The end of the 4.12 merge window
In the end, 12,920 non-merge changesets found their way into the mainline during the merge window; about 1,000 since the previous summary was written. As expected, that was enough to make the 4.12 merge window the second-busiest ever. The most significant changes found in that last 1,000 changesets include:
- The TEE framework has been merged;
this mechanism allows the kernel to support trusted execution
environments on processors (such as ARM CPUs with TrustZone) with that
capability.
- Support for parallel NFS (pNFS) on top of object storage devices has
been removed; that support is unused and has been unmaintained for
some time.
- The building of the old Open Sound System audio drivers has been
disabled for the 4.12 release. In the absence of screaming, those
drivers will likely be removed in the relatively near future. They
are poorly maintained and nearly (if not completely) unused, but the
driving motivation behind this change at the moment is the desire to eliminate the many set_fs()
calls found in those drivers.
- New hardware support includes:
Mediatek MT6797 clocks,
HiSilicon Hi655x clocks,
Allwinner PRCM clock controllers,
Motorola CPCAP PMIC realtime clocks,
STMicroelectronics STM32 Quad SPI controllers,
Broadcom BCM2835 and BCM470xx thermal sensors,
Dialog Semiconductor DA9062/DA9061 thermal sensors,
Powers AXP20X battery power supplies, and
PlayStation 1/2 joypads via SPI interfaces.
- There is a
new set of macros that allow the marking of boot-time and module
parameters that modify hardware behavior. Numerous drivers have
been patched to make use of these macros. The intent is to disallow a
user from changing these parameters on systems where UEFI secure boot
is in use, but that mechanism has not yet been merged.
- Synchronous read-copy-update grace periods may now be used anywhere in the kernel's boot process; see this article for the details.
The time to test and stabilize the 4.12 kernel has begun; if all goes
according to the usual schedule, the final release can be expected in
early July.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/4.12 |
Posted May 14, 2017 22:22 UTC (Sun)
by fratti (guest, #105722)
[Link] (2 responses)
Neat, I guess. How would a PlayStation controller be connected to SPI though? Do the original pins map to SPI somehow?
Posted May 14, 2017 22:48 UTC (Sun)
by hadess (subscriber, #24252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 16, 2017 4:34 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted May 15, 2017 13:02 UTC (Mon)
by kokada (guest, #92849)
[Link] (4 responses)
Neat, I think most people still using OSS will probably use 4Front version instead of the abandoned kernel one. Remembering that OSS is actually in version 4, while the kernel implements the version 3.
Posted May 16, 2017 7:33 UTC (Tue)
by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193)
[Link] (3 responses)
> most people still using OSS will probably use 4Front version instead of the abandoned kernel one. Remembering that OSS is actually in version 4, while the kernel implements the version 3.
In the kernel, new hardware support went into ALSA. New development in the 4Front version ceased a long time ago because nobody wanted to pay for it. Increasing the API version of 4Front's OSS implementation does not change the fact that it does not support any modern USB devices, HDMI audio, MIDI, or anything embedded.
Nowadays, 4Front OSS users are those that have the opinion that “the sound of OSS has more depth where ALSA sound is flat.”
OSS is primarily relevant as an interface used by old software; and that interface can also be used on top of ALSA.
Posted May 16, 2017 10:42 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
Especially if you use those $1000/ft speaker cables!
Posted May 16, 2017 12:06 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 27, 2017 3:41 UTC (Sat)
by ghane (guest, #1805)
[Link]
Some of my "friends" are audiophiles, and I have listened to gushing about Oxygen-Free-Copper, and $150 power cords with balanced wires, optimised to 220V, etc.
Thank you for the pointer to Directional Ethernet. But what about this, a technology that Rockwell developed, which was buried by "Big Them"? https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w
The end of the 4.12 merge window
The end of the 4.12 merge window
The end of the 4.12 merge window
(Checking Wikipedia confirms my memory isn't as bad as I thought...)
The end of the 4.12 merge window
The end of the 4.12 merge window
The end of the 4.12 merge window
Nowadays, 4Front OSS users are those that have the opinion that “the sound of OSS has more depth where ALSA sound is flat.”
The end of the 4.12 merge window
The end of the 4.12 merge window