LKML Summary Podcast

Audio: COMING SOON

For Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.

In today’s issue: AlacrityVM, and xtime.

AlacrityVM. Ingo Molnar repeated his previous comments concerning “forking” kernel subsystems, agreeing with Anthoy Liguori, who had said that there is a need for a clear understanding of the difference (via “bullet points”) between vbus and vhost-net (one provided by KVM, the other Alacrity), which could be used to consider whether to replace or change the existing kernel code. As he has said before, “to the extent there’s room for improvement here it should be done by shaping KVM, not by forking and rebranding it”. Once again, Gregory provided a calm and reasoned response, noting that he felt various confusion continued to exist surrounding his work, and pull requests. The conversation then took a detour into older review comments.

Xtime. John Stultz posted a request that the removal of xtime_cache be reverted, because xtime now has an overflow issue on rounding that was smoothed and covered by the use of a cache. Apparently, the “fix” is to include sub-nanosecond timekeeping accessor functions in order to avoid the need for any rounding up during accumulation, which can’t be done until three remaining architectures are converted over to GENERIC_TIME. John later followed up with some per-architecture RFC patches just for proof of concept, that had not been tested or even compiled, because he was off on vacation until the New Year and wanted to leave time for suggestions.

The latest kernel release was 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.