Kernel Traffic #323 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Sat, 03 Sep 2005 23:59:14 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Kernel Traffic #323 For 3 Sep
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 26 Jul - 10 Aug (65 Cleaning Up The Reboot Code Path
posts)
2. 28 Jul - 8 Aug (94 Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3 Released
posts)
3. 31 Jul - 5 Aug (25 Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1 Released
posts)
4. 2 Aug - 5 Aug (15 Documentation On How To Apply Patches
posts) Against Various Trees
5. 3 Aug - 5 Aug (6 Speeding Up Directory Reads For Large FAT
posts) Filesystems
6. 5 Aug - 8 Aug (6 Weekly Kernel Status Summaries
posts)
7. 5 Aug (5 New PCIE And SHPC Hotplug Driver Maintainer
posts)
8. 7 Aug - 8 Aug (10 Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1 Released
posts)
9. 7 Aug - 8 Aug (6 Advansys SCSI Driver Unmaintained;
posts) Rocketport Driver Ailing
10. 8 Aug (1 post) Linux 2.4.32-pre3 Released
11. 8 Aug - 9 Aug (2 Some Discussion Of Submitting Documentation
posts) Patches
12. 9 Aug - 11 Aug (10 New Server Hosting The linux-kernel Mailing
posts) List
13. 11 Aug (1 post) libata PATA To-Do List
14. 11 Aug (18 Stable Kernel Review Cycle Begins For
posts) 2.6.12.5
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 2346 posts in 14MB.
There were 730 different contributors. 285 posted more than once. The average
length of each message was 106 lines.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|The top posters of the week | The top subjects of the week were: |
| were: | |
|----------------------------+------------------------------------------------|
|102 posts in 495KB by andrew| |
|morton |90 posts in 588KB for "2.6.13-rc3-mm3" |
|60 posts in 313KB by |47 posts in 190KB for "[patch] driver core: add |
|[email protected]|the ability to unbind drivers to devices from |
|48 posts in 187KB by |userspace" |
|christoph lameter |41 posts in 166KB for "[patch 00/14] gfs" |
|47 posts in 170KB by andi |33 posts in 136KB for "[patch] string |
|kleen |conversions for memory policy" |
|46 posts in 222KB by |30 posts in 131KB for "gfs" |
|[email protected] | |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Full Statistics generated by mboxstats version 2.8
1. Cleaning Up The Reboot Code Path
26 Jul - 10 Aug (65 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH 0/23] reboot-fixes"
People: Eric W. Biederman
Eric W. Biederman said:
The reboot code paths seems to be suffering from 15 years of people only
looking at the code when it breaks. The result is there are several code
paths in which different callers expect different semantics from the same
functions, and a fair amount of imperfect inline replication of code.
For a year or more every time I fix one bug in the bug fix reveals yet
another bug. In an attempt to end the cycle of bug fixes revealing yet more
bugs I have generated a series of patches to clean up the semantics along
the reboot path.
With the callers all agreeing on what to expect from the functions they
call it should at least be possible to kill bugs without more showing up
because of the bug fix.
My primary approach is to factor sys_reboot into several smaller functions
and provide those functions for the general kernel consumers instead of the
architecture dependent restart and halt hooks.
I don't expect this to noticeably fix any bugs along the main code paths
but magic sysrq and several of the more obscure code paths should work much
more reliably.
2. Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3 Released
28 Jul - 8 Aug (94 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc3-mm3"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Networking
People: Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc3/
2.6.13-rc3-mm3/
+ Added the anonymous pagefault scalability enhancement patches.
I remain fairly dubious about this - it seems a fairly specific and
complex piece of work to speed up one extremely specific part of one
type of computer's one type of workload. Surely there's a better way :(
The patches at present spit warnings or don't compile on lots of
architectures. x86, x86_64, ppc64 and ia64 are OK.
+ There's a pretty large x86_64 update here which naughty maintainer
wants in 2.6.13. Extra testing, please.
+ Dropped git-net.patch (davem's net devel tree). I'm seeing weird TCP
hangs. I'm fairly sure they're present in mainline, but was unable to
reproduce it without git-net.patch when I was actually trying.
3. Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1 Released
31 Jul - 5 Aug (25 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc4-mm1"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Sound: ALSA
People: Andrew Morton, Felipe Alfaro Solana, Adrian Bunk, James Courtier-Dutton
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc4/
2.6.13-rc4-mm1/
+ Dropped areca-raid-linux-scsi-driver.patch and iteraid.patch. People
who need these can get them from 2.6.13-rc3-mm3.
+ Dropped the CKRM patches. I don't think they were doing much in -mm and
we didn't find many problems with them anyway.
+ Dropped the connector patches: turns out that we no longer have a
netlink slot available for them anyway.
Felipe Alfaro Solana asked, "Why was the KERNEL_VERSION(a,b,c) macro removed
from include/linux/version.h? The removal breaks external drivers like
NDISWRAPPER or nVidia propietary." Adrian Bunk replied, "That's their problem,"
and explained thta the macro had "moved to a different header file." James
Courtier-Dutton asked, "Where have they moved to? This will break ALSA as
well." And Adrian pointed folks to utsname.h.
4. Documentation On How To Apply Patches Against Various Trees
2 Aug - 5 Aug (15 posts) Archive Link: "Documentation - how to apply patches
for various trees"
People: Jesper Juhl, Linus Torvalds
Jesper Juhl said:
How to apply the -rc, -git, -mm and the 2.6.x.y (-stable) patches is a
quite frequently asked question on LKML and elsewhere. Since so many people
seem to be confused by this I gathered it ought to be properly documented
once and for all so we a) get more people testing those trees and b) get
asked this question less often. So, I sat down and wrote such a document.
Below is a patch to add a new file "applying-patches.txt" to Documentation/
This document describes each of the trees and gives examples on how to
apply the various patches.
Looking forward to your feedback (and possible inclusion).
I guess this document could also be placed somewhere on kernel.org and
linked to from the front page so that people downloading the various
patches will have this information available at their fingertips.
In the course of discussion, Linus Torvalds said:
Can we have more whitespace?
You either have very long paragraphs, or no whitespace between them: I
can't quite decide which one.
So leave an empty line between paragraphs (and if you already do, you need
to split them ;) because it's very tiring to not have a nice break every
once in the flow of text.
Long paragraphs may be acceptable in fictional literary work that you read
without thinking about what you're reading. There you get into the "flow"
of the text, and you hopefully don't need to have very many visual breaks
to keep as acnhor-points. However, the same is certainly not true in
technical text, especially something like this where you're trying to
explain somethign that the recipient doesn't ncessarily know.
My rule of thumb is that if you don't have a new paragraph roughly every
five or six lines, it's likely problematic. Maybe I have a shorter
attention span than most, but I don't think so - I just find it much easier
to read text that is nicely broken up, and when it's a "pure ASCII" medium
the only break that works well is an empty line (possibly with indentation
for further visual help - although in this context indentation tends to be
used for a separate issue: examples etc, and is not good for paragraphs).
And since we have a single empty line implying paragraph breaks, feel free
to use multiple empty lines to imply "bigger" breaks (you seem to do this
already).
This email was written with an average paragraph length of 4 lines.
Jesper posted an updated version with more whitespace. Various folks offered
praise and suggestions for his work.
5. Speeding Up Directory Reads For Large FAT Filesystems
3 Aug - 5 Aug (6 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] Speedup FAT filesystem
directory reads"
Topics: Disks: IDE, FS: FAT, USB
People: Karsten Wiese, Hirofumi Ogawa
Karsten Wiese said:
Please give this a try and commit to -mm or mainline, if approved.
Summary:
This speeds up directory reads for large FAT partitions, if the buffercache
has to be filled from the drive. Following values were taken from:
$ time find path_to_freshly_mounted_fat > /dev/null
on an otherwise idle system.
FAT with 16KB Clusters on IDE attached drive: Factor 2
FAT with 32KB Clusters on USB2 attached drive: Factor 10 (!)
Its less than 1/10 slower, if the buffercache is uptodate.
The patch touches 3 areas:
+ fat_bmap() returns the sector's offset in the cluster or a negativ
error code instead of 0 or the negativ error code. It's callers are
changed accordingly.
+ fat__get_entry() calls sb_breadahead() to readahead a whole cluster, if
the requested sector is the first one in a cluster. It is usefull to do
this, because on FAT directories occupy whole clusters.
Readahead is only done, if the cluster's first sector is not uptodate
to avoid overhead, when the buffer cache is already uptodate. Note that
on memory pressure, the maximal byte count wasted (read: has to be red
from disk twice) is 1 cluster's size. Thats 64KB.
Hirofumi Ogawa offered his own updates to Karsten's patch, which Karsten
accepted gratefully, resubmitting the updated patch.
6. Weekly Kernel Status Summaries
5 Aug - 8 Aug (6 posts) Archive Link: "kernel status, 4 Aug 2005"
Topics: Bug Tracking, Disk Arrays: RAID, Disks: IDE, FS: NFS, FS: ReiserFS, FS:
sysfs, I2C, I2O, Kernel Build System, Networking, Power Management: ACPI, SMP,
Serial ATA, Software Suspend, Sound, USB
People: Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton said:
At kernel summit I pledged to put out weekly where-we're-at summaries,
mainly so that subsystem maintainers could get an estimate of when the next
major kernel release will be, so they can plan their merge windows.
Of course, I don't have a clue when the next release will be because the
timing is driven by perception-of-stability. But I can guess.
Current kernel version:
2.6.13-rc5-git3
ETA for 2.6.13:
August 12-19
Status of subsystem trees:
3190002 git-acpi.patch
68299 git-alsa.patch
96 git-arm.patch
100 git-arm-smp.patch
31799 git-audit.patch
113 git-cpufreq.patch
14257 git-cryptodev.patch
107590 git-drm.patch
122 git-drm-via.patch
112 git-ia64.patch
109 git-input.patch
32153 git-ipsec.patch
4781 git-jfs.patch
41254 git-kbuild.patch
21659 git-libata-adma-mwi.patch
17964 git-libata-chs-support.patch
36338 git-libata-ncq.patch
21535 git-libata-passthru.patch
3944 git-libata-promise-sata-pata.patch
91 git-libata-upstream-fixes.patch
85 git-libata-upstream.patch
96 git-mmc.patch
7729 git-mtd.patch
255866 git-netdev-chelsio.patch
10606 git-netdev-e100.patch
1290162 git-netdev-ieee80211-wifi.patch
48220 git-netdev-sis190.patch
4899 git-netdev-smc91x-eeprom.patch
132 git-netdev-upstream-fixes.patch
178991 git-netdev-upstream.patch
955 git-net-gregkh-i2c-w1-netlink-callbacks-fix.patch
443989 git-net.patch
101 git-nfs.patch
119 git-ntfs.patch
1321859 git-ocfs2.patch
88683 git-scsi-block.patch
331078 git-scsi-misc.patch
121 git-scsi-rc-fixes.patch
34584 git-serial.patch
1890 git-sparc64.patch
That's all 2.6.14 material - no subsystem merges pending.
Open bugs:
This is based on my reading of what's real and of what's worth attending
to. Quite a few things get culled up-front.
There are several emailed bug reports which are probably live bugs but they
have gone stale hence I have asked the reporters to raise bugzilla reports,
so more post-2.6.12 bugs will appear as the reporters retest 2.6.13-rc6.
I really don't want to have to track bugs which aren't in bugzilla. If an
emailed bug report comes in and we can address it within a few days and a
few emails then fine. If that doesn't happen I'll be asking reporters to
open bugzilla reports.
All bugs reported prior to the 2.6.12 release have been discarded. I'll
henceforth track bugs across succeeding major release, so this list will
just grow.
There are 60 bugs here. They're almost all post-2.6.12 regressions.
Longer-term we simply have to do better than this, else we'll stabilise at
a pretty buggy level. No matter what process changes we make, the bottom
line is that developers/maintainers will need to spend more of their time
working with reporters on fixing bugs.
If you wish to provide an update on one of the below bugs, please do it in
bugzilla if it's bugzilla-based. Or in reply to the original email thread
if it's email-based. Failing all that, please at least rewrite the Subject:
when replying so I don't lose my mind, thanks.
Lots of USB stuff, some ACPI and we seem to have broken parallel-IDE.
idr_remove
Looks like SELinux is removing IDR entries which don't exist.
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4768] New: Screen appears at mid-right section
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4768
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4769] New: PC104plus BT848 card stop working in
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4769
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4771] New: Linux 2.6.11.10 + reiserfs + usrquota,
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4771
Re: 2.6.12-rc6-mm1
This is the
note: mono[26736] exited with preempt_count 1
scheduling while atomic: mono/0x10000001/26736
x86_64 bug.
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4773] New: 8139too module got "eth0: transmit
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4773
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4776] New: uhci_hcd: host controller halted,
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4777] New: Cyrix 6x86MX PR200+ incorrectly
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4777
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4779] New: amd64: raw1394 returns EINVAL
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4779
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4781] New: Conservative governor makes me lose my
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4781
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4791] New: ACPI + SERIO_I8042 bug/conflict
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4791
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4793] New: Battery reads result in high cpu usage
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4793
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4823] New: alsa modules snd_virmidi & snd_mpu401
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4823
variable used before set
Silly scsi bug.
2.6.12-rc6 mm->total_vm accounting imbalance?
Might be fixed
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4829] New: Problem with sym53c8xx_2 and target
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4829
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4831] New: Bad soundcard patches for Intel ICH4
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4831
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4851] New: x86-64 userspace random segfaults and
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4851
AACRAID failure with 2.6.13-rc1
Might be fixed
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4853] New: pf: Oops with Imation SuperDisk
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4853
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4860] New: sata_sx4 doesn't recognize Promise
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4860
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4866] New: motherboard ga-k8nf-9: ehci_hcd doesn't
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4866
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4869] New: Screen stays blank upon resume
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4869
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4880] New: dpt_i2o.c does not register itself with
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4880
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4888] New: kernel 2.6.12.2 will only do audio when
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4888
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4916] New: USB mouse stops working after inserting
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4916
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4917] New: Lacie 250Go USB
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4917
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4919] New: APM resume: freeze at disk access
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4919
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4920] New: IDE CD Driver not able to read audio
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4920
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4929] New: problem with aic7xxx driver on 2.6.x
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4929
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4940] New: Repeatable Kernel Panic on Adaptec
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4940
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4944] New: uhci_hcd hangs on intel 810 when
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4944
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4950] New: battery state don't change
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4950
[Bug 4951] System freezes with SMP kernel on AMD X2 4600
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4951
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4962] New: ?
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4962
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4963] New: Encounter this Kernel oops while
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4963
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4965] New: Dual-head not working correctly with
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4965
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4966] New: ehci_hcd on x86_64 causes more than
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4966
.13 mptfusion changes.
mpt-fusion needs initrd rework and will break existing userspace.
sysfs double entry.
duplicate entries in /sys/devices/system/
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4968] New: sata_nv buffer I/O errors
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4968
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4971] New: dual head and 2.6.13rc4
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4971
Re: [linux-usb-devel] Fw: BUG: Kernel panic when disconnecting Edirol USB2
audio interface
2.6.13-rc4 - kernel panic - BUG at net/ipv4/tcp_output.c:918
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4974] New: ide2usb adapter do not working with usb
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4974
Re: 2.6.13-rc4 use after free in class_device_attr_show
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4978] New: Failed to allocate mem resource for AGP
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4978
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4981] New: changes in 2.6.12-rc1 causes ati-remote
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4981
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4982] New: Usenet gateway crashes under heavy
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4982
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4983] New: Paralell ZIP disappearing
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4983
Re: aio-fix-races-in-callback-path.patch added to -mm tree
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4992] New: Power off stops
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4992
lpfc: system freezing if FC connection is broken under load
MCE problem on dual Opteron
PROBLEM: reproductible oops, NFS, gigabit network, x86_64
b44 transmit timeout with kernel 2.6
[Bugme-new] [Bug 4998] New: "init 0" broken between 2.6.12 and
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4998
Regression: radeonfb: No synchronisation on CRT with linux-2.6.13-rc5
[Bugme-new] [Bug 5000] New: fan always on after waking from swsusp
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5000
Re: tungsten t5 doesn't sync anymore with kernel 2.6.12
[Bugme-new] [Bug 5001] New: USB: usblp must be unloaded before Scanner is
available, MFP Epson CX3650 (& Epson CX6600)
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5001
7. New PCIE And SHPC Hotplug Driver Maintainer
5 Aug (5 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] new contact info"
Topics: Hot-Plugging, MAINTAINERS File, PCI
People: Bjorn Helgaas
Kristen Carlson Accardi of Intel posted a patch to update a lot of maintainer
information in various source files in the PCI Hotplug area, to list him as
maintainer instead of Dely L. Sy (also of Intel). Bjorn Helgaas asked for a
patch to the MAINTAINERS file as well, and Kristen accomodated, listing himself
as the PCIE hotplug driver maintainer, and the SHPC hotplug driver maintainer.
8. Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1 Released
7 Aug - 8 Aug (10 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc5-mm1"
Topics: Bug Tracking, Disks: SCSI, FS: CacheFS, Kernel Release Announcement,
Sound: ALSA
People: Andrew Morton, Rog?rio Brito, James Bottomley
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc5/
2.6.13-rc5-mm1/
(Grab it from http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/
2.6.13-rc5-mm1.gz until the kernel.org mirrors catch up)
+ Added the git-scsi-iscsi.patch tree: iSCSI drivers (James Bottomley)
+ This kernel is broken on ia64: the spinlock consolidation patch needs
fixing.
+ The acpi development tree is back in -mm.
+ Dropped cachefs and the cachefs-for-AFS patches. These get in the way
of memory management testing a bit, and they're being redone anyway.
Rog?rio Brito replied:
Thanks Andrew, for including the vfat speedup patch.
It has really improved a lot the performance of access to directories
having many subdirectories in an external Firewire HD that I have.
I'd say that if others don't have problems with it, then it should be in
2.6.13, as far as I am concerned.
BTW, everything is working fine with the sbp2/ieee1394 drivers that are in
the mm tree.
It seems that there are some issues with ALSA, though. I will report back
as soon as I see if these are userland problems or not (it worked fine with
vanilla 2.6.13-rc5).
Andrew replied that it was probably too late for this to get into 2.6.13, but
would be likely to get into 2.6.14. He added, "thanks for testing and
reporting. Our turnaround time for ALSA fixes is not fantastic, really, so any
problems which we currently have will probably carry over into 2.6.13. If you
can raise a bugzilla record for any problems in -rc6 I'll make sure they aren't
forgotten."
9. Advansys SCSI Driver Unmaintained; Rocketport Driver Ailing
7 Aug - 8 Aug (6 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] Removing maintainer's bad
e-mails"
Topics: Disks: SCSI, MAINTAINERS File
People: Dave Jones, Adrian Bunk, Kurt Wall
Jiri Slaby posted a patch to remove some bogus emails from the MAINTAINERS
file, under the Advansys SCSI driver, and the Rocketport driver. Dave Jones
remarked, "You may as well change the S: to unmaintained whilst you're there,
it hasn't seen any updates in a long time, and still uses several out-of-date
SCSI APIs." Adrian Bunk added, "Or he could completely remove the entry. We
don't have entries for every single unmaintained driver, and the smaller
MAINTAINERS is the higher is the possibility of not missing a relevant entry
when checking whom to send an email." Jiri posted a new patch, to remove the
Advansys entry altogether, and take out the incorrect Rocketport email. He
credited Rolf Eike Beer with identifying the busted Rocketport email.
At one point, Kurt Wall said, "Hmm, so if a subsystem or driver (more drivers,
I should think) lacks an entry in MAINTAINERS, is it then reasonable to assume
that it is unmaintained? If not, perhaps creating a separate list of
unmaintained subsystems and/or drivers is prudent?" Adrian replied:
For unmaintained drivers or drivers maintained by the subsystem maintainers
(which can be the reason why there's no entry for this driver) contact the
subsystem maintainer.
Unmaintained subsystems are a problem.
I've already started contacting subsystem maintainers that seem to be
inactive, and I have some restructuring of MAINTAINERS (tree structure with
drivers behind subsystems) on my TODO list.
10. Linux 2.4.32-pre3 Released
8 Aug (1 post) Subject: "Linux 2.4.32-pre3"
Topics: Compression, Networking, USB
People: Marcelo Tosatti, Patrick McHardy, Jeff Garzik, Linus Torvalds, Lars
Marowsky-Bree, Alan Stern, i810_audio, John W. Linville
Marcelo Tosatti announced Linux 2.4.32-pre3, saying:
Here goes v2.4.32-pre3. It contains several v2.6 backported fixes, amongst
them:
+ libata update
+ networking fixes (most notably Netfilter)
Please refer to the changelog for the detailed information
Summary of changes from v2.4.32-pre2 to v2.4.32-pre3 ======================
======================
Aaron Grothe:
Fix XTEA implementation
Alan Stern:
Revert USB UHCI changes
Aleksey Gorelov:
Fix incorrect Asus k7m irq router detection
[email protected]:
Fix Alpha AXP Cabriolet build
[email protected]:
fix RedBlackTree rb_next/rb_prev functions
Harald Welte:
Remove bogus declaration of ipt_mutex
Horms:
ppc32: stop misusing ntps time_offset value
Jeff Garzik:
libata: update to 2.6.x latest
John W. Linville:
i810_audio: use MMIO on systems that support it
i810_audio: offset LVI from CIV to avoid stalled start
Ju, Seokmann:
megaraid2 v2.10.10.1
Lars Marowsky-Bree:
fix oops when starting md multipath 2.4 kernel
Linus Torvalds:
PATCH: Fix outstanding gzip/zlib security issues
Marcelo Tosatti:
Change VERSION to v2.4.32-pre3
Merge rsync://rsync.kernel.org/.../davem/net-2.4
Patrick McHardy:
[NETFILTER]: Use correct byteorder in ICMP NAT
[NETFILTER]: Fix potential memory corruption in NAT code (aka memory NAT)
[NETFILTER]: Fix ip6t_LOG sit tunnel logging
[NETFILTER]: Restore netfilter assumption in IPv6 multicast
[NETFILTER]: Fix deadlock with ip_queue/ip6_queue
[NETFILTER]: Ignore PSH on SYN/ACK in ipt_unclean
Willy TARREAU:
fix potential NULL dereferences in several serial driver methods (Julien
Tinnes)
11. Some Discussion Of Submitting Documentation Patches
8 Aug - 9 Aug (2 posts) Archive Link: "Documentation maintainer?"
People: Pierre Ossman, Jesper Juhl, Andrew Morton
Pierre Ossman asked, "Who should be cc:d for document additions? It's a brand
new document, not updates to an existing one. I sent it out without any cc at
all (Subject: [PATCH] ISA DMA API documentation) which got some attention, but
not from anyone with the possibility to commit it would seem." Jesper Juhl
replied, "I don't think there's a central documentation maintainer as such. I
recently submitted a brand new document myself and added Andrew Morton to CC
since he's the overall 2.6 maintainer, and Andrew has been kind enough to add
my document to the -mm tree for starters. Hopefully it'll then migrate onto
mainline eventually."
12. New Server Hosting The linux-kernel Mailing List
9 Aug - 11 Aug (10 posts) Archive Link: "VGER news"
Topics: Version Control
People: Matti Aarnio, Petr Vandrovec, David S. Miller, Lee Revell, Willy
Tarreau
Matti Aarnio said:
Folks at Dell have donated a new machine to be VGER, and folks at RedHat
have installed it into co-location facility with 1000Mbps network
connection into the machine.
This update got considerable performance increase into the machine for our
list loads. In terms of Bogomips around 7-8, but for actual loads nearly
twice as much.
We did system switchover last weekend, and nobody reacted trulu adversely.
Probably nobody noticed it either. :-)
Petr Vandrovec replied, "Ah, that's the reason why commit messages are now sent
from [email protected] instead of from
[email protected] like they were until Friday ?" But Matti
said, "That is probably something else. Davem may have changed list name at
this time as well." And David S. Miller confirmed, "Yes, I did a s/bk-/git-/ on
those list names last week while I was in the UK due to popular request."
Elsewhere, several folks were already impressed by the performance increase.
Lee Revell said, "It's definitely faster. Lately I have had a few replies to
list messages where the reply hit LKML several minutes before my inbox. This
*never* happened before the changeover." And Willy Tarreau added, "OK, I better
understand now why the message I posted this morning from mutt on tty1 was
already caught by the other mutt when I switched to tty2 to check other
messages on the list. I can imagine that from now, we'll get a very good
interactivity again."
13. libata PATA To-Do List
11 Aug (1 post) Archive Link: "libata PATA todo list"
Topics: Disks: IDE, PCI
People: Jeff Garzik
Jeff Garzik said:
Since there's been some recent interest in the subject, I thought I would
post the PATA todo list for libata. Some of these items are from my memory,
and some are from a list Alan was kind enough to create. The items verbatim
from Alan are prefixed "Alan: ".
1. Locked device/host speed
To support devices such as those in the ide/pci/generic.c list, we need
to ensure that libata -never- attempts to change the device speed
(ata_dev_set_xfermode should be avoided).
2. Simplex DMA
PCI IDE specification has a 'simplex' DMA bit, which should be tested.
Simplex means that only one command can be outstanding, for BOTH port0
and port1, at any given time.
Possibly some hosts also need Simplex DMA, but may not assert the
standard PCI IDE Simplex DMA capability bit. I don't know.
3. Speed change on error
Downshift device to a slower UDMA speed, and eventually from DMA->PIO,
as errors persist. There is no 'specified way' to do this, this is
purely hueristic.
4. Alan: Command filter
Alan -- explanation?
I know one line item here, at least: Promise controllers snoop SET
FEATURES - XFER MODE command. We must stop command processing on ALL
ports when this command is issued, to avoid corruption.
5. Alan: MWDMA broken still? is piix doc correct?
6. Alan: some PATA LBA48 devices cannot do > 256 sectors.
7. Alan: Some ALi requires LBA48 be done via PIO. LBA28 DMA is OK.
8. ATAPI device CDB interrupt
Some older ATAPI devices require the OS driver to wait for an
interrupt, after CDB is written, before command processing proceeds.
9. ATAPI devices may delay setting DRQ=1 for up to 3ms.
Make sure we honor the delay noted in IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE word 0.
10. ATAPI DMA alignment (discussed elsewhere)
Needed even for PATA, AFAICT.
14. Stable Kernel Review Cycle Begins For 2.6.12.5
11 Aug (18 posts) Archive Link: "[patch 0/8] -stable review"
Topics: Compression, SMP
People: Chris Wright, Eric W. Biederman, Peter Osterlund, Andi Kleen
Chris Wright said:
This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 2.6.12.5 release.
There are 8 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to
this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let us
know. If anyone is a maintainer of the proper subsystem, and wants to add a
signed-off-by: line to the patch, please respond with it.
These patches are sent out with a number of different people on the Cc:
line. If you wish to be a reviewer, please email [email protected] to add
your name to the list. If you want to be off the reviewer list, also email
us.
Responses should be made by Sat, Aug 13, 22:00 UTC. Anything received after
that time, might be too late.
The changelogs were attached at the top of each patch:
1. A kernel BUG() is triggered by a call to set_mempolicy() with a negative
first argument. This is because the mode is declared as an int, and the
validity check doesnt check < 0 values. Alternatively, mode could be
declared as unsigned int or unsigned long.
2. This fixes a bug in SRAT handling on AMD systems that was introduced with
the dual core support. It would be disabled on CPUs without dual core. Just
drop the bogus check.
3. It's not the real deflateBound() in newer zlib libraries, partly because
the upcoming usage of it won't have the "stream" available, so we can't
have the same interfaces anyway.
This uses the new deflateBound() thing to sanity-check the input to the
zlib decompressor before we even bother to start reading in the blocks.
Problem noted by Tim Yamin <[email protected]>
4. from hanging future joins in the D state [CAN-2005-2098].
The problem is that the error handling path for the
KEYCTL_JOIN_SESSION_KEYRING operation has one error path that doesn't
release the session management semaphore. Further attempts to get the
semaphore will then sleep for ever in the D state.
This can happen in four situations, all involving an attempt to allocate a
new session keyring:
1. ENOMEM.
2. The users key quota being reached.
3. A keyring name that is an empty string.
4. A keyring name that is too long.
Any user may attempt this operation, and so any user can cause the problem
to occur.
None of the above had any objections raised against them. However, two others
posted by Chris did. The first had the following changelog:
introduced in 2.6.12. Please apply to stable.
From Eric Biederman
sync_tsc was using smp_call_function to ask the boot processor to report
it's tsc value. smp_call_function performs an IPI_send_allbutself which is
a broadcast ipi. There is a window during processor startup during which
the target cpu has started and before it has initialized it's interrupt
vectors so it can properly process an interrupt. Receveing an interrupt
during that window will triple fault the cpu and do other nasty things.
Why cli does not protect us from that is beyond me.
The simple fix is to match ia64 and provide a smp_call_function_single.
Which avoids the broadcast and is more efficient.
This certainly fixes the problem of getting stuck on boot which was very
easy to trigger on my SMP Hyperthreaded Xeon, and I think it fixes it for
the right reasons.
Andi Kleen noticed a bug in the patch, fairly trivial to fix. Chris thanked him
for the heads up and said he'd fix it in the tree, instead of requiring an
additional submission. And Eric W. Biederman, who authored the change, added,
"Someone needs to send the patch to Linus for 2.6.13 as well. Is someone else
going to or should I. I knew I was confused about physical versus logical apic
ids when I generated the patch."
The second of Chris's stable tree patches to find criticism had the following
changelog:
a) http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-gnu-utils/1999-06/msg00183.html
b) http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94584
Peter Osterlund asked:
Why does this 6 year old bug have to be fixed in the 2.6.12 stable series?
Doesn't the patch violate this stable series rule?
+ It must fix a real bug that bothers people (not a, "This could be a
problem..." type thing.)
Maybe the motivation was just missing from the patch description?
Chris replied, "These can manifest as possible overflow (1st one, given
CAN-2005-2458), or NULL deref (2nd one given CAN-2005-2459), which could have
possible security consequences."
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
FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at
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.