KernelTrap - Kernel newsKernelTrap is a web community devoted to sharing the latest in kernel development news.Openmoko Neo FreeRunner Released- June 27, 2008 "Thousands of Neo FreeRunners have been loaded into planes and fired around the world," announced Sean Moss-Pultz, the Openmoko CEO, in a frequently philosophical email titled "let us impact the material world", posted to the Openmoko community mailing list. He continued, "many of our distributors have already begun shipping. In about another week, Steve and Harry will announce the opening of our own webshop." The CAD files for building the smartphone hardware are available under the Creative.http://kerneltrap.org/Hardware/Openmoko_Neo_FreeRunner_Released 2.6.26-rc8, "A Pretty Small Set Of Changes"- June 26, 2008 "It hasn't been a week, I know, and this is a pretty small set of changes since -rc7, but I'm going to be mostly incommunicado for the next week or so, so I just released what will hopefully be the last -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc8 kernel. He added, "or maybe not. It depends on how good you all are while I'm not looking." Regarding the latest release candidate, Linus explained: "Most of the bulk of the changes here are to Xen and to KVM in particular,...http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/2.6.26-rc8_A_Pretty_Small_Set_Of_Changes AdvFS Code Released Under GPLv2- June 26, 2008 "HP has released AdvFS, a file system that was developed by Digital Equipment Corp and continues to be part of HP's Tru64 operating system," announced Xose Vazquez Perez, offering a link to the re-licensed source code. 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau replied favorably, "wow! That's awesome. I discovered it in 1999 and 9 years later, it probably remains the most advanced FS I encountered." HP's Linda Knippers explained: "In case its not clear, this is a GPLv2 technology release, not an actual...http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/AdvFS_Code_Released_Under_GPLv2 Position Statement on Linux Kernel Modules- June 23, 2008 "As part of the Linux Foundation Technical board, we confront the issue of closed source Linux kernel modules all the time, and we wanted to do something that could be seen as a general 'public statement' about them that is easy to understand and point to when people have questions," began Greg KH, explaining, "so, after working on this for a while, and asking some of the other major contributors and maintainers of the kernel, what we have is below." a FAQ on the Linux Foundation website...http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Position_Statement_on_Linux_Kernel_Modules 2.6.26-rc7, "Mainly Drivers And Arch Updates"- June 21, 2008 "Another week, another -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc7 Linux kernel, "and as usual, it's mainly drivers and arch updates - over 90% of changes are in one or the other." He continued: "A big part of it (about two thirds of the driver update, in fact) is a late-dropping AGPDRM update that adds support for some new Intel and ATI graphics cards. And a big part of the arch update is the inevitable def_config updates, of course. I'm not all that happy about the...http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/2.6.26-rc7_Mainly_Drivers_And_Arch_Updates HAMMER Performance and Mirroring- June 20, 2008 Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it, "represents an additional significant improvement in performance, also including bug fixes and most of the final media changes." A significant improvement in write performance was obtained by making the filesystem block size automatically increase from 16K to 64K when a file grows to larger than 1 MB. One remaining media change is...http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER_Performance_and_Mirroring Compiler Oops- June 20, 2008 "In the kerneloops.org stats, a new oops is rapidly climbing the charts, began Arjan van de Ven, referring to his website where he automatically collects kernel oops and warning reports from mailing lists, bugzillas, and a special client. Regarding the latest oops, he noted, "the oops is a page fault in the ext3 'do_slit' function, and the first report of it was with 2.6.26-rc6-git3." Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a quick interest in the issue, observing that all the oopses seemed to be...http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Compiler_Oops Git 1.5.6, "Relatively Small Impact Changes"- June 19, 2008 "As promised, this cycle was short and the release is with only relatively small impact changes," said Git maintainer Junio Hamano, announcing the release of Git v1.5.6. He noted that both gitk and git-gui have been updated. To improve portability, when running "git init", git now autodetects whether or not a filesystem is case insensitive, and updates a new configuration variable accordingly. Dependencies on the 'cpio' and 'curl' binaries have also been removed. Among the changes improving.http://kerneltrap.org/Git/1.5.6_Relatively_Small_Impact_Changes HAMMER's B+Tree Implementation- June 18, 2008 "HAMMER makes no modifications to the B-Tree whatsoever on the front-end. When you create, delete, rename, write, etc... when you do those operations HAMMER caches them in a virtualization layer in memory and doesn't make any modifications to its on-media data structures (or their in-memory representations) at all until the meta-data is synced to disk," DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon explained, comparing HAMMER, his clustering filesystem, to a wiki summary of Reiser4's implementations. .http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMERs_BTree_Implementation |