LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091124.mp3

For Tuesday, November 24th, 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: 1394, KSM, LIRC, and perf.

1394. Stefan Richter posted to let everyone know about forthcoming changes in the latest linux1394-2.6 git tree. These include support for the userspace FFADO drivers for firewire audio. He would like to see these fixes in 2.6.32, which seems unlikely at this stage in -rc.

KSM. Hugh Dickins posted a 9 part patch series intended to “at last mak[e] KSM’s shared pages swappable”. KSM is the Linux kernel technology that can scan through physical memory for identical pages, replacing duplicates with copy-on-write references to a single page. Previously, such reconciled pages couldn’t be swapped out directly without splitting them back out again.

LIRC. Somewhat unsurprisingly, someone objected to the idea of doing all IR decoding in the input layer. Maxim Levitsky pointed out that many people seem to believe that all infra-red devices send in some universal code that can easily be decoded in such a fashion. The reality (as anyone who has built an LIRC decoder can tell you) is that this is not the case and that the wide variety of possible IR devices suggests this is not easily mapped to input layer events for all possible kinds of IR device.

Perf. Various patches were posted for performance events (an area that is still undergoing a lot of active development). Amongst them were some patches from John Kacur to prevent bitrot in perf-annotate by having it share more code with perf-report and futex benchmarking in perf bench support from Mitoke Hitoshi.

Finally today, Pavel Machek asked everyone to please keep the LKML English only, in response to an email that had contained non-English text. Although the community is of course open to all, list traffic has traditionally been in English only. This may change one day, but for now it is the “rule”. Some had suggested that posting in English-only was overly limiting for those seeking responses from those who understand other languages.

The latest kernel release is 2.6.32-rc8.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for November 24th. Since Monday, there were two new trees added (samsung, and bjdooks-i2c), the microblaze, mips, ubifs, net, wireless, trivial, and alacrity trees gained issues, while the mfd tree lost its build failures but gained another (so a previous version was usued, as it was for other trees, such as alacrity). The total sub-tree count increases to 153 with the additional two trees.

Alan Cox noted that the linux-next tree no longer boots on KVM in 32-bit mode.

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