Kernel Traffic #311 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:57:44 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Kernel Traffic #311 For 5 Jun
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 29 Apr - 7 May (55 Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm1 Released
posts)
2. 30 Apr - 6 May (51 Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm2 Released; Andrew Not
posts) Considering git For -mm Tree
3. 4 May - 6 May (7 JFS Migrates To git; Developers Consider git
posts) Work-Flow
4. 6 May - 9 May (4 sg3_utils Version 1.14 Released
posts)
5. 6 May (1 Computone Intelliport Multiport Maintainership
post)
6. 6 May (1 sdparm Version 0.91 Released
post)
7. 6 May - 10 May (8 Linux 2.6.12-rc4 Released
posts)
8. 8 May (1 yaird Version 0.0.7 Released
post)
9. 10 May (2 New Automatic Kernel Tunables (AKT) Project
posts) Begun
10. 11 May (4 Linux 2.6.11.9 Released
posts)
11. 12 May (1 Linux 2.4.31-pre2 Released
post)
12. 12 May (2 libata Development Migrates From BitKeeper To
posts) git
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 1769 posts in 10MB.
There were 671 different contributers. 253 posted more than once. The average
length of each message was 95 lines.
The top posters of the The top subjects of the week were:
week were:
75 posts in 386KB by
andrew morton 148 posts in 592KB for "[patch] private mounts"
55 posts in 212KB by 54 posts in 222KB for "[patch][rfc][0/4] infiniband
miklos szeredi userspace verbs implementation"
51 posts in 241KB by 50 posts in 344KB for "2.6.12-rc3-mm1"
adrian bunk 36 posts in 144KB for "/proc/cpuinfo format - arch
40 posts in 433KB by dependent!"
johannes stezenbach 29 posts in 114KB for "filesystem transactions api"
32 posts in 129KB by
timur tabi
Full Statistics generated by mboxstats version 2.8
1. Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm1 Released
29 Apr - 7 May (55 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.12-rc3-mm1"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Modems, Version Control
People: Andrew Morton, Ed Tomlinson, Valdis Kletnieks, Adrian Bunk
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm1, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.12-rc3/
2.6.12-rc3-mm1/
+ There's still a bug in the new timer code. If you think you hit it,
please revert
timers-fixes-improvements-fix.patch then
timers-fixes-improvements-smp_processor_id-fix.patch then
timers-fixes-improvements.patch
or, better, fix the bug.
+ If you use mpt-fusion, beware that the CONFIG_* names got changed - if
you blindly do `make oldconfig' you won't have any disks.
+ ia64 crashes when doing a PM poweroff. It's triggered by
properly-stop-devices-before-poweroff.patch but appears to be an ia64
bug.
+ Lots of bk trees were dropped and lots of git trees and patch serieses
were picked up. I think all the subsystem trees are here, but the bk
ones are starting to rot. As far as I can tell, no subsystem
maintainers are updating their bk trees (apart from acpi).
+ We're still miles away from 2.6.12. Lots of patches here, plus my
collection of bugs-post-2.6.11 is vast. I'll start working through them
again after 2.6.12-rc4 is available to testers.
Ed Tomlinson said:
If we stick with git it might make sense not to include a linux-patch.
cogito is quite fast to export using a commit id. Suspect some bandwidth
could be saved if you just stated the commit id that you based the mm patch
on.
In case anyone is wondering how build this from a cogito/git db... Find the
cogito announcement on lkml install and update cogito. Then folliw the
instructions in the README and download the kernel's db. Next search lkml
to find the commit id of rc3 (a2755a80f40e5794ddc20e00f781af9d6320fafb) and
verify you have it correct with:
cg-mkpatch a2755a80f40e5794ddc20e00f781af9d6320fafb
then export a tree with
cg-export ../12-3-1 a2755a80f40e5794ddc20e00f781af9d6320fafb
and cd over to the new dir and patch with mm and have fun.
Valdis Kletnieks replied:
I suspect that the majority of people who build -mm kernels build -mm
kernels because they *weren't* using BK to pull the trees they were
interested in.
Currently I can pull the pieces needed for a -mm kernel over a 56K modem
without *too* much pain, which means it's something I can easily do in an
evening. What would be the additional disk space requirements to store
enough of a git tree so I can pull the corresponding linus.patch myself,
and how long would it take to do at 56K? Also, what's the comparative CPU/
bandwidth hit on the server end for me to download the additional data if
it's bundled into Andrew's patch, versus me doing a 'git update' or
whatever the command is?
I'm suspecting that it's less strain overall to just include the 180K or so
that the bzip'ed linus.patch takes than to make everybody pull the data
needed to create their own linus.patch
There was some discussion of the pros and cons of git. At one point Adrian Bunk
said:
The reasons why I for one do not plan to use git are:
+ disk space
+ bandwidth (rsync traffic has to go through our masquerader, and the
amount of traffic through the masquerader I'm allowed to generate is
limited)
+ I do not need Linus' tree for anything. I'm working against -mm because
it's further in development.
Having said this, Andrew might perhaps be able to _additionally_ provide
-mm patches without linus.patch for the convenience of git users.
In the course of discussion, Andrew revealed a tidbit about how many folks were
downloading kernel releases. He said, "2.6.11-mm1.gz and 2.6.11-mm1.bz2 were
downloaded from kernel.org from 1729 unique IP addresses using http and from an
additional 321 unique IP addresses using ftp."
2. Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm2 Released; Andrew Not Considering git For -mm Tree
30 Apr - 6 May (51 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.12-rc3-mm2"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement
People: Andrew Morton, James Cloos, Mauricio Lin
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.12-rc3-mm2, saying it contained "various
fixes" against -mm1.
In the course of discussion, Mauricio Lin posted a patch against the stable
2.6.11.7 tree; and Andrew said, "Please don't generate patches for the mainline
kernel against the -stable tree. 2.6.11.7 is ancient - we've added 22MB of diff
since then."
Elsewhere, James Cloos asked, "Apologies if this has already been asked and I
missed it, but do you expect to transition to exporting your working tree via
git, now that licensing concerns are not part of the equation?" Andrew replied:
Nope. At any particular point in time the tree I have here has lots of
problems - failing to compile, crashing, etc. It takes me from four hours
to three days just to get a halfway-respectable release out the door.
So there's no way in which I'd want to make the tree-of-the-minute
externally available - it would muck people around too much and would cause
me to get a ton of email about stuff which I'd probably already fixed.
That, plus a traditional SCM is an inappropriate format for something like
-mm. This tree is a series of patches against Linus's tree - that's how it
is developed, tested and sent upstream. Patches get added, dropped,
reordered and merged at any time. It's hard to explain - you need to have
used patch-scripts or quilt for a while...
Prematurely flattening all this into an SCM view is a fairly pointless
exercise - the only reason for doing it would be for people to be able to
download it. And they can do that by grabbing the single diff anyway. I
suppose someone might start offering git -mm trees sometime, as an
alternative to grabbing the diff file.
3. JFS Migrates To git; Developers Consider git Work-Flow
4 May - 6 May (7 posts) Archive Link: "[git pull] jfs update"
Topics: FS: JFS
People: Dave Kleikamp, Jeff Garzik, Linus Torvalds
Dave Kleikamp took a stab at converting his JFS development into a git
repository. He said:
I think I've got this set up right. I have created a HEAD-for-linus and
HEAD-for-mm in the same git repo.
I've got one patch that I'd like in 2.6.12, and I've got some cleanups that
can just stay in -mm for now.
Please pull from
rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/shaggy/jfs-2.6.git/
HEAD-for-linus
Linus Torvalds adjusted his scripts to be able to handle a 'HEAD-for-linus'
instead of just a 'HEAD', then pulled Dave's changes and added them to his own
tree.
Jeff Garzik remarked, "FWIW I'm definitely interested in some sort of pull
mechanism where I can say "pull from foo://.../libata-2.6.git/HEAD-for-linus"
also. With my netdev-2.6 queue, and given git's intrinsic abilities, I am
planning to keep all ~30 or so mini-branches in a single git tree. When I am
ready to push some upstream, I can do a HEAD-for-linus merge tree, that merges
selected branches." Linus replied:
I already changed my scripts to be able to do that. They default to HEAD,
but if you tell them something else, they'll get that instead.
So I'd do a
git-pull-script foo://.../libata-2.6.git/ HEAD-for-linus
except right now my pull script only works with rsync or ssh, not http.
I'll fix that up asap.
4. sg3_utils Version 1.14 Released
6 May - 9 May (4 posts) Archive Link: "[Announce] sg3_utils-1.14 available"
Topics: Disks: SCSI, Ioctls
People: Douglas Gilbert
Douglas Gilbert said:
sg3_utils is a package of command line utilities for sending SCSI commands
to devices. This package targets the lk 2.6 and lk 2.4 series. In the lk
2.6 series these utilities (except sgp_dd) can be used with any devices
that support the SG_IO ioctl.
This version adds sg_rmsn to read media serial number(s). The tarball
contains a spec file for building rpms. That spec file builds two binary
rpms: sg3_utils and libsgutils. In the future my plan is to make other
utilities such as sdparm depend on libsgutils. See CHANGELOG for other
changes.
A tarball, rpm and deb can be found on (see table 2): http://www.torque.net
/sg
For an overview of sg3_utils see this page: http://www.torque.net/sg/
u_index.html
The sg_dd utility has its own page at: http://www.torque.net/sg/sg_dd.html
A changelog can be found at: http://www.torque.net/sg/p/sg3_utils.CHANGELOG
5. Computone Intelliport Multiport Maintainership
6 May (1 post) Archive Link: "[2.6 patch] update Computone MAINTAINERS entry"
Topics: MAINTAINERS File
People: Adrian Bunk, Michael H. Warfield
Adrian Bunk posted a patch updating the MAINTAINERS file, to clarify that the
Computone Intelliport Multiport card was not orphaned as listed, but was still
maintained by Michael H. Warfield. Adrian's patch also removed a defunct
mailing list address from that entry.
6. sdparm Version 0.91 Released
6 May (1 post) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] sdparm 0.91"
Topics: Disks: IDE, Disks: SCSI
People: Douglas Gilbert, Jeff Garzik
Douglas Gilbert said:
sdparm is a command line utility designed to get and set SCSI disk
parameters (cf hdparm for ATA disks). More generally it gets and sets mode
page information on SCSI devices or devices that use a SCSI command set
(e.g. CD/DVD drives (any transport) and SCSI tape drives). It also can list
device identification descriptors from VPD pages.
For more information and downloads (tarball, rpms and deb packages) see:
http://www.torque.net/sg/sdparm.html
This utility overlaps in functionality somewhat with blktool by Jeff
Garzik.
sdparm 0.90 was the original version released. ChangeLog for sdparm-0.91
[20050506]
+ if lk 2.4 detected, map primary SCSI node to sg node for ease of use
+ add support for '--inquiry' (VPD pages, defaults to device
identification)
+ decode format and rigid disk mode pages (sbc2) [both pages are obsolete
but common]
7. Linux 2.6.12-rc4 Released
6 May - 10 May (8 posts) Archive Link: "Linux v2.6.12-rc4"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Spam, User-Mode Linux
People: Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 2.6.12-rc4, saying:
git trees, patches, tar-balls, you name it. I've still not made a shortlog
script, and right now I'm too tired to generate the shortlog from the full
log, so you can either find it all in the git archives, or just parse down
the full log in ChangeLog-2.6.12-rc4 to a more manageable format.
Both the full log and the diffstat are too big for the mailing list to
accept, so I'll not spam your mailboxes.
But you could just use gitweb, in case you haven't noticed already. So
point your browsers at http://www.kernel.org/git and see what you find out
that way.
What's changed? ia64, arm, UML, ppc64, jfs, cifs updates. And drivers. And
tons of small stuff all over.
Me, I'm off for a week of vacationing. Flee the country, like I usually do
after releases. Leave you suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgentle people to test it all
out.
Coywolf Qi Hunt posted a link to an LXRed 2.6.12-rc4 (http://sosdg.org/~coywolf
/lxr/source/) page.
8. yaird Version 0.0.7 Released
8 May (1 post) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] yaird 0.0.7, a mkinitrd based on
hotplug concepts"
Topics: Advanced Encryption Standard, FS: NFS, Hot-Plugging
People: Erik van Konijnenburg
Erik van Konijnenburg said:
Version 0.0.7 of yaird is now available at:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ekonijn/yaird/yaird-0.0.7.tar.gz
Yaird is a proof of concept perl rewrite of mkinitrd. It aims to reliably
identify the necessary modules by using the same algorithms as hotplug, and
comes with a template system to to tune the tool for different
distributions and experiment with different image layouts. It requires a
2.6 kernel with hotplug. There is a paper discussing it at:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ekonijn/yaird/yaird.html
Summary of user visible changes:
+ Support cryptsetup-luks (Based on a patch by Dick Middleton)
+ Bugfixes
o cryptsetup, handle multiple hard links to same block special dev
o cryptsetup, recognise keyword 'none' in /etc/crypttab
o cryptsetup, keyfile check now for both luks and plain
o cryptsetup, missing module for aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
o Fedora template: dash was used instead of ash
On top of the todo list are now:
+ support NFS devices
+ support loopback devices
9. New Automatic Kernel Tunables (AKT) Project Begun
10 May (2 posts) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] Automatic Kernel Tunables"
Topics: Backward Compatibility, FS: procfs, FS: sysfs, Ottawa Linux Symposium
People: Derbey Nadia, Joel Schopp
Derbey Nadia said:
I'm pleased to announce a new project related to Linux kernel tunables. Any
comment you have will be welcome!
Automatic Kernel Tunables Project
The AKT (Automatic Kernel Tunables) project aims at:
1. providing a standard API to unify the various ways Linux developers
have to access kernel tunables, system information, resource
consumptions: today, installation scripts, supervision scripts and more
generally applications are facing the following issues:
o There are quite multiple ways of accessing the kernel configuration
and tunables: /procfs, /sysfs, sysconf(), rlimit(), etc...,
o The associated executables are rarely portable, since they require
to get, set and change values that are represented by objects that
may change from distribution to distribution, or from one release
to the other inside the same distribution.
This raises the need for a standard, well defined API to manipulate the
kernel configuration and tunables for software products to relay on.
This API will be built on top of the existing mechanisms: it will
"hide" them instead of replacing them, in order not to break backward
compatibility.
2. making the kernel able to automatically tune the resources as it sees
appropriate. This is a much more complicated feature that will be
considered as a second step for the project
A design about 1st point will be available soon at http://
akt.sourceforge.net/. Everything related to this project will be dropped at
this url, and further discussions will take place in the dedicated project
mailing lists at SF.
Joel Schopp replied, "You might be interested in the work Jacob Moilanen has
been doing with genetic algorithm tuning of I/O and CPU schedulers. Google will
probably turn up some discussion on this. Also, he is scheduled to give a
presentation and paper on this topic at the Ottawa Linux Symposium in July."
10. Linux 2.6.11.9 Released
11 May (4 posts) Archive Link: "Linux 2.6.11.9"
Topics: FS: sysfs, I2C, Version Control
People: Greg KH, Michal Schmidt, Chris Wright, Jean Delvare
Greg KH announced Linux 2.6.11.9, saying:
Due to a recently announced security issue with the current kernel, we (the
-stable team) are announcing the release of the 2.6.11.9 kernel. It
contains:
+ a fix for the posted problem
+ a revert of a patch in the last release that caused issues with
partitions (the bk changelog shows this as a i2c issue, but that is a
mistake as you can see from the real patch.)
+ addition of the SecurityBugs documentation
+ another security related fix that is already in 2.6.12-rc4.
The diffstat and short summary of the fixes are below.
I'll also be replying to this message with a copy of the patch between
2.6.11.8 and 2.6.11.9, as it is small enough to do so.
One of the fixes in this release was an I2C SysFS file permission fix from Jean
Delvare, and Michal Schmidt asked, "This was already in 2.6.11.8, wasn't it?"
Chris Wright replied, "Yes. There was a mixup, and the msdos partitions patch
got mixed with this one (in 2.6.11.8). So that whole cset was backed out, and
this fix was reapplied in 2.6.11.9."
11. Linux 2.4.31-pre2 Released
12 May (1 post) Archive Link: "Linux 2.4.31-pre2"
People: Marcelo Tosatti
Marcelo Tosatti announced Linux 2.4.31-pre2, saying:
Here goes 2.4.31-pre2.
It contains a small number of changes, most notably the elf_core_dump flaw
fix (CAN-2005-1263).
Please refer to -hf tree for the standalone patch.
http://linux.exosec.net/kernel/2.4-hf/
12. libata Development Migrates From BitKeeper To git
12 May (2 posts) Archive Link: "Experimental git repositories available for
SATA"
Topics: Ioctls, Serial ATA, Version Control
People: Jeff Garzik
Jeff Garzik said:
I have finally gotten around to getting 2.6.x libata development moved over
from BitKeeper to git.
The "for Linus/Andrew" repository is libata-2.6.git, available at rsync://
rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jgarzik/libata-2.6.git/
The new libata-dev repository is libata-dev.git, available at rsync://
rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jgarzik/libata-dev.git/
A word about these repositories. I don't use any SCM besides git itself.
libata-2.6.git appears as you would expect: .git/HEAD points to refs/heads/
master, which is the top-of-tree, and contains patches destined for
upstream ASAP.
libata-dev.git is a bit different, as it contains multiple branches:
>[jgarzik@pretzel libata-dev]$ ls .git/refs/heads/
>adma atapi-enable iomap pdc2027x
>adma-mwi bridge-detect iomap-step1 pdc20619
>ahci-atapi chs-support master promise-sata-pata
>ahci-msi ioctl-get-identity passthru sil24
I use the attached 'git-switch-tree' script to update the working directory
to reflect the desired branch.
As soon as I am comfortable with git merging, I will create an 'ALL'
branch, which contains all of these trees, merged together properly.
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