Merged for 2.6.24, part 2

The 2.6.24 merge window has now closed; more than 7000 changesets were merged before 2.6.24-rc1 was released. The bulk of the new features for 2.6.24 were described last week. Here's a summary of patches merged since then, starting with user-visible changes:

• There are new drivers for Marvell Libertas 8385/6 wireless chips, Freescale 3.0Gbps SATA controllers, Fujitsu laptops (LCD brightness in particular), and TI AR7 watchdog devices.

• Another set of old Open Sound System drivers has been removed from the kernel.

• The "uninitialized block groups" feature has been merged into the ext4 filesystem. UBG helps to speed filesystem checks by keeping track of which parts of a disk partition have never been used, and, thus, do not require checking.

• As was discussed back in August, the binary sysctl() interface has been marked deprecated, and the code for many of the sysctl targets (much of which appears to not have worked for some time) has been removed. There is a new checker which looks for problematic sysctl definitions; according to Eric Biederman, "As best as I can determine all of the several hundred errors spewed on boot up now are legitimate."

• The semantics of the CAP_SETPCAP capability have been changed. In previous kernels, this capability gave a process the ability to bestow new capabilities upon another process; now, instead, it allows a process to set capabilities within its own "inherited" mask.

• Process CPU time accounting (via taskstats) has been augmented with information allowing CPU usage time to be scaled by CPU frequency.

• The Control Groups (formerly process containers) patch set has been merged. Control groups will allow the CFS group scheduling feature to be used; it will also be the control mechanism used for containers in general.

• Process ID namespaces have been added; this feature lets container implementations create a different view of the list of processes on the system for every container.

• The kernel markers patch set has been merged.

• The CIFS filesystem now has access control list (ACL) support.

• The old, unmaintained Fibre Channel support code has been removed.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• The process of merging the i386 and x86_64 architectures continues, with many files having been merged by the time the window closed. This job is far from complete, though. For the curious, this message from Ingo Molnar talks a bit about what is going on there. "The x86 architecture is the most common Linux architecture after all - and users care much more about having a working kernel than they care about cleanups and unifications.... This cannot be realistically finished in v2.6.24, without upsetting the codebase."

• The paravirt_ops structure has been split into several smaller, more specialized operations vectors. These include pv_init_ops (boot-time operations), pv_time_ops (for time-related operations), pv_cpu_ops (privileged instructions), pv_irq_ops (interrupt handling), pv_mmu_ops (page table management), and a few others.

• There are some new bit operations which have been added:

      int test_and_set_bit_lock(unsigned long nr, unsigned long *addr);
      void clear_bit_unlock(unsigned long nr, unsigned long *addr);
      void __clear_bit_unlock(unsigned long nr, unsigned long *addr);
  

  These operations are intended to be used in the creation of single-bit locks; they work without the need for any additional memory barriers.

• There is a new KERN_CONT priority level for printk(). It is, in fact, empty; it is meant to serve as a marker for printk() calls which continue a previous (not terminated with a newline) printed line.

• The watchdog device drivers have been moved to a new home at drivers/watchdog.

• A notifier mechanism for console events has been added; this feature is aimed at accessibility tools (like Speakup) which need to know when something has changed on the console display.

• The filesystem export operations, used to make filesystems available over protocols like NFS, have been reworked. Two new methods (fh_to_dentry() and fh_to_parent()) replace the old get_dentry() interface. There is a new structure (struct fid) used to describe file handles. This work is aimed at making the export interface easier to use and (eventually) supporting 64-bit inode numbers.

• The virtio patches - providing an infrastructure for I/O into and out of virtualized guests - have been merged.

Now the stabilization period begins.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/2.6.24

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to post comments

Which Fibre Channel stuff was removed?  I couldn't find "fibre" in the 
changelog and fc has a zillion hits...

So does the incomplete status of the x86 merge mean that while the new arch is there, it isn't
generally usable, and thus the old split arches will be used until 2.6.25?