LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091117.mp3

For Tuesday, November 17th, 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: CFS hard limits, MadWiFi, and noatime in procfs.

CFS hard limits. Bharata B Rao posted version 4 of his patch series implementing “hard limits” for processor utilization by specific task groups in the CFS. This latest version adds cpu hotplug support for CFS runtime balancing in the form of a patch that “reclaim[s] runtimes lent to other cpus when a cpu goes offline”.

MadWiFi. Luis R. Rodriguez replied to a thread on the madwifi development list, copying the LKML, stating that madwifi is essentially dead and has been for some time. According to Luis, most of the devices previously covered by MadWiFi now have upstream support, with the exception of some ath5k users who might be holding out “until ath5k gets feature-parred”. Luis says those using MadWifi are mainly doing so out of nostalgia (due to “romantic experiences with it with extensive features and its history”), and that any real future for it other than going into maintainance mode is “just wasting time and electrons”. It’s nice to see Linux wireless has moved along so nicely.

Noatime. Bernd Petrovitsch posted a question concerning the opening of files contained with the /proc pseudofilesystem using the O_NOATIME flag. He wondered why this would not succeed for files such as /proc/uptime and /proc/cpuinfo. He also wondered why specifying “noatime” as a mount option for procfs made no difference either. Although it seems odd that someone would want to affect (or otherwise) the timestamp on dynamically generated files, perhaps he was concerned about existing software file open behavior.

In today’s announcements: GIT version 1.6.5.3. Junio C Hamano announced version 1.6.5.3 of the git SCM as used for Linux kernel development. The latest version contains a number of fixes, including a fix for “git blame” when the specified input file ends in an incomplete line, a fix for “git cvs import”, and a git for color use on “git diff”. Various git-email and gitweb fixes were also included, along with many other improvements.

LTTng version 0.171 and LTTV 0.12.21. Mathieu Desnoyers announced version 0.171 of LTTng and version 0.12.21 (trace format 2.4) of LTTV. The newer versions, as is implied, use a newer trace format that is not compatible with the older versions. The reason behind these changes stems from a desire for correct some alignment concerns with structures such that they always have 64-bit alignment, even on a 32-bit architecture. Later, Mathieu posted LTTng 0.173 and LTTV 0.12.22, which are “required to push the trace format forward to 2.5″.

The latest kernel release was 2.6.32-rc7.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for November 17th. Since Monday, there was a new edac-amd tree, the mips, kvm, and tip trees lost conflicts and a build error, while the net, trivial, and sysctl trees gained conflicts. The total subtree count increased to 151 trees in the latest compose.

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