Kernel version status
Meanwhile, Kernel 3.2 development is going at the usual speed. Version 3.2-rc6 appeared late last week. Linus Torvalds mentioned in the release mail: "While I can see myself doing an -rc7, I probably won't do an -rc8 unless something bad pops up. There doesn't seem to be any real reason to drag out this release any more, and we'll probably have the real 3.2 around new years."
Since the last regular kernel log, the stable and long-term kernels 2.6.32.49, 2.6.32.50, 3.0.10, 3.0.11, 3.0.12, 3.0.13, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4 and 3.1.5 have been released. The 2.6.32.51, 3.0.14, and 3.1.6 kernels should be released shortly.
It is somewhat unusual that Greg Kroah-Hartman is still maintaining the 3.0 kernel series under the stable name, since he usually stops maintaining the previous version (in this case, 3.0) a few weeks after the most recent version of the main development branch (such as Linux 3.1) is released. Maybe he is thinking of making Kernel 3.0 a long-term kernel maintained for two years; this would make developers of real-time support for Linux happy, since the production-ready version of their RT tree is based on Linux 3.0.
In brief
Kernel
- Christoph Hellwig has published the "XFS status update for November 2011".
- Over the last few weeks and months, LAN and wireless Linux developers have occasionally discussed a problem called "bufferbloat". The term is used for problems and dangers occurring in network hardware as a result of excessive data buffering. Jim Gettys is especially active in this area and recently explained the problem in more detail in the ACM Queue article "Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet"; the web site has also published the transcript of a conversation between Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver and Jim Gettys entitled "BufferBloat: What’s Wrong with the Internet?".
- H.J. Lu has published a short status update on the X32 project that attempts to get around some of the drawbacks of 64-bit software by implementing an x32 ABI.
Support for graphics hardware
- The developers of libdrm have released versions 2.4.28 and 2.4.29 of the library used by user space software like Mesa 3D's 3D drivers to communicate with the DRM drivers in the Linux kernel.
- Ian Romanick has released version 7.11.2 of Mesa 3D, which mostly corrects bugs from the previous version.
- The X Developers Conference (XDC) will take place in Nuremberg, Germany, in September 2012.
Kernel plumbing layer, userland drivers, developer tools, etc.
- The developers of the Hplip project (Hewlett-Packard's Linux Imaging and Printing software) have released version 3.11.12 of their driver framework which supports more than two thousand printers and multifunction devices from HP. The new features include, according to the Release Notes, support for the Photosmart 5510d e-All-in-One as well as a number of devices from the LaserJet Enterprise 600 and LaserJet 200 color MFP series.
- Lucas De Marchi, together with Gustavo Barbieri, developed libkmod and kmod. The former is a library that provides functions for handling of kernel modules; kmod is based on top of it and contains some command line tools that perform similar tasks as lsmod, rmmod, insmod or modprobe, but do not yet provide their full functionality. With the library, the developers are trying to fulfil one of the wishes which Kay Sievers, Lennart Poettering and Harald Hoyer mentioned in their "Plumber's Wish List for Linux"; according to the Kmod developers udev will start to use the libkmod soon.
- James Hunt has released Upstart 1.4, entitled "Let them speak". It includes functions to run system jobs from certain user accounts and groups.
- Lukas Czerner has introduced his System Storage Manager on the LKML. The tool, originally called File System Manager (FSM), is intended to be a central command-line configuration tool for typical administrative tasks related to data storage management that uses Mdadm, the various filesystem tools, or the LVM2 tools. Slides from a presentation given by Czerner at LinuxCon Europe in October provide more details.
- Version 3.1 of Ethtool, the programme responsible for configuring LAN components, has been released.
- Stephen Hemminger has released version 3.1 of iproute2, which is designed for Linux 3.1 but also works with older kernels. The programme includes a number of tools for network configuration.
- In his blog, Karel Zak describes some improvements in wipefs that will be included in version 2.21 of the Util-Linux tool collection he supervises; in another blog post, Zak explains how to monitor the lists of mounted filesystems found in /proc/mounts or /proc/self/mountinfo.
- Junio C Hamano has released Git 1.7.8.
- Samuel Ortiz has released a user space daemon for NFC (near field communication) that works with the NFC subsystem that was added in Linux 3.1.