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Kernel version status

On Monday morning, Linus Torvalds issued the fourth release candidate of Linux 3.1. In his release email, Torvalds was slightly displeased to report that more changes were introduced between RC3 and RC4 than between RC2 and RC3; however, he also indicated that he is quite happy with the overall development of Linux 3.1. Having only recently been renamed, the kernel was renamed again to "Divemaster Edition" with RC3, as Linus Torvalds recently passed his divemaster exam.

Since the latest regular Kernel Log, the developers have released stable and long-term kernel versions 2.6.32.44, 2.6.32.45, 2.6.32.46, 2.6.33.17, 2.6.33.18, 2.6.33.19, 3.0.2, 3.0.3 and 3.0.4

In brief

Kernel

  • Sarah Sharp has provided a summary of the discussions that were recently held on the "USB Mini Summit" at LinuxCon 2011 in Vancouver. Among the topics was USB redirection, a technology that allows USB devices to be passed through to a local or remote guest system; reportedly, Matt Mooney plans to adapt the "USB over IP" drivers in the staging area so that they use a protocol that was developed by Hans de Geode and can already be used locally with the latest version of Qemu.
  • The Wireless developers' wiki offers video recordings of three Wi-Fi technology presentations held as part of the "Wireless Summit" at LinuxCon 2011; a short description of the three videos is available in an email by Luis R. Rodriguez.
  • At LinuxCon 2011, a large number of developers who contribute to the kernel's KVM hypervisor also met for the KVM Forum 2011. Its web page offers more than three dozen PDF documents with slides of the presentations given at the forum. Some of them offer extensive information on the latest changes made and on further improvements that are being developed. For instance, Avi Kivity's keynotePDF mentions Transparent Huge Pages (THP) and zero-copy support for Vhost-net as some of the recent kernel-side improvements; the developer also mentions a forthcoming port to A15 ARM whose virtualisation functions are said to allow guest systems to achieve good performance. Asias He describesPDF the "Native Linux KVM tool" he has co-developed; this tool missed the integration window for Linux 3.1. In "Fixing the USB disasterPDF", Gerd Hoffmann describes some problems concerning the USB support for Qemu; further details are also available in the USB Mini Summit report mentioned earlier.
  • The developers of the open80211s/O11s project have released version 0.41 aka "Meshgate" of Open80211s – a reference implementation of the 802.11s standard for creating mesh networks that is based on the Linux kernel's Wi-Fi stack. The new version implements the IEEE's 12.0 draft of 802.11s, which will probably be approved in the coming months; in the near future, it is planned that this version will replace older Open80211s code that was already incorporated into the Linux kernel in version 2.6.26.

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