LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20090713.mp3

For Monday, July 13th 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: Mailing lists, modules, and a new RC release.

Mailing Lists. Matti Aarnio posted to let everyone know that he is currently experimenting with a new list manager for vger.kernel.org. It is not based on various existing implementations – for example mailman, majordomo (the current, long in the tooth mailing list manager), etc. – and is instead a re-write using an SQL database to store all aspects of list information, and list management actions. If things go well, it will replace majordomo on vger and become the default mailing list manager for kernel.org mailing lists.

Modules. Andi Kleen followed up to the recently posted patches for RO/NX page protection enforced bits for loadable modules – which had devolved into a discussion as to the purpose of building loadable modules for kernels in cases where the distribution vendor enforces always loading the module – with a summary of the reasons why modules are still useful (especially disabling modules that have a problem, or replacing them). He revived the discussion of supplying Modules.builtin metadata concerning modules pre-compiled into the running kernel so that module loading tools can take appropriate action.

In today’s miscellaneous items: an interesting treatise on the various arguments for and against SFI being more ACPI-like (Peter Stuge – and for more information on SFI, take a look at Len Brown’s excellent, and highly explanatory Linux Symposium 2009 presentation), version 3 of a patch series implementing various helper OOM analysis logging functions, version 3 of another patch series implementing notifcation of memory usage limits for tasks, a fix to enable kdump if a second kernel is loaded and oops occurs with panic=oops set on the kernel command line (Ken’ichi Ohmichi), version 2 of a series of patches converting SPARC to asm-generic/dma-mapping-common.h and pci-dma-compat.h (Fujita Tomonori), and a suggestion from Mitchell Erblich that the SLAB allocator be changed to reap SLABs only after a configurable delay. Additionally, Andi Kleen posted a patch modifying a public (procfs) interface such that file size information on /proc will now include deleted (but still open) files in the calculation.

In today’s announcements: LTTng 0.146. Mathieu Desnoyers posted to let everyone know that LTTng 0.146 will add extra read-side sub-buffering for its flight recorder, which came complete with a technical summary, and version 1.0.1 of the SCST Target driver for QLogic 24xx adapters (Vladislav Bolkhovitin).

The latest kernel release is: 2.6.31-rc3, which was released by Linus on Monday evening PDT. Linus repeats his call that he wishes things would “calm down”, which – as his points out in the accounement – they have, to a degree.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for July 13th. Since Friday, the ia64 is now under control of Fenghua Yu, the tree still fails to build in an allyesconfig build configuration on powerpc, and several net gains in conflicts occured also. The total sub-tree count remains steady at 132 trees.

That’s a summary of today’s LKML traffic. For further information visit kernel.org. I’m Jon Masters.