2009/12/10 Linux Kernel Podcast
Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091210.mp3
For my 28th birthday (December 10th 2009), I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.
In today’s issue: BKL, email clients, RCU, and VM.
BKL. Arnd Bergmann posted some compat_ioctl cleanups that also included BKL ellimination. He noted though, that some of these might want to wait for 2.6.34 if Linus felt that they should go through a linux-next cycle.
Email clients. Alan Jenkins posted some helpful updates to the Documentation/email-clients.txt file intended to clarify the situation for those who are using the “Thunderbird” mail client, I assume in light of the recent changes in behavior that have been reported, for which a fix may be forthcoming (and for which Jim Owens noted he had already taken measures to ensure that his modified config would continue to work after any “fix”).
RCU. Thomas Gleixner posted a 9 part patch series entitled “Fix various __task_cred related invalid RCU assumptions” in which he pointed out a number of incorrect assumptions (that happened to be true, but were not generally correct nor guaranteed to hold true forever) in RCU usage along with fixes.
VM. Hiroyuki Kamezawa posted a number of patches for the VM, including several intended to reduce a lock contention problem in vmscan that Larry Woodman had noticed, and several more that introduced an explicit entry for the number of swap entries in use by a given process within its /proc/self/status file.
In today’s announcements: Git version 1.6.6.rc2. Junio C Hamano announced the latest release of the GIT SCM as used by the kernel development community. This update had a large number of minor fixes. On a related note, do take a look at the excellent GIT Manual, available in PDF format. I love it.
Userspace RCU 0.3.2. Mathieu Desnoyers announced release 0.3.2 of his userspace RCU library, “which includes a complete rework of s390/s390x uatomic_* operations”. It is available from http://www.lttng.org/urcu.
The latest kernel release is 2.6.32.
Andrew Morton posted an mm-of-the-moment (mmotm) for 2009-12-10-17-19.
Greg Kroah-Hartman posted a series of review patches for the forthcoming 2.6.31.8 and 2.6.32.1 stable kernels, including a large number of ext4 fixes, and an obscurely unlikely stack corruption on 2.6.32.
Ingo Molnar reported a regression in the SLOB allocator code on an IA32 system for which he posted a complete kernel config. The system hung without any usable logs available.
Jens Axboe dissected an issue with Nehalem-EX failing to boot due to a faulty commit entitled “x86: Move find_smp_config() earlier and avoid bootmem usage”.
Xose Vazquez Perez pointed out some recent benchmarks from Phoronix in which, allegedly, “Solaris is 2.4X times faster than Linux” (in some configuration) when measuring OpenSSL performance. As was noted indirectly by Andi Kleen and others, these benchmarks were performed using vendor kernels (Fedora and Ubuntu – although apparently the tests were also done on a vanilla 2.6.32) and vendor compiled OpenSSL binaries that likely have issues. Andi said the best thing was to report any regressions (especially with OpenSSL) to Fedora directly as they were unlikely to be a kernel problem.
Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for December 10th. Since Wednesday, the origin tree gained a build failure for which Stephen applied a patch, the powerpc tree lost its conflict, the ext4 tree gained a build failure for which Stephen reverted a commit, the cpufreq tree lost its conflict, the trivial tree gained a conflict against the net-current tree, the tip tree lost its conflicts, and the usb tree still has its build failure for which Stephen reverted a commit. The total sub-tree count remained steady at 155 trees in the latest compose, and Stephen repeated his usual “call for calm” the folks not push patches intended for 2.6.34 until after 2.6.33-rc1.
That’s a summary of today’s Linux Kernel Mailing List traffic, for further information visit www.kernel.org. I’m Jon Masters.
