LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091116.mp3

For Monday, November 16th 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: Console noise, KVM, and thread renaming.

Console noise. Mike Travis posted a 6 part patch series intended to reduce excessive console noise by removing “repetitious messages”. This was now in its third version.

KVM. Avi Kivity posted a 42 part patch series comprising part 1 of a 2 part batch of patches intended to hit the forthcoming 2.6.33 merge window. Avi mentions various “highlights” including improved kernel context switching speed, better interoperation with other users of virtualization extensions, improved IRQ scaling, nested SVM improvements and tracing, improved cpufreq integration, and spin loop detection on newer hardware. The latter is an implementation of the support for a modern CPU feature in which looping spinlocks can be automatically detected and the processor yielded.

Thread renaming. John Stulz, having not heard objections from his previous RFC postings, requested that Andrew Morton pull his patches enabling threads to rename their siblings through /proc/pid/tasks/tid/comm into -mm.

Finally today, Andreas Mohr got annoyed enough with the existing init code to add a documentation reference (and the documentation) for the case of “no init found” during boot.

In today’s announcements: LTTng version 0.170. Mathieu Desnoyers released version 0.170 of LTTng, which contains a fix for a concurrency issue between cpu hotplug, trace start/stop, and marker arm/disarm.

Userspace RCU 0.3.1. Mathieu Desnoyers announced version 0.3.1 of his userspace RCU library. This includes a fix to the build system to support cross-compilation.

The latest kernel release was 2.6.32-rc7.

Rafael J. Wysocki posted a list of regressions between 2.6.31 and 2.6.32-rc7-git1. Most were drivers, but there was also an oops starting udev on boot, an IDE issue, an mm/page_alloc warning, and an ext3/jbd oops amongst various other corruptions and serious enough sounding regressions. He followed up with individual messages, copying the original bug reporting CC list. There was also another list posted in which Rafael itemized regressions between 2.6.30 and 2.6.31 that have not yet got fixes in current mainline.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for November 16th. Since Friday, there were two new trees (omap_dss2, and workqueues), the sound tree lost its conflicts, the omap_dss2 tree gained a conflict against the omap tree, a warning introduced by the tip tree became an error in the sparc build, and the percpu tree lost a conflict. The total sub-tree count increased to 148.

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