LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091122.mp3

For the weekend of November 22nd 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: kbuild, kFIFO, and LogFS.

kbuild. Sam Ravnborg announced that he is stepping down as the kbuild maintainer, citing a lack of time. As he notes, he has done this soley on a hobbyist basis (while managing a busy schedule of work and a family life), and the job was becoming “a duty and not that fun suddenly”. Rather than uproot himeself and work for a Linux company, he has decided to step down and persue other interests instead. He posted a patch to the MAINTAINERS file also. I am sure many will be sad to see Sam go, as his work has been excellent.

kFIFO. Stefani Seibold posted version 0.7 of a new kfifo implementation. This has been discussed before, and this 7th iteration includes various typo fixes, and other trivial cleanups, suggesting that it is nearing completion. As Stefani points out, the existing API had very few (17 files only) users, due to an overly simple API that could not handle various use cases, could not be used dynamically, and required a spinlock even in cases where it would otherwise be unncessary. The new patches implement a more robust API.

LogFS. Joern Engel surprised folks with an announcement that various changes to the format of LogFS had been made and that it was now ready for inclusion. Apparently, the last time it was discussed, Linus had said something along the lines of “go and don’t come back until all format changes are done”. Joern is seeking testing and comments ahead of a potential merge to mainline.

In today’s announcements: LTTng 0.179. Mathieu Desnoyers announced yet another release of LTTng.

util-linux-ng version 2.17-rc1. Karel Zak posted to let everyone know the the first rc of util-linux-ng 2.17 is now available. It includes a typically large number of changes, including changes to libblkid support for exposing the block layer topology, and various new commands such as “unshare” that allow a process to be created with some of its namespares not shared by its parent.

The latest kernel release is 2.6.32-rc8.

Rafael J Wysocki posted a list of regressions between 2.6.31 and 2.6.32-rc8-git1, following Linus’ previous 2.6.32-rc8 announcement.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for November 20th. Since Thursday, the microblaze, and infiniband trees had issues, with the net and edac-amd trees lost theirs. The total sub-tree count remains steady at 151 trees.

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