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Kernel version status

At the beginning of the week, Linus Torvalds issued the third release candidate of Linux 2.6.37. In his release email, Torvalds said that he was pleased with how quiet things had been and that, given the relatively few changes the kernel hackers have submitted for integration so far, was hoping this release schedule would remain calm.

On Monday evening, Greg Kroah-Hartman released four new stable kernels: 2.6.27.56, 2.6.32.26, 2.6.35.9 and 2.6.36.1. A few corrections submitted for series 36 were retained for integration into 2.6.36.2. Kroah-Hartman wrote in his release email that with 2.6.35.9, series 35 has reached its "End of Life" and will receive no further updates; those who use this kernel series should now switch to a series 36 kernel.

In brief

Kernel

  • The Linux Foundation has recently made the "Introduction to Btrfs with Chris Mason" web seminar available online. It can be accessed free of charge after registering. In his webinar about the file system dubbed the "Next Generation File System for Linux", main Btrfs developer Chris Mason provides an overview of various recently completed features as well as detailed explanations of the file system's RAID-5 and RAID-6 capabilities.

  • In his "XFS status update for October 2010", Christoph Hellwig provides an overview of the latest XFS developments and discusses the changes integrated in Linux version 2.6.37.

  • Earlier this month, the developers rekindled a discussion on the LKML about the changes that are part of the Android kernel but have not been integrated into the official kernel. On this subject, long-term kernel hacker and current Google employee Ted 'tytso' Ts'o pointed out that the kernels of the Red Hat and Novell / SUSE enterprise distributions contain numerous patches that were never merged into the official kernel, and that this didn't spark similar discussions. The developer said: "Move along, there's nothing to see" and concluded that, in his opinion, a controversy was whipped up by journalists and bloggers where none deserved to exist.

X Server, etc

  • Last week, AMD made version 10.11 of its proprietary graphics drivers known as Catalyst or Fglrx available to download, but didn't provide any related release notes.

  • On one of the official Linux support forums at nvnews.net, an NVIDIA employee recently said that his company does not plan to support the Wayland X Server alternative.

  • Wayland developer Kristian Høgsberg has released the libwayland-server and libwayland-client code, which was previously available under the MIT licence, under the LGPLv2.

Kernel environment ("plumbing layer"), userland drivers, developer tools, ...

  • Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar recently introduced the 'trace' tracing program, which is said to give developers better ways of investigating system processes than previously existing tools.

  • In a blog posting, Lennart Poettering provides an overview of current Systemd developments and lists many of the latest changes. For instance, the alternative to SysV-Init and Upstart now has a dedicated read-ahead implementation and supports Btrfs de-fragmentation, which is said to improve booting times especially on older systems. Poettering has also released the fourth part of his "Systemd for administrators" series.

  • Michael Kerrisk has released the man-pages 3.31, which explain a further getrlimit system call and a flag for inotify that were both introduced in Linux 2.6.36. On his blog, Kerrisk also advertises his recently released book "The Linux Programming Interface" (TLPI), whose sources are available to download free of charge.

  • Douglas Gilbert has released version 1.06 of sdparm, the "hdparm for SCSI disks".

  • In his article "Virtual networking in Linux" released at IBM Developerworks, M. Tim Jones provides an overview of the network configuration options for virtual environments.

  • The slides of many conference presentations are now available on the web pages of the Linux Plumbers Conference. In his "Kernel Report"PDF, the founder and chief editor of LWN.net, Jonathan Corbet, provides a good overview of recent and forthcoming Linux kernel developments. Arnaldo Melo has summarised the latest kernel tracing improvements in "Perf Tools: Recent Improvements". Rafael Wysocki's presentation "Runtime Power Management in the PCI Subsystem", on the other hand, provides background information on recent kernel changes that give access to the runtime power management mechanisms of PCI devices.

Further background information about developments in the Linux Kernel and its environment can be found in previous editions of the Kernel Log on The H Online. New editions of Kernel Logs are also mentioned on Identi.ca and Twitter via "@kernellog2". The Kernel Log author also posts updates about various topics on Identi.ca and Twitter via "@kernellogauthor".

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