Polish and add-ons; the latest updates in Linux 2.6.26

Attachment: More changes to drivers and infrastructure

The updates to the latest Linux version mentioned in the above article are only the most significant – the tip of the iceberg, as the saying goes. And the iceberg in this case consists of the thousands of commits in the source code administration system. Numerous other important new features – "just below the waterline", so to speak – can be found in the following list, organised by topic and with brief descriptions of the updates that link to additional sources of information. These usually consist of the (sometimes slightly abridged) titles of the commits linked to the corresponding change in the source code administration system web front end. This contains detailed information and background to the change, as well as the patch itself.

Which drivers were modified On the Git front end at kernel.org, it is possible to retrieve information on changes to individual files in the Linux kernel. That is how to find out if there were any updates to drivers used on a user's own system. To do that, however, it is important to know where the drivers are located on the Linux source code tree. When searching for these in a distributon's kernels, which are heavily reliant on modules, it often helps to have the output of a program called modinfo: [VERBATIM0] If a compiled module is located in [...]/kernel/drivers/net/e100.ko, then its source code in the source code archive is usually is located in the drivers/net/ directory and files with similar names. In the case of the e100 driver responsible for Intel 100 Mb network hardware, for instance, the file is called e100.c. Other modules, like the e1000 driver for Intel's PCI gigabit LAN chips, on the other hand, have their own directory. If a person knows the approximate position of the driver source code, the tree view of the Git web interface can be used to navigate to the corresponding source code data; clicking on the history link displays an overview of the most recent changes to the corresponding files or even entire directories. In the network drivers directory, for instance, the modifications to the driver code for the e100 (drivers/net/e100.c) and e1000 (drivers/net/e1000/) drivers can be displayed and examined more carefully.