Kernel Traffic #315 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:27:01 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Kernel Traffic #315 For 12 Jun
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 1 Jun - 5 Jun (20 Linux 2.6.12-rc5-mm2 Released; -mm Tree To Be
posts) Available As git Repository
2. 2 Jun - 7 Jun (8 New Automated Testing Scripts For Official And
posts) Development Kernel Releases
3. 3 Jun (1 sdparm Version 0.93 Released
post)
4. 3 Jun - 9 Jun (37 An ETA For 2.6.12
posts)
5. 3 Jun - 7 Jun (11 Some Developers Appraise The w.x.y.z Series
posts)
6. 4 Jun (6 New Short Changelog Listing Script For git
posts)
7. 6 Jun (1 sg3_utils (SCSI Command Utilities) Version 1.15
post) Released
8. 6 Jun - 9 Jun (39 Linux 2.6.12-rc6 Released; Some Discussion Of
posts) Patch Submission Policies
9. 7 Jun (12 Real-Time Preemption Patch Version 0.7.47-20
posts) Released
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 1585 posts in 10MB.
There were 580 different contributers. 219 posted more than once. The average
length of each message was 130 lines.
The top posters of the The top subjects of the week were:
week were:
46 posts in 250KB by
ingo molnar 75 posts in 342KB for "ot] joerg schilling flames linux
45 posts in 241KB by on his blog"
jeff garzik 43 posts in 271KB for "[patch 3/4] new timeofday x86-64
39 posts in 186KB by arch specific changes (v. b1)"
[email protected] 39 posts in 143KB for "pci_enable_msi() for everyone?"
31 posts in 151KB by 38 posts in 220KB for "linux v2.6.12-rc6"
greg kh 37 posts in 147KB for "2.6.12?"
29 posts in 113KB by
greg kh
Full Statistics generated by mboxstats version 2.8
1. Linux 2.6.12-rc5-mm2 Released; -mm Tree To Be Available As git Repository
1 Jun - 5 Jun (20 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.12-rc5-mm2"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Version Control
People: Andrew Morton, Pavel Machek, Matthias Urlichs
Andrew Morton announced Linus 2.6.12-rc5-mm2, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.12-rc5/
2.6.12-rc5-mm2/
+ Dropped bk-acpi.patch. Too old, too much breakage.
+ A few more subsystem trees have moved to using git
+ There are a large number of patches here which fix patches which people
have already sent. A very large number. Are we getting a bit careless?
Pavel Machek asked:
Have you considered publishing -mm using git?
I guess your workflow prevents you from really using git, but even just
publishing releases using git would be great.
(Just now I'm tracking Linus with my tree. git makes that quite easy.
Tracking -mm is ugly manual work with diff, patch and ketchup...)
Matthias Urlichs replied:
I have written a script (actually a leftover from the mm-to-BK import days)
that pulls -mm into git as individual commits.
Andrew: Could you prefix the patches you pull from git with this line:
GIT SHA1-of-their-top-commit URL-of-their-archive
so that I can annotate the commits with an appropriate second parent?
If you never do any changes oon top of -mm, but only merge with it (or
them), then this works out quite well.
Pavel said, "Great! Would it be possible to export results of your script
somewhere? I guess you could get kernel.org account for this..." Matthias said
he'd be happy to set this up if someone would give him a kernel.org account.
2. New Automated Testing Scripts For Official And Development Kernel Releases
2 Jun - 7 Jun (8 posts) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] automated linux kernel
testing results"
Topics: Version Control
People: Martin J. Bligh, Jeff Garzik, Greg KH, Denis Vlasenko
Martin J. Bligh said:
OK, I've finally got this to the point where I can publish it.
http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mbligh/abat/
regression_matrix.html
Currently it builds and boots any mainline, -mjb, -mm kernel within about
15 minutes of release. runs dbench, tbench, kernbench, reaim and fsx.
Currently I'm using a 4x AMD64 box, a 16x NUMA-Q, 4x NUMA-Q, 32x x440
(ia32) PPC64 Power 5 LPAR, PPC64 Power 4 LPAR, and PPC64 Power 4 bare metal
system. The config files it uses are linked by the machine names in the
column headers.
Andrew, you should be able to see build failures in -mm more easily now ;-)
I'll work on some automatic email triggers to you if you want them.
Thanks to all the other IBM people who've worked on the ABAT test system
that this stuff relies on - too many to list, but especially Andy, Adam,
and Enrique, who have fixed endless bugs, and put up with my incessant
bitching about it all not working as it should ;-)
It will do various other bits and pieces ... more profiling, more tests,
it'll do patches, etc as well. I don't want to push much volume up to
kernel.org (I just copy a small subset of the generated files right now),
but there are more runs queued with some fixup patches on top of -mm tree,
for example. It did also do -bk and -git nightly builds, they're not in
this matrix, but I'll add them back soon.
Andrew, if you want some other test added to the mix, please let me know
... though theoretically we can do multi-machine tests (eg networked), I
want to stick with single-machine ones for now. There's a huge pile of
tests we intend to add ... but I thought I'd throw the general results
mechanism out there for people to look at.
Clicking on the failure ones error codes should take you to somewhere
vaguely helpful to diagnose it. Clicking on the job number just below that
takes you to the info I'm publishing right now, which should include perf
results and profiles, etc. I'll add graphs, etc later, comparing
performance across kernels (I have them ... just not automated).
Greg KH was very impressed, and asked if this could be extended to also test
the git nightly snapshots. Also, he asked if the -stable (w.x.y.z) tree could
be included. Martin replied, "It does do both. I just didn't pull in all the
historical data, I just repopulated the external set with a brief snapshot (I
have way more internally, but it has some crap unpublishable benchmarks in it).
If you look at the latest rev, about 3 up it has 2.6.12-rc5-git7, and I think
I've fixed it to monitor for new ones automatically now. I guess we'll see if
it worked in the morning ;-)"
Denis Vlasenko was also very impressed with Martin's (and the rest of the
contributors' work).
At one point, Martin said:
there's performance graphs out there for tbench, dbench, kernbench, and
reaim now.
http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mbligh/abat/perf/
perf_matrix.html
-mm seems to be rather sucky on kernbench recently, I'll have a drill down
into why, and try to send out some more data later on. The vertical bars on
the kernbench graph are std deviation between sets of runs (a rough error
margin).
Jeff Garzik replied, "Very nice. All this stuff is helpful, thanks much."
3. sdparm Version 0.93 Released
3 Jun (1 post) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] sdparm 0.93"
Topics: Disks: IDE, Disks: SCSI
People: Douglas Gilbert
Douglas Gilbert said:
sdparm is a command line utility designed to get and set SCSI device
parameters (cf hdparm for ATA disks). Apart from SCSI devices (e.g. disks,
tapes and enclosures) sdparm can be used on any device that uses a SCSI
command set (e.g. CD/DVD drives). sdparm also can list VPD pages including
the device identification page.
The major addition in version 0.93 is transport protocol specific modes
pages for FCP, SPI and SAS.
For more information and downloads see: http://www.torque.net/sg/
sdparm.html
ChangeLog: http://www.torque.net/sg/p/sdparm.ChangeLog
4. An ETA For 2.6.12
3 Jun - 9 Jun (37 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.12?"
Topics: Framebuffer, Power Management: ACPI, USB
People: Andrew Morton, Dave Jones, Jeff Garzik
Jeff Garzik asked if a 2.6.12 release was in the works for the near future, and
Andrew Morton replied:
Current plan is -rc6 in a few days, 2.6.12 a week after that.
My things-to-worry-about folder still has 244 entries. Nobody seems to care
much. Poor me.
Lots of USB problems, quite a few input problems. fbdev, ACPI, ATAPI. All
the usual suspects.
Jeff was happy to hear this plan, and offered some help on some of Andrew's
remaining issues. A bunch of other folks also tackled the remaining issues, but
Dave Jones also remarked that of the items Andrew had listed, "There's quite a
few in there judging by the looks of the subjects that aren't worth holding up
the release imo. Will the world end if we dont ship 2.6.12 with support for
Geode optimisation for eg ?"
5. Some Developers Appraise The w.x.y.z Series
3 Jun - 7 Jun (11 posts) Archive Link: "Stable 2.6.x.y kernel series..."
People: Jeff Garzik, Alan Cox
Jeff Garzik said, "I think the stable 2.6.x.y kernel series is working out
quite well. Kudos to the [email protected] team for a job well done. The
2.6.x.y series is definitely filling a needed niche." Szonyi Calin said he
didn't believe the 2.6 tree could be made stable by just the addition of a few
small patches, as the w.x.y.z tree seemed to be. But Szonyi did acknowledge
that the tree did seem to be stabler than regular 2.6. But Alan Cox agreed
wholeheartedly with Jeff's appraisal, saying, "its been conservative enough
that not only does it stay pretty stable (one partition slip-up so far is very
good indeed) its small enough that most of the add on patches people use aren't
breaking against it either. Even the -ac set just keeps applying barring
makefile just fine so its saved me a ton of work."
6. New Short Changelog Listing Script For git
4 Jun (6 posts) Archive Link: "git-shortlog script"
Topics: Version Control
People: Jeff Garzik, Linus Torvalds
Jeff Garzik said:
Attached is the 'git-shortlog' script I whipped up, to mimic the shortlog
script that was used back in the BitKeeper days.
shortlog reads a changelog in the 'git-whatchanged' format, such as
git-whatchanged | git-shortlog
or
git-shortlog changes.txt
and outputs the changes sorted by author:
author1:
cset 1-line desc
cset 1-line desc
...
author2:
cset 1-line desc
...
...
Since git distinguishes 'author' from 'committer', I ran
git-whatchanged | git-shortlog > changes.txt
to look at the kernel authors throughout the entire history [of which is in
git].
It's fun to browse, since this is the first time we've been able to get a
better picture who is actually writing the patches, versus committing them.
See changes.txt.bz2, attached.
Linus Torvalds replied:
Thanks, I'll add this to the git stuff, and next kernel release will have a
proper shortlog.
Btw, it shows how broken your merge script is: you don't fill in the AUTHOR
field properly for some reason:
<[email protected]>:
Automatic merge of /spare/repo/netdev-2.6 branch r8169-fix
Automatic merge of /spare/repo/linux-2.6/.git branch HEAD
Automatic merge of /spare/repo/netdev-2.6 branch use-after-unmap
Automatic merge of rsync://rsync.kernel.org/.../torvalds/linux-2.6.git branch HEAD
but "committer" is right. Pls fix.
He also added:
the reason you didn't notice is that "git-whatchanged" normally ignores
merges. Do
git-rev-list --pretty HEAD ^v2.6.12-rc5 | git-shortlog | less -S
to see what I'm talking about ("show shortlog of all the changes since
v2.6.12-rc5").
7. sg3_utils (SCSI Command Utilities) Version 1.15 Released
6 Jun (1 post) Archive Link: "[Announce] sg3_utils-1.15 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 includes minor enhancements, bug fixes and man page
improvements. See CHANGELOG for more information.
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
A release announcement has been sent to freshmeat.net (http://freshmeat.net
) .
8. Linux 2.6.12-rc6 Released; Some Discussion Of Patch Submission Policies
6 Jun - 9 Jun (39 posts) Archive Link: "Linux v2.6.12-rc6"
Topics: USB
People: Linus Torvalds, Pavel Machek, Andrew Morton, Dmitry Torokhov
Linus Torvalds said:
It's being uploaded right now, the git tree is already up-to-date, and by
the time this hits the mailing list the mirroring of the tar-ball will
hopefully be done too.
And since Jeff wrote me a shortlog script for git, the easist way to tell
what's new since -rc5 is to just do the shortlog and diffstat output.
Network drivers, USB and CPU-freq stand out.
And the good news is that people do seem to have taken my rumblings about
calming down for 2.6.12 seriously. Let's hope that pans out, and I can
release that one asap.. But give this a good beating first, and holler
(again, if you must) about any issues you have
Pavel Machek noted that a fix for a jumpy mouse cursor had been wrongly
attributed to him. He pointed out that Dmitry Torokhov was the true author, and
added that this information was also contained in the changelog entry:
author Pavel Machek <[email protected]> Fri, 27 May 2005 12:53:03 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> Sat, 28 May 2005 11:14:01 -0700
[PATCH] fix jumpy mouse cursor on console
Do not send empty events to gpm. (Keyboards are assumed to have scroll
wheel these days, that makes them part-mouse. That means typing on
keyboard generates empty mouse events).
From: Dmitry Torokhov <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
He suggested Linus had a problem with his script. But Linus replied:
My scripts definitely do the expected thing.
In git, the author is always in the fixed header, and you never look for it
anywhere else. However, in order for the author to _get_ there in the first
place, the person who commits the thing needs to haev the author info.
In this case it was me, and I get the author information from the email
when I commit an emailed patch. I take it from the first line of the body
if that one is a valid "From:" line, and otherwise I fall back to taking it
from the headers of the email.
So in this case you got tagged, either because the patch came through
Andrew (it has his sign-off) and _he_ sent the email but incorrectly had
you as the "From:" person, or alternatively because you sent the email and
took Andrew's sign-off but didn't put the "From:" in the right spot.
Pavel replied, "I thought you are taking "first From: in the body", not "From:
only if it is first line in the body". [Could you perhaps modify your scripts
to take "first From: in the body"? It seems logical to put From "near"
Signed-of-by: lines..." But Linus said, "I really don't want to, for a number
of reasons. Most notably because I don't want to mix things up with the
sign-off, because authorship and sign-off are really separate things (sign-offs
accumulate, authorship stays), but also because it's not entirely unambiguous
to parse these things. With the "first line only" rule, it ends up being pretty
clear what's going on when the script suddenly ate one line.." Pavel said,
"Okay, I see. I'm little afraid that during forwards blank line will be
inserted before "From: " and break this, but lets see how it works." But Linus
replied, "Oh, I skip blank lines (and that means any line that is "whitespace
only", ie tabs/spaces etc won't confuse the scripts), so at least it's not
_that_ subtle."
9. Real-Time Preemption Patch Version 0.7.47-20 Released
7 Jun (12 posts) Archive Link: "[patch] Real-Time Preemption,
-RT-2.6.12-rc6-V0.7.47-29"
Topics: FS: sysfs, Real-Time
People: Ingo Molnar
Ingo Molnar said:
i have released the -V0.7.47-20 Real-Time Preemption patch, which can be
downloaded from the usual place:
http://redhat.com/~mingo/realtime-preempt/
i've implemented two new features:
+ new debugging feature: CONFIG_DEBUG_RT_LOCKING_MODE, which adds the /
proc/sys/kernel/preempt_locks flag (default: 0). This way the 'locking
model' can be switched runtime - very useful for debugging and
profiling. Value 0 means that all spinlocks and rwlocks are implemented
via raw spinlocks/rwlocks. (which disable preemption, increase latency,
but improve throughput) Value 1 means the kernel will fully preempt all
locks again. (NOTE: the only safe runtime switching of the locking
model can be done while the system is idle, so i've implemented the
flag via two flags where the idle thread propagates the new value from
the user-flag to the kernel-flag. You should put a "sleep 1" into
scripts that switch the locking mode, to guarantee that the new flag
value is picked up.)
+ performance feature: i've implemented a new scheduler feature called
'delayed preemption', which turns sync wakeups into guaranteed wakeups,
while preserving their workload-batching properties. A delayed
preemption request is implemented via the TIF_NEED_RESCHED_DELAYED
flag, which runs in parallel to the "immediate preemption"
TIF_NEED_RESCHED flag. If this works out fine then it will be a
suitable replacement for the upstream sync-wakeups facility as well.
delayed preemption already improved the performance of 'hackbench' under
PREEMPT_RT quite signifiantly.
to build a -V0.7.47-20 tree, the following patches have to be applied:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.11.tar.bz2
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/patch-2.6.12-rc6.bz2
http://redhat.com/~mingo/realtime-preempt/
realtime-preempt-2.6.12-rc6-V0.7.47-20
Sharon And Joy
Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor
Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented
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kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and
distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.0.