Miscellaneous
- A number of changes to the CIFS filesystem code for accessing Samba or Windows shares should significantly improve data throughput in certain situations (1, 2, 3).
- From 3.2, the Objects Raid Engine (ORE) in Exofs will support RAID 5 (1, 2, 3). Exofs (EXtended Object File System) is designed for object storage devices (OSDs). This is the kernel's third RAID 5 implementation. Btrfs is also eventually expected to offer RAID 5 support and long term consolidation of this code path has been vaguely discussed.
- In his XFS status update for October 2011, Christoph Hellwig describes some of the enhancements to XFS, including optimisations when executing fsync(2) on directories and reduced latencies with sync(2).
Minor gems
Many further minor, but by no means insignificant, changes can be found in the list below, which contains the commit headers referring to the respective change. Like many of the references in the text above, the links point to the relevant commit in the web front end of the Git branch for the "official" kernel sources maintained by Linus Torvalds at kernel.org. The commit comments available at these links and the patches themselves provide extensive further information on the respective changes.
Each link is preceded by various letters and numbers in square brackets. The letter "C" identifies patches that modify Kconfig files, which contain the help texts and configuration options displayed by "make menuconfig", "make xconfig" and similar tools during kernel configuration. "D" is used for patches that modify the documentation available under Documentation/ in the kernel branch. "N" identifies changes which create a new file. The numbers provide a rough idea of the patch size: for instance, "1" is used for changes between 10 and 20 KBytes including comment, "2" for patches between 20 and 30 KBytes; changes without a number are less than 10 KBytes, while patches marked "9" are 90 KBytes or more.
Btrfs
- [
1
] Btrfs: add a log of past tree roots - [
1
] Btrfs: allow us to overcommit our enospc reservations - [
- [
1
] Btrfs: inline checksums into the disk free space cache - [
- [
Ext-Familiy
- [
- [
1
] ext4: Add new ext4_discard_partial_page_buffers routines - [
2
] ext4: add some tracepoints in ext4/extents.c - [
D
] ext4: documentation: remove acl and user_xattr mount options - [
- [
- [
Various
- [
D
] 9p: fix 9p.txt to advertise msize instead of maxdata - [
- [
- [
- [
- [
C
] ceph: use kernel DNS resolver - [
1
] cifs: Add data structures and functions for uid/gid to SID mapping (try #4) - [
1
] cifs: Add mount options for backup intent (try #6) - [
- [
- [
- [
- [
- [
- [
- [
3
] fs/9p: Update zero-copy implementation in 9p - [
- [
- [
- [
N2
] net/9p: Convert net/9p protocol dumps to tracepoints - [
- [
C
] pnfs-obj: move to ore 02: move to ORE - [
C
] Squashfs: Add an option to set dev block size to 4K - [
- [
- [
D
] vfs: add d_prune dentry operation - [
For other articles on Linux 3.2 and links to the rest of the "Coming in 3.2" series, see The H's Kernel Log Linux 3.2 Tracking page. Further background information about the developments in the Linux kernel area can be found using the search function at The H Open Source. Information about previous Linux kernel releases can be found in The H's Linux Kernel History. New editions of Kernel Logs are also mentioned on Identi.ca and Twitter by @kernellog2. The Kernel Log author also posts updates about various topics on Identi.ca and Twitter as @kernellogauthor.