[STATUS 2.5] July 24, 2002

Guillaume Boissiere
2002-07-24T02:37:34Z

Many many changes this week, including the inclusion of the new
virtual memory system using reverse mapping in 2.5.27.

Also added better entries for all the NUMA work tentatively planned
for inclusion in 2.6. If you have not looked at the status list
in a while, chances are you won't recognize it :-)

The latest status update is always available at
http://kernelnewbies.org/status/
Enjoy!

-- Guillaume

-----------------------------------
Linux Kernel 2.5 Status - July 24th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.27)

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 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)
o in 2.5.5 New architecture: AMD 64-bit (x86-64) (Andi Kleen, x86-64 Linux
team)
o in 2.5.5 New architecture: PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64) (Anton Blanchard, ppc64 team)
o in 2.5.5+ IDE subsystem rewrite (Martin Dalecki)
o in 2.5.6 Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM) (JFS team)
o in 2.5.6 per_cpu infrastructure (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.6 HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update (Krzysztof Halasa)
o in 2.5.6 smbfs Unicode and large file support (Urban Widmark)
o in 2.5.7 New driver API for Wireless Extensions (Jean Tourrilhes)
o in 2.5.7 Video for Linux (V4L) redesign (Gerd Knorr)
o in 2.5.7 Futexes (Fast Lightweight Userspace Semaphores) (Rusty Russell, etc.)
o in 2.5.7+ NAPI network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim, Robert
Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov)
o in 2.5.7+ ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) (Andy Grover, ACPI team)
o in 2.5.8 Syscall interface for CPU task affinity (Robert Love)
o in 2.5.8 Radix-tree pagecache (Momchil Velikov, Christoph
Hellwig)
o in 2.5.8+ Delayed disk block allocation (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.9 Smarter IRQ balancing (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.11 Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o in 2.5.11 Fast walk dcache (Hanna Linder)
o in 2.5.11+ Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o in 2.5.12+ Rewrite of the buffer layer (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.14 Support for IDE TCQ (Tagged Command Queueing) (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.14 Bluetooth support (no longer experimental!) (Maxim Krasnyansky, Bluetooth
team)
o in 2.5.17 New quota system supporting plugins (Jan Kara)
o in 2.5.17+ Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface (Kai Germaschewski,
ISDN4Linux team)
o in 2.5.18 Software suspend (to disk & RAM) (Pavel Machek)
o in 2.5.23 More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist, from
Procom donated code)
o in 2.5.23+ Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.25 Faster internal kernel clock frequency (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.26 Direct pagecache <-> BIO disk I/O (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.27+ New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o in 2.5.28 Serial driver restructure (Russell King)
* in 2.5.28 Remove the "Big IRQ lock" (Ingo Molnar)

o in -dj Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
o in -dj New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Patrick Mochel)
o in -dj Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling (Erik Mouw, Dave Jones,
Russell King, Arjan van de Ven)
o in -ac Strict address space accounting (Alan Cox)
o in -ac PCMCIA Zoom video support (Alan Cox)
o in -ac Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer (Alan Cox)

o Ready Read-Copy Update (RCU) Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty
Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o Ready Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team)
o Ready Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)

o Beta New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5) (Keith Owens)
o Beta New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe)
o Beta Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton, Robert Love,
etc.)
o Beta Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team)
o Beta Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)
o Beta EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) (EVMS team)
o Beta Device mapper for Logical Volume Manager (LVM2) (LVM team)
o Beta Dynamic Probes (Suparna Bhattacharya,
dprobes team)
o Beta Page table sharing (Daniel Phillips, Dave
McCracken)
o Beta ext2/ext3 online resize support (Andreas Dilger)
o Beta Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o Beta UDF Write support for CD-R/RW (packet writing) (Jens Axboe, Peter Osterlund)
o Beta Asynchronous IO (aio) support (Ben LaHaise)
o Beta More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo,
from Procom donated code)
o Beta Better event logging for enterprise systems (Larry Kessler, evlog team)
o Beta High resolution timers (George Anzinger, etc.)
* Beta discontigmem support (Pat Gaughen, Jack Steiner,
Tony Luck, etc.)

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)
o Alpha ext2/ext3 large directory support: HTree index (Daniel Phillips, Christopher
Li, Ted Ts'o)
o Alpha Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) (Alan Cox, Robert Love, Neil
Brown, Dave Hansen, etc.)
o Alpha Zerocopy NFS (Hirokazu Takahashi)
o Alpha Change all drivers to new driver model (All maintainers)
o Alpha Remove the 2TB block device limit (Peter Chubb)
o Alpha SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) (lksctp team)
o Alpha USB gadget support (Stuart Lynne, Greg Kroah-
Hartman)
* Alpha NUMA aware scheduler extensions (Erich Focht)
* Alpha Basic NUMA API (Matt Dobson)
* Alpha NUMA topology support (Matt Dobson)
* Alpha Non-linear memory support (Martin Bligh, Daniel
Phillips)
* Alpha Parallelizing page replacement (William Lee Irwin)
* Alpha VM large page support (Simon Winwood, Hubertus
Franke)
* Alpha Remove waitqueue heads from kernel structures (William Lee Irwin)
* Alpha Remove the global tasklist (William Lee Irwin)

o Started Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse, David Hinds)
o Started Reiserfs v4 (Reiserfs team)
o Started Serial ATA support (Andre Hedrick)
o Started InfiniBand support (InfiniBand team)
o Started Fix device naming issues (Patrick Mochel, Greg Kroah-
Hartman)
o Started Replace initrd by initramfs (H. Peter Anvin, Al Viro)
* Started Make AppleTalk use shared skbs and refcounting (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
* Started NUMA aware multipath IO (Pat Mansfield, Mike Anderson)
* Started NUMA aware slab allocator (Martin Bligh)

o Draft #2 New lightweight library (klibc) (Greg Kroah-Hartman)
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)

Cleanups:

Merged
o in 2.5.3 Break Configure.help into multiple files (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.3 Untangle sched.h & fs.h include 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 in 2.5.18+ ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes (Al Viro)
o in 2.5.21 Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.23+ Major MD tool (RAID 5) cleanup (Neil Brown)

o Ready Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type (Al Viro)

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 Beta Remove dcache_lock (Maneesh Soni, IBM team)

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!