kernel news – 15.04.2013

-Linus Torvalds announces kernel 3.9-rc7:

Another week, another -rc.

This is mostly random one-liners, with a few slightly larger driver
fixes. The most interesting (to me, probably to nobody else) fix is a
fix for a rather subtle TLB invalidate bug that only hits 32-bit PAE
due to the weird way that works. Even then it only hits you if you
have some particularly insane mapping patterns, but we *suspect* that
this one might be the cause behind google chrome having triggered bugs
like

chrome: Corrupted page table at address 34a03000
*pdpt = 0000000000000000 *pde = 0000000000000000
Bad pagetable: 000f [#1] PREEMPT SMP

however, the problem is so rare that we haven’t been able to verify
that this really fixes it.

That said, this bug is much more common (and by “much more common” I
mean “still basically impossible to hit unless you were really
unlucky”) on newer machines that have bigger TLB’s and that could
happily have run in 64-bit mode without the disgusting abortion that
is x86 PAE, and a small part of me feels that anybody who hit this
problem on such a machine probably got whatever they deserved.

But if you’ve seen messages like this, and you still run PAE, give the
new -rc a try.

The rest of the fixes are probably more relevant to most people, but
hey, the PAE oen tickles my fancy. Anyway, go out and test regardless
of the PAE issue,

Linus

kernel news – 12.04.2013

-Rafael J. Wysocki has PM fixes for -rc7:

Included are:

- System reboot/halt fix that prevents some systems from crashing
during reboot due to a violation of ordering between
syscore_shutdown() and disable_nonboot_cpus(). From Huacai Chen.

- intel_pstate driver fix for a delay time calculation mistake
that causes systems using the driver to crash occasionally in a
hard to reproduce way. From Dirk Brandewie.

kernel news – 08.04.2013

-Chanwoo Choi adds extcon fixes for -rc6:

MAX77693 extcon driver
- Add ‘static’ keryword to internal data structure
- Fix return value using ‘ret’ instead of hardcoding

MAX8997 extcon driver
- Use dev_err() instead of pr_err()
- Fix return value using ‘ret’ instead of hardcoding

-Speaking of 3.9-rc6, here’s Linus Torvalds with the announcement:

Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots
of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm,
mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates
(gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands
out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people
who want to wallow in the details..

Things seem to be on track, which means that unless something comes
up, rc7 will probably be the last rc as usual,

Linus

kernel news – 06.04.2013

-Greg Kroah-Hartman announces kernels 3.8.6, 3.4.39 and 3.0.72 .

-David Miller and networking updates:

1) Fix erroneous sock_orphan() leading to crashes and double kfree_skb() in
NFC protocol. From Thierry Escande and Samuel Ortiz.

2) Fix use after free in remain-on-channel mac80211 code, from Johannes
Berg.

3) nf_reset() needs to reset the NF tracing cookie, otherwise we can leak
it from one namespace into another. Fix from Gao Feng and Patrick
McHardy.

4) Fix overflow in channel scanning array of mwifiex driver, from Stone
Piao.

5) Fix loss of link after suspend/shutdown in r8169, from Hayes Wang.

6) Synchronization of unicast address lists to the undelying device doesn’t
work because whether to sync is maintained as a boolean rather than a
true count. Fix from Vlad Yasevich.

7) Fix corruption of TSO packets in atl1e by limiting the segmented packet
length. From Hannes Frederic Sowa.

8) Revert bogus AF_UNIX credential passing change and fix the coalescing
issue properly, from Eric W. Biederman.

9) Changes of ipv4 address lifetime settings needs to generate a notification,
from Jiri Pirko.

kernel news – 05.04.2013

-Rafael J. Wysocki has ACPI and PM fixes for -rc5:

- Revert of a recent cpuidle change that caused Nehalem machines
to hang on boot from Alex Shi.

- USB power management fix addressing a crash in the port device
object’s release routine.

- Device PM QoS fix for a potential deadlock related to sysfs
interface.

- Fix for a cpufreq crash when the /cpus Device Tree node is missing.
From Paolo Pisati.

- Fix for a build issue on ia64 related to the fact that the
Boot Graphics Resource Table (BGRT) is only useful on x86 with
EFI. From Tony Luck.

- Two fixes for ACPI handles being set incorrectly for device
objects that don’t correspond to any ACPI namespace nodes in
the I2C and SPI subsystems.

- Fix for compiler warnings related to CONFIG_PM_DEVFREQ being
unset from Rajagopal Venkat.

- Fix for a symbol definition typo in cpufreq_governor.h from
Borislav Petkov.

-Takashi Iwai has sound bug fixes for -rc6:

This contains slightly more volumes than usual at this stage, mostly
because of my vacation in the last week.
Nothing to scare, all small and/or trivial fixes:

- Fix loop path handling in ASoC DAPM
- Some memory handling fixes in ASoC core
- Fix spear_pcm to adapt to the updated API
- HD-audio HDMI ELD handling fixes
- Fix for CM6331 USB-audio SRC change bugs
- Revert power_save_controller option change due to user-space usage
- A few other small ASoC and HD-audio fixes

-Steven Whitehouse has GFS2 fixes:

There are two patches which fix up a couple of minor issues in the DLM
interface code, a missing error path in gfs2_rs_alloc(), two patches
which fix problems during “withdraw” and a fix for discards/FITRIM when
using 4k sector sized devices.

kernel news – 31.03.2013

-Nicholas A. Bellinger has target-pending fixes for -rc5:

This includes the bug-fix for a >= v3.8-rc1 regression specific to
iscsi-target persistent reservation conflict handling (CC’ed to stable),
and a tcm_vhost patch to drop VIRTIO_RING_F_EVENT_IDX usage so that
in-flight qemu vhost-scsi-pci device code can detect the proper vhost
feature bits.

Also, there are two more tcm_vhost patches still being discussed by MST
and Asias for v3.9 that will be required for the in-flight qemu
vhost-scsi-pci device patch to function properly, and that should
(hopefully) be the last target fixes for this round.

-Mauro Carvalho Chehab has media fixes for -rc4 :

- A subsystem build fix when VIDEO_DEV=y, VIDEO_V4L2=m and I2C=m.
- A compilation fix for arm multiarch preventing IR_RX51 to be
selected;
- a regression fix at bttv crop logic;
- s5p-mfc/m5mols/exynos: a few fixes for cameras on exynos hardware.

kernel news – 30.03.2013

-Steven Rostedt announces kernel 3.6.11.1, Nicolas Ferre has a
“tiny cleanup” for at91, and Vineet Gupta has arch/arc fixes for
3.9:

his pull request contains ARC fixes for 3.9 cycle.

It includes fix for a serious bug in DMA mapping API, make allyesconfig wreckage,
removal of bogus email-list placeholder in MAINTAINERS, a typo in ptrace helper
code and last remaining changes for syscall ABI v3 which we are finally starting
to transition-to internally.

The request is late than I intended to – but I was held up with debugging a timer
link list corruption, for which a proposed fix to generic timer code was sent out
to lkml/tglx earlier today.

-Chris Mason has btrfs updates:

We’ve had a busy two weeks of bug fixing. The biggest patches in here
are some long standing early-enospc problems (Josef) and a very old race
where compression and mmap combine forces to lose writes (me). I’m
fairly sure the mmap bug goes all the way back to the introduction of
the compression code, which is proof that fsx doesn’t trigger every
possible mmap corner after all.

I’m sure you’ll notice one of these is from this morning, it’s a small
and isolated use-after-free fix in our scrub error reporting. I double
checked it here.

-Jens Axboe has block fixes for 3.9-rc :

Collection of fixes that have been queued up since the merge window
opened, hence postponed until later in the cycle. The pull request
contains:

- A bunch of fixes for the xen blk front/back driver.

- A round of fixes for the new IBM RamSan driver, fixing various nasty
issues.

- Fixes for multiple drives from Wei Yongjun, bad handling of return
values and wrong pointer math.

- A fix for loop properly killing partitions when being detached.

kernel news – 15.03.2013

-Jan Kara has ext2, ext3, quota fixes for -rc3:

[...]a fix for regression in ext2, and a fix of one possibly exploitable
format string issue in ext3. The rest isn’t too serious.

-Greg KH announces kernels 3.8.3, 3.4.36 and 3.0.69.

-Guenter Roeck has hwmon patches, also for -rc3:

Bug fixes for pmbus, ltc2978, and lineage-pem drivers
Added specific maintainer for some hwmon drivers

-Jonas Bonn and OpenRISC fixes:

Here are 3 patches to fix OpenRISC build issues for 3.9. 2 of them are essential as the build is broken without them; the third patch, removing VIRT_TO_BUS, isn’t strictly essential, but is harmless enough and removes an invalid config setting introduced during this cycle.

-Samuel Ortiz has MFD fixes:

Hi Linus,

This is the first batch of MFD fixes for 3.9.

With this one we have:

- An ab8500 build failure fix.
- An ab8500 device tree parsing fix.
- A fix for twl4030_madc remove routine to work properly (when built-in).
- A fix for properly registering palmas interrupt handler.
- A fix for omap-usb init routine to actually write into the hostconfig
register.
- A couple of warning fixes for ab8500-gpadc and tps65912.

Thanks in advance for pulling them in.

-Nicolas Ferre announces framebuffer enhancements for 3.10:

Following our conversation about these framebuffer patches for
Atmel LCD driver, here are the remaining three patches that can be
pushed for 3.10. As suggested by Arnd, I have kept them on top of last
commit concerning this topic that have already been merged in arm-soc 3.9
fixes branch.

kernel news – 12.03.2013

-David Miller and networking:

1) Missing cancel of work items in mac80211 MLME, from
Ben Greear.

2) Fix DMA mapping handling in iwlwifi by using coherent DMA for
command headers, from Johannes Berg.

3) Decrease the amount of pressure on the page allocator by
using order 1 pages less in iwlwifi, from Emmanuel Grumbach.

4) Fix mesh PS broadcast OOPS in mac80211, from Marco Porsch.

5) Don’t forget to recalculate idle state in mac80211 monitor
interface, from Felix Fietkau.

6) Fix varargs in netfilter conntrack handler, from Joe Perches.

7) Need to reset entire chip when command queue fills up in
iwlwifi, from Emmanuel Grumbach.

8) The TX antenna value must be valid when calibrations are
performmed in iwlwifi, fix from Dor Shaish.

9) Don’t generate netfilter audit log entries when audit is disabled,
from Gao Feng.

10) Deal with DMA unit hang on e1000e during power state transitions,
from Bruce Allan.

11) Remove BUILD_BUG_ON check from igb driver, from Alexander
Duyck.

12) Fix lockdep warning on i2c handling of igb driver, from Carolyn
Wyborny.

13) Fix several TTY handling issues in IRDA ircomm tty driver, from
Peter Hurley.

14) Several QFQ packet scheduler fixes from Paolo Valente.

15) When VXLAN encapsulates on transmit, we have to reset the
netfilter state. From Zang MingJie.

16) Fix jiffie check in net_rx_action() so that we really cap the
processing at 2HZ. From Eric Dumazet.

17) Fix erroneous trigger of IP option space exhaustion, when
routers are pre-specified and we are looking to see if we
can insert a timestamp, we will have the space. From David
Ward.

18) Fix various issues in benet driver wrt. waiting for firmware to
finish POST after resets or errors. From Gavin Shan and Sathya
Perla.

19) Fix TX locking in SFC driver, from Ben Hutchings.

20) Like the VXLAN fix above, when we encap in a TUN device we have
to reset the netfilter state. This should fix several strange
crashes reported by Dave Jones and others. From Eric Dumazet.

21) Don’t forget to clean up MAC address resources when shutting down
a port in mlx4 driver, from Yan Burman.

22) Fix divide by zero in vmxnet3 driver, from Bhavesh Davda.

23) Fix device statistic regression in tg3 when the driver is
using phylib, from Nithin Sujir.

24) Fix info leak in several netlink handlers, from Mathias
Krause.

-Rob Herring has a clocksource cleanup pull request for 3.10:

[...]This improves the clocksource init to avoid double matching
to the DT device node. The clocksource init function changes are needed
for any other clocksource conversions to CLKSRC_OF, so we need to make
sure any other conversions use this branch (It happens to silently work
without warnings, but there would be a mismatch in function ptrs). I’m
including the twd_smp timer support for CLKSRC_OF here because of the
dependency on this change.

kernel news – 11.03.2013

-Linus Torvalds announces kernel 3.9-rc2:

Hey, things have been reasonable calm. Sure, Dave Jones has been
messing with trinity and we’ve had some excitement from that, but Al
is back, and is hopefully now busy virtually riding to the rescue on a
white horse. But otherwise it’s been good for this phase in the rc
window.

The diffstat is reasonably flat (good sign), with wireless network
drivers standing out. And that’s mainly due to a new driver for the
ASIX AX88179_178A USB gigabit controller.

Other than network drivers, we’ve got some drm updates, md and gpio,
btrfs, etworking, arm, sound.. Stuff all over the place, but nothing
horribly scary. Considering that some rc2′s are too big to post a
shortlog for, I’m happy.

And let’s just keep it that way, ok?

Linus

-Greg Ungerer has m68knommu fixes for 3.9:

Hi Linus,

Can you please pull the m68knommu git tree, for-linus branch.

It contains a few small fixes for the non-MMU m68k platforms. Fixes some
compilation problems, some broken header definitions, removes an unused
config option and adds a name for the old 68000 CPU support.

-Dmitry Torokhov and input updates for -rc2:

Except for the largish
change to the ALPS driver adding “Dolphin V1″ support and Wacom getting
a new signature of yet another device, the rest are straightforward
driver fixes.

-Prabhakar Lad has DaVinci media driver fixes and cleanups:

The first patch fixes module build for VPBE driver
and the second patch fixes the module build for VPIF
driver.