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Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

June 11th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Rares Aioanei

Welcome to another edition of openSUSE’s kernel weekly news!
This week sees the launch of 2.6.35-rc2, plus other goodies, so let’s dive into it!

-Takashi Iwai pushed sound fixes for -rc2, mainly for the USB audio stack, v4l/dvb fixes were pushed by Mauro Carvalho Chehab (-rc1), Len Brown has patches for the SFI and ACPI trees targetting -rc1 and openSUSE’s Greg Kroah-Hartman also posted multiple fixes for USB, driver-core, staging and TTY and serial targetting 2.6.35-git.

-Grant Likely has fixes for the sparc architecture : “This patch moves SPARC architecture specific data members out of struct of_device and into the pdev_archdata structure. The reason for this change is to unify the struct of_device definition amongst all the architectures.  It also remvoes the .sysdata, .slot, .portid and .clock_freq properties because they aren’t actually used by anything.

A subsequent patch will replace struct of_device entirely with struct platform_device and the of_platform support code will share common routines with the platform bus (but the bus instances themselves can remain separate).

This patch also adds ‘struct resources *resource’ and num_resources to match the fields defined in struct platform_device.  After this change, ‘struct platform_device’ can be used as a drop-in replacement for ‘struct of_platform’.

This change is in preparation for merging the of_platform_bus_type with the platform_bus_type.”

-Al Viro posted fixes for the vfs tree targetting -rc2, while Ryusuke Konishi and David Miller posted patches for the nilfs2 and networking trees, respectively. Alex Elder updated the XFS tree  for -rc2, Jens Axboe updated block for -rc1, Michal Simek updated the arch/microblaze tree with fixes targetting 2.6.35-rc3 and Jeff Garzik updated the libata tree with some quirk fixes.

-Jeffrey Merkey announced Merkey’s Kernel Debugger 2.6.34 :  “Have not tested the APIC IPI calls yet but should work.  Let me know if there are problems.  I disable the hw_breakpoints interface with MDB is loaded because it is not well designed and to be honest, virtualizing DR6 and trying to handle these types of events outside of a debugger core causes a lot of problems.  Has support for x86_64 and works under it however, I have not completed the dissassembler with the newer x86_64 instructions, so some of them do not display properly and do not detect the 64 bit flag, but will finish this at a later date as I need it.  I do most of my work on 32 bit anyway and will work on it as I have time.  Someone else is welcome to add it and send me back the changes since this is the only thing missing for full
x86_64 features — finished everything else.”

-Mr. Torvalds, Linus Torvalds, announced the release of 2.6.35-rc2 thusly :
“So -rc2 is out there, and hopefully fixes way more problems than it introduces. I’m slightly unhappy with its size – admittedly it’s not nearly as big as rc2 was the last release cycle, but that was an unusually big -rc2. And I really hoped for a calmer release cycle this time.

In fact, for once I’m going to enforce -rc3 being sane, because the  upcoming week is the last week of school for my kids. And when the kids get out of school, I’m going be offline for a while. And as a result, I _really_ don’t want to pull anything even half-way scary in the next week for -rc3.

So any pull requests had better be obvious fixes only, and this time I’m not going to let things slide.

Anyway, the biggest patches in -rc2 are some staging drivers (70% of the patch is just that), so while it’s still biggish, at least most of it is clearly staging.

Of the remaining non-staging 30%, half of _that_ is just the regular drivers (drm: i915 and radeon, along with some dvb updates is a noticeable chunk), with a new Core i7 EDAC driver that I had gotten a pull request for before -rc1, but just hadn’t had the energy to pull until -rc2 (same goes for a build system update – the pull request predated -rc1).

And some late powerpc changes that I do _not_ think predated -rc1. Tssk.  I’m really not going to let things like that slide next -rc, as mentioned.

But the most important part is obviously the regression fixes, which tend to be small and not show up much in the patch statistics. A number of reverts, a number of fixes, hopefully things are all rosy.

And it really isn’t _that_ bad – the -rc2 shortlog is almost never small  enough to be worth posting on the mailing list, but I think it’s doable this time, even if it’s borderline. So ShortLog appended if people care
about the (summary of) details.

Linus ”

-Dave Airlie updated the drm tree with some fixes as he explains in his mail : “3 regressions fixes, one radeon loading on IGP, one i865 loading, one and  an evergreen userspace interaction workaround.

It adds hwmon support for a temperature sensor on r600 cards, later PM patches were build on this and Alex had tested them in one so I didn’t want to cherry-pick around it. Also its useful to report the gpu temp to check if power management is helping cooling it down.”

-Stefan Richter came up with a single update/fix for Firewire, Martin Schwidefsky posted three bug fixes and a defconfig update for the s390 architecture targetting-rc2, Tejun Heo has also some fixes, this time for sched/core and Frederic Weisbecker updated the perf and tracing trees with various fixes.

-Karel Zak of Redhat announces util-linux-ng version 2.18-rc1, posting also the release notes, stating the updates, fixes and improvements specific to this version.

-Artem Bityutskiy posted a pull request for the UBI tree targetting -rc3, David Miller pushed another series of networking updates, Jesse Barnes updated the PCI tree, while Takashi Iwai targeted -rc3 with updates to the sound tree; other updates include perf (Ingo Molnar), perf for 2.6.36 (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo) and block/io (Jens Axboe).

-Rafael Wysocki posted a list of reported regressions from 2.6.33.4 (related to-rc2-git2), comprised of 15 regressions, from which 13 are pending and 10 are unresolved.

-Thomas Gleixner announced 2.6.33.5-rt23, a new kernel from the preempt-rt series – changelog to be found in the lkml archive.

-Avi Kivity has updates for the kvm tree targetted at -rc2, Jeff Garzik updated the libata tree with some fixes, Sage Weil, as usual, updated the ceph tree (for -rc3) and Steven Rostedt updated the perf tree (2.6.35).

That would be it for this week, take care and enjoy your weekend!

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