Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc1

[Posted March 24, 2024 by jake]

The 6.9-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus Torvalds described some rather large updates to the core kernel code that are coming for 6.9:

The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested use-case, but not realistic in many cases).

Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc1

Posted Mar 25, 2024 7:36 UTC (Mon) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link]

This looks like it could be a vintage release. There's a lot of very cool-sounding new updates in here, and very significant changes, and I look forward to giving it a spin (erm, perhaps from -rc2!). Phoronix and the other usual places, as well as here, report all sorts of tasty new gems.

Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc1

Posted Mar 28, 2024 0:31 UTC (Thu) by opalmirror (subscriber, #23465) [Link]

The tiny VxWorks RTOS (that I worked on from 2000-2005) deferred work (essentially a function pointer with parameters) from interrupt handlers to a work queue. I kinda feel like Linux has explored many ideas for a long time, only to settle on a similar approach.