Hi everyone and welcome to this week’s edition of fresh kernel news!
-We start this time with an s390 update by Martin Schwidefsky, aimed at 2.6.37 merge window
(this is round two and final of the series of updates targetted at this version); also, we have
Greg Kroah-Hartman announcing new upgrades for stable releases : 2.6.27.55, 2.6.32.25,
and 2.6.35.8 .
-Jason Wessel announced the final updates for 2.6.37 related to the kgdb tree, also there is
Tyler Hicks with last-moment updates to ecryptfs, msm fixes by Daniel Walker, x86 fixes by
H. Peter Anvin and Steven Rostedt with perf updates.
-David Miller has a number of fixes announced through a git pull request; here they are :
“This has the verify_iovec() INT_MAX limiter change as well as:
1) kdump fix in netxen from Rajesh Borundia
2) 8390 oops in probe regression fix from Pavel Emelyanov
3) ipv4 routing table memory leak on namespace stop, also from Pavel
Emelyanov.
4) cxgb3 probe OOPS fix from Nishanth Aravamudan
5) Limit kernel stack usage of root in pktgen, from Nelson Elhage,
although this needs a few more tweaks I think.
6) Fix panic in cxgb3 tx desc freeing, from Krishna Kumar.
7) DCCP updates from Gerrit Renker
8) pch_gbe build fix, due to missing dependency
9) Signedness fix in netfilte xt_socket code.
10) Atheros driver fixes from Felix Fietkau, Jones Desougi, Luis
R. Rodriguez, Mohammed Shafi Shajakhan, and Rajkumar Manoharan”
-Aaaand, ladies and gents, here’s the announcement you’ve all been waiting for!
“The merge window for 2.6.37 is over, and -rc1 is out there (or will be
soon, as things are uploading from my laptop here in Boston and then
mirroring out)
There’s a lot of changes there – just shy of 10k commits since 2.6.36
– despite the slightly shortened merge window. Way too many to list.
But the part that I think deserves some extra mention is that we’ve
finally largely gotten rid of the BKL (big kernel lock) in all the
core stuff, and you can easily compile a kernel without any BKL
support at all. It’s been a long road, and thanks to Arnd and others
who did it.
Note that “core code” does not mean “everything”. There are still
drivers out there that need the BKL, and if you configure the kernel
without it, you won’t be able to configure in the V4L drivers, for
example. They still have lock_kernel/unlock_kernel calls in them, but
hopefully that will get fixed too, to the point where in the not too
distant future we will hopefully see only some legacy drivers that
nobody uses needing the old locking.
Other than that, it looks like a fairly normal release. Lots of
changes all over, with drivers – as usual – dominating the patches.
Give it all a try, and hopefully this will be a quiet week wrt
development with lots of core developers here at the kernel summit.
Linus”
Yes, -rc1 is out, so get your git, wget, lynx, or whatever download tool you prefer
and test this ! :)
-Takashi Iwai has sound fixes , smallish ones, for -rc2 and Chris Metcalf has some updates
for the tile tree for 2.6.37. That, gals and boys, is the last piece of news for this week, so
enjoy your weekend and we’ll meet again next saturday.
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