[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2011.1.0 released

Marek Lindner
2011-04-19T11:45:35Z

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team is publishing its second 2011 release - 2011.1.0,
containing major code changes under the hood to improve performance and
scalability plus the usual set of bug fixes. As the kernel module always
depends on the Linux kernel it was compiled against, it does not make sense to
provide binaries on our website. As usual, you will find the signed tarballs
in our download section:

http://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/releases/batman-adv-2011.1.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.

Thanks
------

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

* Jesper Juhl <jj@chaosbits.net>
* Linus Lüssing <linus.luessing@web.de>
* Lucas De Marchi <lucas.demarchi@profusion.mobi>
* Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
* Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
* Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
* Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre.ledru@scilab.org>

batman-adv
----------

The principal objective while working towards this release was to remove the
originator hash lock (also known as the batman-adv private "big kernel lock").
It was introduced in the very early stages of the batman-adv development which
proved to be a simple and effective way to protect all originator node
information from parallel access. As time went on, the module grew and gained
more features - most of them making heavy use of the aforementioned originator
hash lock as it safeguarded the module's central pool of data. It thereby
became a major bottleneck because almost every piece of code had to acquire
this very same lock. An extensive effort was necessary to replace the
originator hash lock by fine grained locking which only locks the bare minimum
of data to improve the module's performance and scalability.
Other parts of the code received attention too: After learning about
bufferbloat in one of Jim Getty's talks we revisited our own buffering
settings and decided to set the txqueuelen to zero. Fragmented packets are now
properly linearized upon receipt to avoid a crash if the network card splits
the packet into smaller chunks. The fragment numbering became more robust and
several spelling mistakes have been corrected.

batctl
------

To render batctl more versatile packet dump functionality support for raw WiFi
packet decapsulation was added. This allows to keep an eye on your network
using interfaces in monitor mode which output packets including all WiFi
headers. The bug causing to display an erroneously warning message when
changing gateway settings has been squashed. Unused code and the last trace of
our subversion integration in the Makefile have been removed.

Happy routing,
The B.A.T.M.A.N. team