlled RF-kill switches.
- USB:
VUB300 USB to SDIO/SD/MMC host controllers.
- Miscellaneous:
ST-Ericsson DB5500 power reset control management units,
AMD Family 15h processor power monitors,
SMSC EMC6W201 hardware monitors,
Marvell 88PM860x real-time clocks,
HTC ASIC3 LED controllers,
Qualcomm PM8921 PMIC chips,
Micro Crystal RV3029-C2 RTC chips,
VIA/WonderMedia 85xx SoC RTC chips,
ST M41T93 SPI RTC chips,
EM Microelectronic EM3027 RTC chips,
Maxim/Dallas DS2780 stand-alone fuel gauge ICs,
Maxim MAX8903 battery chargers, and
TI TPS65910 and TPS65911 power management chips.
Changes visible to kernel developers include:
- There is a new core support module for GPIO controllers based
on memory-mapped I/O.
- There is a new atomic_or() operation to perform a logical
OR operation on an atomic_t value.
With the -rc1 release, Linus tagged the kernel "3.0.0" (with a new name of
"Sneaky Weasel"). His stated intent is to drop the last digit during the
stabilization period so that the final kernel would be just "3.0", but that
depends on getting various user-space scripts fixed. Either way, the
stable updates that most people will actually run will start with 3.0.1.
Linus is clearly hoping for a relatively smooth development cycle this time
around; he has hinted that he may be fussier than usual about the fixes
that he'll pull from now on. 3.0, it seems, is supposed to be boring, just
to drive home the point that the version number change does not really mean
much. The final release, boring or not, can be expected sometime in the
first half of July.
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