[STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Guillaume Boissiere]

Of note in this week's update are the merge of the new AMD 64bit
architecture, included in 2.5.5, and the merge of JFS in the latest 
2.5.6 prerelease.

Check the latest update at http://kernelnewbies.org/status/

A couple patches with with poetic names (futexes and radixes comes 
to mind) have been floating around recently.  Please let me know 
if you'd like me to add some of them to the list. 
Enjoy!

-- Guillaume


------------------------------------------------------------
Kernel 2.5 status  -  March 6th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.6-pre2)


Features:

Merged
o in 2.5.1+   Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer             (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.2    Initial support for USB 2.0                     (David Brownell, 
Greg Kroah-Hartman, etc.)
o in 2.5.2    Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups      (Al Viro, Manfred 
Spraul)
o in 2.5.2+   New scheduler for improved scalability          (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.2+   New kernel device structure (kdev_t)            (Linus Torvalds, 
etc.)
o in 2.5.3    IDE layer update                                (Andre Hedrick)
o in 2.5.3    New driver API for Wireless Extensions (1/2)    (Jean Tourrilhes)
o in 2.5.3    Support reiserfs external journal               (Reiserfs team)
o in 2.5.3    Generic ACL (Access Control List) support       (Nathan Scott)
o in 2.5.3    PnP BIOS driver                                 (Alan Cox, Thomas 
Hood, Dave Jones, etc.)
o in 2.5.3+   New driver model & unified device tree          (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.4    Add preempt kernel option                       (Robert Love, 
MontaVista team)
o in 2.5.4    Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading     (NGPT team)
o in 2.5.4+   Porting all input devices over to input API     (Vojtech Pavlik, 
James Simmons)
o in 2.5.5    Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)    (ALSA team)
o in 2.5.5    Pagetables in highmem support                   (Ingo Molnar, 
Arjan van de Ven)
* in 2.5.5    New architecture: AMD x86-64                    (Andi Kleen, x86-
64 Linux team)
o in 2.5.6    Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM)        (JFS team)

o Pending     Finalize new device naming convention           (Linus Torvalds)
o in -ac      32bit UID quota support                         (?)

o Ready       Add User-Mode Linux (UML)                       (Jeff Dike)
o Ready       HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update      (Krzysztof Halasa)
o Ready       Add hardware sensors drivers                    (lm_sensors team)
o Ready       New kernel config system: CML2                  (Eric Raymond)
o Ready       Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion               (Dipankar Sarma, 
Rusty Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o Ready       per_cpu infrastructure                          (Rusty Russell)

o Beta        New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5)            (Keith Owens)
o Beta        Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling       (Erik Mouw, Dave 
Jones, Russell King, Arjan van de Ven)
o Beta        Serial driver restructure                       (Russell King)
o Beta        New IO scheduler                                (Jens Axboe)
o Beta        NAPI Network interrupt mitigation               (Jamal Hadi Salim, 
Robert Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov)
o Beta        Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI)      (XFS team)
o Beta        New VM with reverse mappings                    (Rik van Riel)
o Beta        Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency  (Andrew Morton, 
etc.)
o Beta        Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT)      (Karim Yaghmour)
o Beta        Better event logging for enterprise systems     (evlog team)
o Beta        Add Linux Security Module (LSM)                 (LSM team)
o Beta        Hotplug CPU support                             (Rusty Russell)
o Beta        Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)
o Beta        EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System)      (EVMS team)
o Beta        LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0               (LVM team)
o Beta        Linux booting ELF images                        (Eric Biederman)
o Beta        First pass at LinuxBIOS support                 (Eric Biederman)
o Beta        Dynamic Probes                                  (Suparna 
Bhattacharya, dprobes team)
o Beta        Video for Linux (V4L) redesign                  (Gerd Knorr)
o Beta        Scalable CPU bitmaps                            (Russ Weight)
o Beta        Page table sharing                              (Daniel Phillips)

o Alpha       Better support of high-end NUMA machines        (NUMA team)
o Alpha       Add Asynchronous IO (aio) support               (Ben LaHaise)
o Alpha       Overhaul PCMCIA support                         (David Woodhouse, 
David Hinds)
o Alpha       Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver    (Anton 
Altaparmakov)
o Alpha       More complete IEEE 802.2 stack                  (Arnaldo, Jay 
Schullist, from Procom donated code)
o Alpha       Full compliance with IPv6                       (Alexey Kuznetzov, 
Jun Murai, Yoshifuji Hideaki, USAGI team)
o Alpha       UMSDOS (Unix under MS-DOS) Rewrite              (Al Viro)
o Alpha       Scalable Statistics Counter                     (Ravikiran 
Thirumalai)
o Alpha       Linux Kernel Crash Dumps                        (Matt Robinson, 
LKCD team)
o Alpha       Add support for NFS v4                          (NFS v4 team)
* Alpha       ext2/ext3 HTree directory indexing              (Daniel Phillips, 
Christopher Li, Ted Ts'o)
o Alpha       Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)

o Started     Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)
o Started     More complete NetBEUI stack                     (Arnaldo Carvalho 
de Melo, from Procom donated code)
o Started     Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock)         (Alan Cox, Robert 
Love, Neil Brown, etc.)
o Started     Change all drivers to new driver model          (All maintainers)
o Started     Reiserfs v4                                     (Reiserfs team)
o Started     Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface         (ISDN4Linux team)

o Draft #2    New lightweight library (klibc)                 (Greg Kroah-
Hartman)
o Draft #3    Replace initrd by initramfs                     (H. Peter Anvin, 
Al Viro)
o Planning    Add thrashing control                           (Rik van Riel)
o Planning    Remove all hardwired drivers from kernel        (Alan Cox, etc.)
o Planning    Generic parameter/command line interface        (Keith Owens)
o Planning    New mount API                                   (Al Viro)
o Planning    New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver    (Dave Jones)


Cleanups:

Merged
o in 2.5.3    Break Configure.help into multiple files        (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.3    Untangle include file dependancies              (Dave Jones, Roman 
Zippel)
o in 2.5.4    Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h         (Arnaldo Carvalho 
de Melo)
o in 2.5.4    Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h                 (Daniel Phillips, 
Jeff Garzik, Al Viro)
o in 2.5.6    Killing kdev_t for block devices                (Al Viro)

o Ready       Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type    (Al Viro)
o Ready       ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes  (Al Viro)
o Ready       Remove dcache_lock                              (Maneesh Soni, IBM 
team)

o Beta        file.h and INIT_TASK                            (Benjamin LaHaise)
o Beta        Proper UFS fixes, ext2 and locking cleanups     (Al Viro)
o Beta        Lifting limitations on mount(2)                 (Al Viro)

o Started     Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces      (Dave Jones, Randy 
Dunlap)
o Started     Reorder x86 initialization                      (Dave Jones, Randy 
Dunlap)

Have some free time and want to help?  Check out the Kernel Janitor TO DO list 
for a 
list of source code cleanups you can work on.  A great place to start learning 
more 
about kernel internals!

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Mike Fedyk]

> o in -ac      32bit UID quota support                         (?)
>

I'm surprised this is still pending, it's been in -ac for ages...

> o Beta        Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency  (Andrew Morton, 
> etc.)

IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?

Also Andrew, where's the listing for the delayed allocation patch you're
working on.  It looks like it's just about ready to go to beta stage...

> o Alpha       Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver    (Anton 
> Altaparmakov)

Is this still in alpha stage?

> o Alpha       Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)
> o Started     Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)

Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 11:02:49AM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:

 > > o Alpha       Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)
 > > o Started     Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)
 > Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?

 It's stable enough that at least bits of it should probably start
 being pushed to Linus soon. This and the input layer changes probably
 make up for quite a high percentage of my current diff.

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Guillaume Boissiere]

> On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 11:02:49AM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>
> > > o Alpha       Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)
> > > o Started     Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)
> > Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?
>
> It's stable enough that at least bits of it should probably start
> being pushed to Linus soon. This and the input layer changes probably
> make up for quite a high percentage of my current diff.

I'll mark them as "in -dj" in the next update, then.

-- Guillaume

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[James Simmons]

>  > > o Alpha       Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)
>  > > o Started     Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)
>  > Since this is in -dj and people are using it, maybe it should be beta?
> 
>  It's stable enough that at least bits of it should probably start
>  being pushed to Linus soon. This and the input layer changes probably
>  make up for quite a high percentage of my current diff.

The input stuff should again be synced. The only thing I like to see is
the creation of a touchscreen and others directory in drivers/input. We
had this discussion on the ARM list this morning. 

As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part.
At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess.
The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but
nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.

Now the console stuff needs more work. That shouldn't go in yet. The
changes break things else where. The changes that affect people are
struct kbd_struct[] is gone. Also a few of the ioctl32.c files get
broken. The next big thing is the removal of fg_console but this will
break alot of keyboard drivers. Which again I push for people to move
their keyboard drivers over to the input api.

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Robert Love]

On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 14:02, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> > o Beta        Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency  (Andrew Morton, 
> > etc.)
> 
> IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?

Agreed.  It isn't "incompatible" per se but it is certainly not the
intention anymore.  With kernel preemption, we plan to cleanly tackle
the lock hold times.

But maybe that is what the above means ... not "low-latency" per se but
the general reduction in lock hold times and improvement of algorithms. 
This is something Andrew, myself, and others are working on.  It is the
follow up work to preempt-kernel.

	Robert Love	

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Paul Mundt]

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On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 12:07:14PM -0800, James Simmons wrote:
> As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part.
> At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess.
> The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but
> nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.
> 
If this stuff is being cleaned up, I still have a large chunk of fixes locally
in my tree that need to be pushed up to linuxconsole CVS. Is the linuxconsole
stuff going to be synced up all at once, or is still going to be progressive?
If it's progressive, I'd still like to get my stuff cleaned up before pushing
it into CVS..

Regards,

-- 
Paul Mundt <lethal@chaoticdreams.org>


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Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[Guillaume Boissiere]

On 6 Mar 2002 at 15:30, Robert Love wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 14:02, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> 
> > > o Beta        Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency  (Andrew Morton, 
> > > etc.)
> > 
> > IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
> 
> Agreed.  It isn't "incompatible" per se but it is certainly not the
> intention anymore.  With kernel preemption, we plan to cleanly tackle
> the lock hold times.
> 
> But maybe that is what the above means ... not "low-latency" per se but
> the general reduction in lock hold times and improvement of algorithms. 
> This is something Andrew, myself, and others are working on.  It is the
> follow up work to preempt-kernel.

Yes, this is what the above means: reducing lock hold times in the 
appropriate places.  Robert, I'll add you name for this item too, 
since you are working on this with Andrew.  It will make it clearer 
that it is not just referring to the old "low-latency" patch.

-- Guillaume

Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[James Simmons]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Paul Mundt wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 12:07:14PM -0800, James Simmons wrote:
> > As for the framebuffer stuff that can also be synced for the most part.
> > At present I'm working on new soft accels to replace that fbcon-cfb* mess.
> > The one thing missing is a universal cursor api. I purposed one but
> > nothing happened. Its not urgent yet anyways.
> > 
> If this stuff is being cleaned up, I still have a large chunk of fixes locally
> in my tree that need to be pushed up to linuxconsole CVS. Is the linuxconsole
> stuff going to be synced up all at once, or is still going to be progressive?
> If it's progressive, I'd still like to get my stuff cleaned up before pushing
> it into CVS..

It will be progressive. Just watch out for the recent updates in CVS.


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Re: [STATUS 2.5] March 6, 2002

[J Sloan]

Mike Fedyk wrote:

>IIRC, LL isn't compatible with preempt, so maybe this item should be removed?
>
huh? that's news to me -

I have run both simultaneously -
they are more or less orthogonal....

Joe