-mm -> 2.6.13 merge status

Andrew Morton
2005-06-21T08:13:06Z

This summarises my current thinking on various patches which are presently
in -mm. I cover large things and small-but-controversial things. Anything
which isn't covered here (and that's a lot of material) is probably a "will
merge", unless it obviously isn't.

(If you reply to this email it would be a good idea to alter the Subject:
to reflect which feature you are discussing)

git-ocfs

The OCFS2 filesystem. OK by me, although I'm not sure it's had enough
review.

sparsemem

OK by me for a merge. Need to poke arch maintainers first, check that
they've looked at it sufficiently closely.

vm-early-zone-reclaim

Needs some convincing benchmark numbers to back it up. Otherwise OK.

avoiding-mmap-fragmentation

Tricky. Addresses vm area fragmentation issues due to recent
optimisations to the free-area lookup code. Will merge.

periodically-drain-non-local-pagesets

Will merge

pcibus_to_node and users

Will merge

CONFIG_HZ for x86 and ia64: changes default HZ to 250, make HZ Kconfigurable.

Will merge (will switch default to 1000 Hz later if that seems necessary)

dmi-*.patch

Will merge. I have a comment "The below break x440". Maybe it got
fixed. We'll doubtless hear if not.

xen-*.patch

These are little cleanups and abstractions which make a Xen merge
easier. May as well merge them.

CPU hotplug for x86 and x86_64

Not really useful on current hardware, but these provide
infrastructure which some power management patches need, and it seems
sensible to make the reference architecture support hotplug. Will merge.

swsusp-on-SMP

Will merge.

cfq version 3

Not sure. Jens seems to be setting up a few git trees. On hold.

RCUification of the key management code

Don't know - dhowells seemed diffident last time we discussed this.

timers-fixes-improvements.patch

SMP speedups for the core timer code. It was bumpy, but this seems
stable now. Will merge.

kprobes-*

Will merge

rapidio-*

Will merge.

namespace*.patch

Awaiting viro ack.

xtensa architecture

Is xtensa now, or will it be in the future a sufficiently popular
architecture to justify the cost of having this code in the tree?

Heaven knows. Will merge.

dlm-*.patch: Red Hat distributed lock manager

Hard. Right now it seems that no in-kernel projects will use this and
only one out-of-kernel project will use it. Shelve the problem until
after Kernel Summit, where some light may be shed.

Opinions are sought...

connector.patch

Nice idea IMO, but there are still questions around the
implementation. More dialogue needed ;)

connector-add-a-fork-connector.patch

OK, but needs connector.

inotify

There are still concerns about the userspace API and internal
implementation details. More slogging needed.

pcmcia-*.patch

Makes the pcmcia layer generate hotplug events and deprecates cardmgr.
Will merge.

NUMA-aware slab allocator

Seems stable now, but it needs some ifdef reduction work before
merging, please.

CPU scheduler

Will merge some of these patches. We're still discussing which ones.

perfctr

Not yet, but getting closer. The PPC64 guys still need to sort out a
few interface issues with Mikael. We might be able to fit this into
2.6.13 if people get a move on.

cachefs

This is a ton of code which knows rather a lot about pagecache
internals. It allows the AFS client to cache file contents on a local
blockdev.

I don't think it's a justified addition for only AFS and I'd prefer to
see it proven for NFS as well.

Issues around add-page-becoming-writable-notification.patch need to
be resolved.

cachefs-for-nfs

A recent addition. Needs review from NFS developers and considerably
more testing.

These things aren't looking likely for 2.6.13.

kexec and kdump

I guess we should merge these.

I'm still concerned that the various device shutdown problems will
mean that the success rate for crashing kernels is not high enough for
kdump to be considered a success. In which case in six months time we'll
hear rumours about vendors shipping wholly different crashdump
implementations, which would be quite bad.

But I think this has gone as far as it can go in -mm, so it's a bit of
a punt.

reiser4

Merge it, I guess.

The patches still contain all the reiser4-specific namespace
enhancements, only it is disabled, so it is effectively dead code. Maybe
we should ask that it actually be removed?

v9fs

I'm not sure that this has a sufficiently high
usefulness-to-maintenance-cost ratio.

fuse

This is useful, but there are, AFAIK, two issues:

- We're still deadlocked over some permission-checking hacks in there

- It has an NFS server implementation which only works if the
to-be-served file happens to be in dcache.

It has been said that a userspace NFS server can be used to get
full NFS server functionality with FUSE. I think the half-assed kernel
implementation should be done away with.

execute-in-place

Will merge. Have the embedded guys commented on the usefulness of
this for execute-out-of-ROM?