[STATUS 2.5] June 19, 2002

Guillaume Boissiere
2002-06-19T04:10:15Z

With the kernel summit next week in Ottawa, I figured I would look back
on the last six months of development. Much has happened!

Of the items that were discussed at the last Kernel Summit and are being
taken care of (most still need more work but the bulk is there):
- Block IO: merged
- NAPI: merged
- LDM & driverfs: merged
- ACPI: merged
- hotplug: merged

Among the most 'important & not yet merged' items - at least the ones I
have received the most requests about from people :-)
- kbuild 2.5: should be integrated soon in pieces
- AIO: some pieces are just starting to get merged
- VM: not merged
- LSM: not merged
- XFS: not merged
- initramfs: not merged

As usual, the URL with the details is http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/
Enjoy!

-- Guillaume

-----------------------------------
Linux Kernel 2.5 Status - June 19th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.23)

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+ Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)

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 More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de
Melo, from Procom donated code)
o in -ac More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist,
from Procom donated code)
o in -ac Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer (Alan Cox)

o Ready Better event logging for enterprise systems (Larry Kessler, evlog
team)
o Ready Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman)
o Ready First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman)
o Ready Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)
o Ready New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5) (Keith Owens)
o Ready Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty
Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o Ready USB gadget support (Stuart Lynne, Greg Kroah-
Hartman)
o Ready Scalable CPU bitmasks (Russ Weight)
o Ready Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team)

o Beta Serial driver restructure (Russell King)
o Beta New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe)
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, 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 LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0 (LVM team)
o Beta Dynamic Probes (Suparna Bhattacharya,
dprobes team)
o Beta Page table sharing (Daniel Phillips)
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 Direct pagecache <-> BIO disk I/O (Andrew Morton)

o Alpha Better support of high-end NUMA machines (NUMA team)
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 Started Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse, David
Hinds)
o Started Reiserfs v4 (Reiserfs team)
o Started Serial ATA support (Andre Hedrick)

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 InfiniBand support (InfiniBand team)

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!