[STATUS 2.5] July 31, 2002

Guillaume Boissiere
2002-07-31T05:11:03Z

The latest status update is available at:
http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/

Of note this week for security enthusiasts is the beginning of the
Linux Security Module (LSM) merge.

As usual, feedback and corrections welcome.
Enjoy!

-- Guillaume

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Linux Kernel 2.5 Status - July 31th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.29)

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 2.5.9 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)
o in 2.5.28 Remove the "Big IRQ lock" (Ingo Molnar)
* in 2.5.29 Thread-Local Storage (TLS) support (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.29+ Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team)

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 Ready Remove the 2TB block device limit (Peter Chubb)
o Ready Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)

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 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 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.)
o Beta discontigmem support (Pat Gaughen, Jack Steiner, Tony Luck,
etc.)
* Beta Add new CIFS (Common Internet File System) (Steve French)

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 SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) (lksctp team)
o Alpha USB gadget support (Stuart Lynne, Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o Alpha NUMA aware scheduler extensions (Erich Focht)
o Alpha Basic NUMA API (Matt Dobson)
o Alpha NUMA topology support (Matt Dobson)
o Alpha Non-linear memory support (Martin Bligh, Daniel Phillips)
o Alpha Parallelizing page replacement (William Lee Irwin)
o Alpha VM large page support (Simon Winwood, Hubertus Franke)
o Alpha Remove waitqueue heads from kernel structures (William Lee Irwin)
o Alpha Remove the global tasklist (William Lee Irwin)
o Alpha 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)
o Started Make AppleTalk use shared skbs and refcounting (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o Started SCSI multipath IO (with NUMA support) (Patrick Mansfield, Mike Anderson)
o 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)
* Started Remove incomplete SPX network stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
* Started Rework datalink protocols to not use cli/sti (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)

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!