LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20091213.mp3

Wondering if the latest Linus kernel tree builds? Why not follow @kernelbuild on twitter. I’ll be refining the format and adding additional tracking to it over time, and I welcome feedback. It builds every 3 hours at the moment.

For the weekend of December 13th 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: ATA, BFS, dm and md, FBAC-LSM, idle disks, nouveau, and the vger outage is now complete.

ATA. Apparently the long-awaited general support in hardware for 4K sector sizes is now becoming a reality. Mathew wilcox, James Andrewartha, and Peter Anvin all had things to say about this, especially James, who posted a number of links to manufacturer specific documents on the matter.

BFS. Con Kolivas announced that version 0.311 of his “Brain Fuck Scheduler” (BFS) is now available for kernel release 2.6.32. He included a summary of a number of changes, including code to measure cache locality and determine the best task to wakup (complete with a preference list).

dm and md. Alasdair Kergon and Neil Brown both announced updates for dm and md respectively. Both featured barrier updates (Alasdair announcing that dm now supports barriers on all devices, while Neil Brown noted that barriers are supported on all RAID levels – including RAID5 now). It is now possible to convert a 2-disk RAID5 md to RAID1 and vice versa (as possible before).

FBAC-LSM. Z. Cliffe Schreuders posted an initial version of a new LSM (Linux Security Module) intended to limit applications based on the specific features that each provides. He cites a number of items of documentation produced as part of his PhD research, including a comparison to SELinux. More will be available in his LCA (LinuxConf AU) presentation on the topic.

Idle disks. Mathew Garrett posted an RFC patch intended to add an event on block device idle change occurance. The idea is that userspace can monitor when disks are becoming idle (and when not) in order to adjust the power management policy on the fly in accordance with usage.

Nouveau. Following various ongoing debate (especially stired by Linus in response to earlier DRM tree updates, as also reported on LWN), Dave Airlie posted a tree entitled “drm-nouveau-pony” in an email thread entitled “drm pony for Xmas”. In the posting, Dave indirectly references the reasoning behind the driver not being available in mainline sooner (that it requires firmware or other code extract from the device, which isn’t included), notes that the driver alone is 36K lines of code (”bigger than most subsystems we carry, so hopefully ppl realise the monumental scale of writing a driver for these things”), and adds that he’ll be pushing the VMWare virtual GPU KMS driver “early next week” for good measure. There are some other legal topics being discussed surrounding this whole issue: refer to LWN for detail.

Vger. Remember that the mailing list server vger.kernel.org was moved over the weekend, and so consequently list traffic was significantly reduced. On a related note, David Miller noted in the thread discussing kernel names that he “should just remove” the hard-coded block list of words that cannot be said on LKML since the list does “dynamic spam filtering these days”.

In today’s announcements: Git version 1.6.5.6. Junio C Hamano announde version 1.6.5.6 of the GIT SCM as used by the kernel development community has been released. This version includes a number of minor fixes, as well as the removal of the “post-upload-hook” script run in response to “git fetch” due to some security concerns.

The latest kernel release is 2.6.32.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for December 11th. Since Thursday, the origin tree lost its build failure, the microblaze tree lost its conflict, the ext4 tree lost its build failure, the rr tree lost its conflict but gained a build failure for which Stephen applied a patch, the trivial tree lost its conflicts, and the usb tree still has its build failure for which he reverted a commit. The total number of sub-trees remained steady at 155, and Stephen repeated his usual “call for calm” in not pushing updates 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.