LKML Summary Podcast

AUDIO: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091111.mp3

For Veterans Day (November 11th) 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: Floppy, LZO, Resume, and Wakeup.

Floppy. Just when you thought nobody used floppy disks any more. Stephen Hemminger posted to let everyone know that “mount -o sync” support has a regression for floppy disk use cases in kernel 2.6.31. Some time between 2.6.30 and 2.6.31-rc1, the anticipated behavior of writes immediately completing and blocking until they hit the ext2-formatted disk broke and a copy followed by disk removal followed by unmount results in errors. This potentially may affect USB thumbdrive users, so has some wider relevance.

LZO. Albin Tonnerre posted version 3 of a patch series implementing generic LZO compression for kernel binary images on x86, ARM. The patches include support both for building and using these images, and their initramfses.

Resume. Rafael J. Wysocki and Linus Torvalds chimed in on Rafael’s previous posting concerning broken resume-from-suspend. After applying a patch intended to help diangose the problem, Rafael reported that errors were being generated by btusb_waker, which Linus said matched his “observation that only a few [Bluetooth] drivers seem to use workqueues, and btusb_disconnect() isn’t doing any work cancel”. Marcel Holtmann and others began discussing solutions.

Wakeup. Yinghai Lu posted version 2 of a patch intended to make doubly sure that ACPI wakeup code is located below 1M in physical memory on x86. The patch attempts to find a suitable region in the BIOS/EFI/firmwire specified “e820″ area (a table of memory mappings on such systems) and reserve it early on.

The latest kernel release is 2.6.32-rc6.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for Novemeber 11th. Since Tuesday, the i2c tree lost a conflict, the new tree gained a conflict, the wireless tree lost a build failure, the rr tree gained a build failure, the pcmcia tree gained a conflict, the tip tree gained a build failure, the percpu tree gained a conflict, and the usb tree also gained a conflict. The total sub-tree count is now at 148 trees, since the previous issues with pulling trees resolved.

That’s a summary of today’s Linux Kernel Mailing List traffic, for further information visit www.kernel.org. I’m Jon Masters.