kernel news – 16.12.2013

-perf/core from Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo :

perf/core improvements and fixes:

Fixes:

. Fix inverted error verification bug in thread__fork, from David Ahern.

New features:

. Shell completion for ‘perf kvm’, from Ramkumar Ramachandra.

Refactorings:

. Get rid of panic() like calls in libtraceevent, from Namyung Kim.

. Start carving out symbol parsing routines from perf, just moving routines to
topic files in tools/lib/symbol/, tools that want to use it need to integrate
it directly, i.e. no tools/lib/symbol/Makefile is provided.

. Assorted refactoring patches, moving code around and adding
utility evlist methods that will be used in the IPT patchset,
from Adrian Hunter.

-Mike Snitzer has DM fixes :

A set of device-mapper fixes for 3.13.

A fix for possible memory corruption during DM table load, fix a
possible leak of snapshot space in case of a crash, fix a possible
deadlock due to a shared workqueue in the delay target, fix to
initialize read-only module parameters that are used to export metrics
for dm stats and dm bufio.

Quite a few stable fixes were identified for both the thin-provisioning
and caching targets as a result of increased regression testing using
the device-mapper-test-suite (dmts). The most notable of these are the
reference counting fixes for the space map btree that is used by the
dm-array interface — without these the dm-cache metadata will leak,
resulting in dm-cache devices running out of metadata blocks. Also,
some important fixes related to the thin-provisioning target’s
transition to read-only mode on error.

-Bjorn Helgaas has PCI updates :

PCI device hotplug
– Move device_del() from pci_stop_dev() to pci_destroy_dev() (Rafael J. Wysocki)

Host bridge drivers
– Update maintainers for DesignWare, i.MX6, Armada, R-Car (Bjorn Helgaas)
– mvebu: Return ‘unsupported’ for Interrupt Line and Interrupt Pin (Jason Gunthorpe)

Miscellaneous
– Avoid unnecessary CPU switch when calling .probe() (Alexander Duyck)
– Revert “workqueue: allow work_on_cpu() to be called recursively” (Bjorn Helgaas)
– Disable Bus Master only on kexec reboot (Khalid Aziz)
– Omit PCI ID macro strings to shorten quirk names for LTO (Michal Marek)

-HPA has x86 updates for -rc4 :

This is a pretty small batch:

The biggest single change is to stop using EFI time services on 32-bit
platforms. This matches our current behavior on 64-bit platforms as
we already had ruled them out there as being too unreliable. Turns
out that affects 32-bit platforms, too.

One NULL pointer fix for SGI UV.

Two minor build fixes, one of which only affects icc and the other
which affects icc and future versions or nonstandard default settings
of gcc.

-Networking pull request from David Miller :

1) Revert CHECKSUM_COMPLETE optimization in pskb_trim_rcsum(), I can’t figure
out why it breaks things.

2) Fix comparison in netfilter ipset’s hash_netnet4_data_equal(), it was
basically doing “x == x”, from Dave Jones.

3) Freescale FEC driver was DMA mapping the wrong number of bytes, from
Sebastian Siewior.

4) Blackhole and prohibit routes in ipv6 were not doing the right thing
because their ->input and ->output methods were not being assigned
correctly. Now they behave properly like their ipv4 counterparts.
From Kamala R.

5) Several drivers advertise the NETIF_F_FRAGLIST capability, but really
do not support this feature and will send garbage packets if fed
fraglist SKBs. From Eric Dumazet.

6) Fix long standing user triggerable BUG_ON over loopback in RDS
protocol stack, from Venkat Venkatsubra.

7) Several not so common code paths can potentially try to invoke packet
scheduler actions that might be NULL without checking. Shore things
up by either 1) defining a method as mandatory and erroring on
registration if that method is NULL 2) defininig a method as optional
and the registration function hooks up a default implementation when
NULL is seen. From Jamal Hadi Salim.

8) Fix fragment detection in xen-natback driver, from Paul Durrant.

9) Kill dangling enter_memory_pressure method in cg_proto ops, from
Eric W. Biederman.

10) SKBs that traverse namespaces should have their local_df cleared,
from Hannes Frederic Sowa.

11) IOCB file position is not being updated by macvtap_aio_read() and
tun_chr_aio_read(). From Zhi Yong Wu.

12) Don’t free virtio_net netdev before releasing all of the NAPI
instances. From Andrey Vagin.

13) Procfs entry leak in xt_hashlimit, from Sergey Popovich.

14) IPv6 routes that are no cached routes should not count against the
garbage collection limits. We had this almost right, but were
missing handling addrconf generated routes properly. From Hannes
Frederic Sowa.

15) fib{4,6}_rule_suppress() have to consider potentially seeing NULL
route info when they are called, from Stefan Tomanek.

16) TUN and MACVTAP have had truncated packet signalling for some time,
fix from Jason Wang.

17) Fix use after frrr in __udp4_lib_rcv(), from Eric Dumazet.

18) xen-netback does not interpret the NAPI budget properly for TX work,
fix from Paul Durrant.

-Linux kernel 3.13-rc4 is here :

So I delayed this a couple of days to get back to my normal Sunday
release schedule, but I’m not entirely happy with the result. Things
aren’t calming down the way they should be, and -rc4 is bigger than
previous rc’s. And I don’t think I can just blame the two extra days.

Anyway, what that means from a practical standpoint is that I’m going
to be *very* grumpy at anybody who sends me unnecessary crap. If it’s
not regression or marked for stable, then just don’t send it to me.
Because you *will* be called names if you can’t follow those simple
rules. Comprende?

Anyway, the bulk of changes for rc4 is drivers (notably networking and
gpu, but there’s usb, input and media driver updates too). Aside from
that, there are the usual arch updates (mainly ARM) and the slightly
less usual selinux updates. And generic networking, with some random
stuff thrown in for good measure. The shortlog isn’t very short, but
it’s appended for your reading pleasure.

We’re obviously heading for the holiday season, and I’m really hoping
that will help calm things down too for the rest of the release
candidates…

kernel news – 13.12.2013

-Takashi Iwai and sound :

Still a slightly high amount of changes than wished, but they are all
good regression and/or device-specific fixes. Majority of commits are
for HD-audio, an HDMI ctl index fix that hits old graphics boards,
regression fixes for AD codecs and a few quirks. Other than that, two
major fixes are included: a 64bit ABI fix for compress offload, and
64bit dma_addr_t truncation fix, which had hit on PAE kernels.

-Vinod Koul has slave-dma fixes :

Here is the common fixes PULL for dmaengine. Dan has been working on fixing the
build issues in bunch of drivers. Here we have one fixing s3c24xx-dma, along
with fix from Russell on pl08x. Also we have Kuninori rcar dma fixes. The
s3c24xx-dma which was added in last merge window missed updates to usage of
DMA_COMPLETE so converting the last driver

-MTD fixes from Brian Norris :

Two MTD fixes, for the pxa3xx-nand driver:

– This driver was not ready to fully support Armada 370 NAND, with
particularly notable problems seen on flash with 2KB page sizes. This
“compatible” entry really should have been held back until 3.14 or
later.

– Fix a bug seen in rare cases on the error path of a failed probe attempt,
where we free unallocated DMA resources

-Nicolas Ferre has additions to at91 :

This is a “drivers” series that adds Device Tree support to
Atmel crypto drivers (AES/[T]DES/SHA). As the DT part of this
addition is in at91-3.14-dt I thought it would be simpler to take
this series through arm-soc. I asked and got Herbert’s blessing.

The Device Tree entries documented in these patches are very simple
and only declare the reg/irq values and the link to DMA.

-Mark Brown has some regulator fixes :

A small set of driver fixes plus one larger core change which changes
the way we check to see if we’re using DT so that there aren’t any races
between deciding we’re using DT and the regulator subsystem noticing.
This makes the new support for substituting a dummy regulator and
optional regulators work a lot better on DT systems since it ensures
that we don’t trigger probe deferral when we shouldn’t which was causing
bugs in clients.

kernel news – 12.12.2013

-Greg Kroah-Hartman announces kernels 3.4.74, 3.10.24 and 3.12.5 .

-Olof Johansson announces ARM SoC updates for -rc :

Another week, another batch of fixes.

Again, OMAP regressions due to move to DT is the bulk of the changes here,
but this should be the last of it for 3.13. There are also a handful of
OMAP hwmod changes (power management, reset handling) for USB on OMAP3
that fixes some longish-standing bugs around USB resets.

There are a couple of other changes that also add up line count a bit:
One is a long-standing bug with the keyboard layout on one of the
PXA platforms. The other is a fix for highbank that moves their
power-off/reset button handling to be done in-kernel since relying on
userspace to handle it was fragile and awkward.

kernel news – 09.12.2013

-Tracing updates from Steven Rostedt :

A regression showed up that there’s a large delay when enabling
all events. This was prevalent when FTRACE_SELFTEST was enabled which
enables all events several times, and caused the system bootup to
pause for over a minute.

This was tracked down to an addition of a synchronize_sched() performed
when system call tracepoints are unregistered.

The synchronize_sched() is needed between the unregistering of the
system call tracepoint and a deletion of a tracing instance buffer.
But placing the synchronize_sched() in the unreg of *every* system call
tracepoint is a bit overboard. A single synchronize_sched() before
the deletion of the instance is sufficient.

-Linus Torvalds announces 3.13-rc3 :

.. I’m still on a Friday release schedule, although I hope that
changes soon – the reason I didn’t drag this one out to Sunday is that
it’s already big enough, and I’ll wait until things start calming
down.

Which they really should, at this point. Hint hint. I’ll start
shouting at people for sending me stuff that isn’t appropriate as
we’re starting to get later into the release candidates.

That said, it’s not like rc3 is somehow unmanageably large or that
anything particularly scary has happened. I’d have *liked* for it to
be smaller, but I always do.. And nothing particularly nasty stands
out here.

The bulk here is drivers (net, scsi, sound, crypto..) and ARM DT
stuff, but there’s the usual randon stuff too, with arch updates
(pa-risc, more ARM, x86) and some filesystem and networking updates.

-Greg Kroah-Hartman has USB fixes :

Nothing major, but we seem to have an argument about a XHCI fix, so I’m not
including a revert that Sarah requested, because that breaks a USB network
driver, and I can’t revert the USB network driver fix without reintroducing
other bugs that it fixed. So as it is, everything should now be
working. Worse case, I can revert the XHCI fix before 3.13-final is
out, but it seems to work well here with my testing, so all should be
good.

-Greg also has updates for char/misc, staging and TTY/serial.

-Dmirty Torokhov has input updates :

[…]an update to
ALPS to support devices on Dell XT2 (hopefully working better this time
around and although it is largish it should not affect any other ALPS
devices) and a tiny update to Elantech driver to support newer devices
as well. Also a coupe of new input event codes have been defined.

-Greg KH also announces kernels 3.4.73, 3.10.23 and 3.12.4 .

-Dave Airlie and DRM :

this is probably a bit big, but just because I fell behind last week and
didn’t get to doing any pulls, so stuff backed up behind me, I actually
should have sent this for -rc3 but failed to even manage that,

So this has radeon, intel, nouveau, vmware, exynos and tegra fixes in it,
and the line count isn’t all the bad in the end.

kernel news – 06.12.2013

-Takashi Iwai has sound fixes :

A usual pattern of half ASoC and half HD-audio fixes, although
HD-audio fixups have more volumes, in addition to a couple of
trivial fixes. Nothing to worry much is found here.

For ASoC side: a few fixes for PCM rate constraints calculations,
regmap byte-order fix, the rest driver specific fixes (atmel, fsl,
omap, kirkwood, wm codecs).

For HD-audio: Dell headset and mono out fix, ELD update in polling
mode, ALC283 Chromebook fixes, a few fixes for old AD codecs and
MBA2,1 regression fix.

-Daniel Lezcano and clocksource/clockevents :

* Axel Lin removed the bcm_timer_ids which are no longer used due to the conversion to clksrc-of and added a missing dependency on CLKSRC_MMIO in the Kconfig for the time-efm32.

* Dinh Nguyen fixed read_sched_clock to return the right value for the dw_apb_timer.

* Ezequiel Garcia registered the sched clock after the counter, thus preventing time jump in the traces for the armada-370-xp.

* Marc Zyngier stopped the timer before enabling the irq in order to prevent it to be fired before the clockevent is registered for the sunxi.

* Thierry Reding removed a of_node_put in clksrc-of because the reference is not held.

-NFS client fixes from Trond Myklebust :

– Stable fix for a NFSv4.1 delegation and state recovery deadlock
– Stable fix for a loop on irrecoverable errors when returning delegations
– Fix a 3-way deadlock between layoutreturn, open, and state recovery
– Update the MAINTAINERS file with contact information for Trond Myklebust
– Close needs to handle NFS4ERR_ADMIN_REVOKED
– Enabling v4.2 should not recompile nfsd and lockd
– Fix a couple of compile warnings

-John W. Linville and a wireless pull request :

For the mac80211 bits, Johannes says:

“For now I have various fixes all over, mostly for issues introduced in
relatively recent patches. There’s no real pattern to it. Some of the
issues like go back longer, but still seemed 3.13 material.”

And…

“These are just two patches disabling the broken CSA code. Once this
goes into your tree I’ll merge it into mac80211-next and revert there
(since we fixed the bugs there).”

For the iwlwifi bits, Emmanuel says:

“I have here a few fixes for BT Coex. One of them is a NULL pointer
dereference. Another one avoids to enable a feature that can make the
firmware unhappy since the firmware isn’t ready for it yet. WE also
avoid a WARNING that can be triggered upon association in not-so-bad
cases even if the association succeeded. We add support for new NICs
(not yet on the market) and bump the API so that 3.13 will be able to
work with the new firmware that will be out soon hopefully.
I also have a boundary check from Johannes.”

In addition to those…

– Arend van Spriel fixes a brcmfmac problem that could use an
uninitialized variable in an error path.

– Borislav Petkov fixes a Kconfig-based build breakage problem for
brcmsmac.

– Michal Nazarewicz fixes a couple of NULL pointer dereference problems
in ath9k and wcn36xx.

– Sujith Manoharan fixes a couple of ath9k problems related to
incorrect interpretation of EEPROM configuration data.

– Ujjal Roy fixes a memory leak in mwifiex.

-Jens Axboe has block fixes :

A small collection of fixes for the current series. It contains:

– A fix for a use-after-free of a request in blk-mq. From Ming Lei.

– A fix for a blk-mq bug that could attempt to dereference a NULL rq if
allocation failed.

– Two xen-blkfront small fixes.

– Cleanup of submit_bio_wait() type uses in the kernel, unifying that.
From Kent.

– A fix for 32-bit blkg_rwstat reading. I apologize for this one looking
mangled in the shortlog, it’s entirely my fault for missing an empty
line between the description and body of the text.

kernel news – 05.12.2013

-Greg KH announces kernels 3.4.72, 3.10.22 and 3.12.3 .

-H. Peter Anvin announces x86 and EFI changes :

The by far biggest change is the change to hold off the deletion of a
sysfs entry while a backend scan is in progress. This is to avoid
calling kmemdup() while under a spinlock.

The other major change is for each entry in the EFI pstore backend to
get a unique identifier, as required by the pstore filesystem proper.

The other changes are a fix to the recent consolidation and
optimization of using “asm goto” with read-modify-write operation,
which broke the bitops; specifically in such a way that we could end
up generating invalid code.

Finally, a build hack to make sure we compile with -mno-sse. icc, and
most likely future versions of gcc, can generate SSE instructions
unless we tell it not to.

-Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo has perf/core improvements and fixes :

Backport libtraceevent plugin support from trace-cmd repository, with
plugins for jbd2, hrtimer, kmem, kvm, mac80211, sched_switch, function,
xen, scsi, cfg80211. From Jiri Olsa.

. Retain bfd reference to lookup source line numbers, greatly optimizing, among
other use cases, ‘perf report -s srcline’, from Adrian Hunter.

. Do not disable source line lookup just because of 1 failure, from Adrian Hunter.

. Fix random fd closing with no libelf, from Adrian Hunter.

. Do not call perf_event__preprocess_sample() twice in ‘perf script,
from Adrian Hunter.

. Several ‘perf kvm’ man page corrections, from Dongsheng Yang.

kernel news – 03.12.2013

-Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo has perf/core improvements and fixes :

. Honour -m option in ‘trace’, the tool was offering the option to
set the mmap size, but wasn’t using it when doing the actual mmap
on the events file descriptors, fix from Jiri Olsa.

. Correct the message in feature-libnuma checking, swowing the right
devel package names for various distros, from Dongsheng Yang.

. Polish ‘readn’ function and introduce its counterpart, ‘writen’, from
Jiri Olsa.

. Start moving timechart state from global variables to a ‘perf_tool’ derived
‘timechart’ struct.

-Thomas Gleixner has timer fixes for 3.13 :

– timekeeping: Cure a subtle drift issue on GENERIC_TIME_VSYSCALL_OLD
– nohz: Make CONFIG_NO_HZ=n and nohz=off command line option behave
the same way. Fixes a long standing load accounting wreckage.
– clocksource/ARM: Kconfig update to avoid ARM=n wreckage
– clocksource/ARM: Fixlets for the AT91 and SH clocksource/clockevents
– Trivial documentation update and kzalloc conversion from akpms pile

kernel news – 02.12.2013

-David Miller has a networking-related pull request :

Here is a pile of bug fixes that accumulated while I was in Europe.

1) In fixing kernel leaks to userspace during copying of socket
addresses, we broke a case that used to work, namely the user
providing a buffer larger than the in-kernel generic socket address
structure. This broke Ruby amongst other things. Fix from Dan
Carpenter.

2) Fix regression added by byte queue limit support in 8139cp driver,
from Yang Yingliang.

3) The addition of MSG_SENDPAGE_NOTLAST buggered up a few sendpage
implementations, they should just treat it the same as MSG_MORE.
Fix from Richard Weinberger and Shawn Landden.

4) Handle icmpv4 errors received on ipv6 SIT tunnels correctly,
from Oussama Ghorbel. In particular we should send an ICMPv6
unreachable in such situations.

5) Fix some regressions in the recent genetlink fixes, in particular
get the pmcraid driver to use the new safer interfaces correctly.
From Johannes Berg.

6) macvtap was converted to use a per-cpu set of statistics, but some
code was still bumping tx_dropped elsewhere. From Jason Wang.

7) Fix build failure of xen-netback due to missing include on some
architectures, from Andy Whitecroft.

8) macvtap double counts received packets in statistics, fix from
Vlad Yasevich.

9) Fix various cases of using *_STATS_BH() when *_STATS() is more
appropriate. From Eric Dumazet and Hannes Frederic Sowa.

10) Pktgen ipsec mode doesn’t update the ipv4 header length and
checksum properly after encapsulation. Fix from Fan Du.

kernel news – 30.11.2013

-Matt Fleming has some EFI urgent fixes :

* Avoid triggering a lockdep warning caused by calling kmemdup() while
holding a spinlock – Seiji Aguchi

* EFI framebuffer earlyprintk fix for off-by-one error that caused
console output to be split over two lines on some machines.

* Avoid pstore filename collisions by using a timestamp to calculate
the entry ID, thereby making them unique – Madper Xie

-Takashi Iwai has sound fixes :

Quite a few HD-Audio fixes, a WUSB audio fix and a fix for FireWire
audio. The HD-audio part contains a couple of fixes for the generic
parser, and these are the only intrusive fixes. The rest are mostly
device-specific fixes.

-Tejun Heo has cgroup, libata and workqueue fixes for -rc1 :

Fixes for three issues.

* cgroup destruction path could swamp system_wq possibly leading to
deadlock. This actually seems to happen in the wild with memcg
because memcg destruction path adds nested dependency on system_wq.
Resolved by isolating cgroup destruction work items on its dedicated
workqueue.

* Possible locking context deadlock through seqcount reported by
lockdep.

* Memory leak under certain conditions.
#########################################
libata device removal path was removing parent device node before its
child, which is mostly harmless but triggers warning after recent
sysfs changes. Rafael’s patch fixes the order.

Other than that, minor controller-specific fixes and device ID
additions.
##########################################
This pull request contains one important fix. The NUMA supported
added a while back broke ordering guarantee on ordered workqueues. It
was enforced by having single frontend interface with @max_active == 1
but the NUMA support puts multiple interfaces on unbound workqueues on
NUMA machines thus breaking the ordered guarantee. This is fixed by
disabling NUMA support on ordered workqueues.

The above and a couple other patches were sitting in for-3.12-fixes
but I forgot to push that out, so they ended up waiting a bit too
long. My aplogies.

Other fixes are minor.

-Catalin Marinas has arm64 fixes for -rc :

Fixes:
– Remove preempt_count modifications in the arm64 IRQ handling code
since that’s already dealt with in generic irq_enter/irq_exit
– PTE_PROT_NONE bit moved higher up to avoid overlapping with the
hardware bits (for PROT_NONE mappings which are pte_present)
– Big-endian fixes for ptrace support
– Asynchronous aborts unmasking while in the kernel
– pgprot_writecombine() change to create Normal NonCacheable memory
rather than Device GRE

-Greg KH announnces kernels 3.11.10 (last one of the 3.11 series), 3.4.71,
3.10.21 and 3.12.2 .

-Linus Torvalds announces 3.13-rc2:

We’re back on the normal weekly schedule, although I’m planning on
eventually slipping back to a Sunday release schedule. In the
meantime, it’s like Xmas every Friday! Or, perhaps more appropriately
for the date, Hanukkah.

Anyway, everything looks normal for an -rc2. Nothing hugely alarming,
lots of small fixes all over, and the statistics look normal too (just
over half drivers, the rest is one third arch updates, one third
Documentation, and one third misc – filesystems, kernel, crypto..)

Nothing particularly stands out. If you thought rc1 is too scary to
test, jump on in now. It’s all good,

kernel news – 28.11.2013

-Rafael J. Wysocki has ACPI and PM updates :

– Fix for a recent regression in the Tegra cpufreq driver causing
excess error messages to be printed from Stephen Warren.

– ACPI-based device hotplug fix to prevent conflicting notify handlers
from being installed for PCI host bridge objects. From Toshi Kani.

– ACPICA update to upstream version 20131115. This contains bug fixes
mostly (loop termination fix for the get AML length function, fixes
related to namespace node removal and debug output). From Bob Moore,
Tomasz Nowicki and Lv Zheng.

– Removal of incorrect inclusions of internal ACPICA header files by
non-ACPICA code from Lv Zheng.

– Fixes for the ACPI sysfs interface exposing tables to user space
from Daisuke Hatayama and Jeremy Compostella.

– Assorted ACPI and cpufreq cleanups from Sachin Kamat and Al Stone.

– cpupower tool fix and man page from Thomas Renninger.

-Jiri Kosina and HID :

– fix compat ioctl leak in uhid, by David Herrmann
– fix scheduling in atomic context (causing actual lockups in real world)
in hid-sony driver, by Sven Eckelmann
– revert patch introducing VID/PID conflict, by Jiri Kosina
– support from various new device IDs by Benjamin Tissoires and KaiChung
Cheng

-Greg Kroah-Hartman has driver core/sysfs and TTY serial fixes :

Here are 3 patches for sysfs issues that have been reported. Well, 1
patch really, the first one is reverted as it’s not really needed (the
correct fix is coming in through the different driver subsystems
instead.) But that 1 sysfs fix is needed, so this is still a good thing
to pull in now.
###############################################
Here are some tty/serial driver fixes for reported issues in 3.13-rc2.

The n_gsm “fix” was reverted as it was found to not be correct.
Hopefully this will be resolved in a future pull request, but as there’s
really only one user of this line setting, it’s not a big deal…