Kernel
2.6.23 includes the new, better, fairer CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, make SLUB the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.
"There's another item to add to my list of 7 Reasons Why Linux Won't Succeed On The Desktop. An Australian doctor who spent his spare time working on the kernel says desktop performance is suffering because Linus Torvalds and company are only concerned about enterprise users. He got so ticked off he quit Linux in a huff, and made some pointed comments about Linus."
"From the kernel mailing list: "[the -stable team] are announcing the release of the 2.6.22.3 kernel. This release has a few bugfixes so all users of the 2.6.22 series are encouraged to update to it. Especially people with laptops, they will appreciate the power savings in this release.""
Willy Tarreau, maintainer of the 2.4 kernel series, wants to continue to oversee the Linux version 2.6.20 a bit longer than the maintainers of the stable kernel series would normally have done.
It may be thankless, boring work, but you have to get more involved in building the Linux Kernel.
Emulex Corporation today announced its LightPulse Virtual Host Bus Adapter (HBA) driver is the first to be accepted into the Open Source Linux kernel.
The Linux 2.6.22 kernel was release yesterday. Features include a WLAN driver for the OLPC laptop and an Ivtv driver for various Hauppauge WinTV-PVR models, new WLAN and FireWire stacks and several new device drivers. Over 500,000 lines of source code were changed, shifted or inserted -- more than any other version of the 2.6 series.
If the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes and some of the other surprises (just as an example: we were apparently unlucky enough to hit what looks like a previously unknown hardware errata in one of the ethernet drivers that got updated etc).
More than half of the 1.2 million lines of code for the real-time kernel technology have been moved into the mainline Linux kernel over the past year, Tim Burke, the director of emerging technologies at Red Hat, said at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference here on April 23.
The open-source OKL4 microkernel, developed by Australia's Center of Excellence for Information and Computing Technology (NICTA), is about to receive a strong commercial push. Open Kernel (OK) Labs, a NICTA spinoff, is setting up its U.S. headquarters in Chicago and is rolling out a commercial support package for OKL4.
"LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work — but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two."
The 0.01 kernel downloads to about 10,000 lines of C and assembler, which is fairly manageable. Note that it's a barely functional UNIX with tons of bugs, but that doesn't stop it being useful. Many people use it as the first step when learning to hack the Linux kernel.
Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton last week revealed some of his plans for the next kernel version, a few days after the final release of Linux 2.6.20.
Following the release of Linux Version 2.6.20 a few days ago the development phase of the next kernel version has now taken off. Whereas Linus Torvalds during the last few days has already integrated some 800 patches into his developer kernel that will lead to 2.6.21, Andrew Morton has now informed the kernel developers about his plans for the next kernel version.
That's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.
