Kernel Traffic #220 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Fri, 27 Jun 2003 19:30:02 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <E19W5TW-0004xI-00@renegade> |
Kernel Traffic #220 For 27 Jun
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Introduction
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 8 Jun - 16 Jun (4 Support For LM78 Hardware Monitoring Chips In
posts) 2.5
2. 12 Jun - 13 Jun (8 Mailing List And Other Kernel Discussion
posts) Archives
3. 13 Jun - 16 Jun (36 Linux 2.4.21 Released
posts)
4. 15 Jun - 16 Jun (10 GNU "Free Documentation License" Disallowed
posts) From Kernel Sources
5. 15 Jun - 16 Jun (4 BitKeeper-to-Subversion Gateway
posts)
6. 17 Jun (5 Status Of ACPI In 2.5
posts)
Introduction
Thanks go out to all the folks who've been sending in donations. They make a
big difference for me right now. If folks like Kernel Traffic and feel like
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Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 1463 posts in 6974K.
There were 457 different contributors. 237 posted more than once. 265 posted
last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
* 42 posts in 115K by "David S. Miller"
* 36 posts in 143K by Andrew Morton
* 27 posts in 92K by =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rn?= Engel
* 26 posts in 71K by Alan Cox
* 22 posts in 63K by Dave Jones
* Full Stats
1. Support For LM78 Hardware Monitoring Chips In 2.5
8 Jun - 16 Jun (4 posts) Archive Link: "[RFC PATCH] Add lm78 sensor chip
support (2.5.70)"
Topics: FS: sysfs, Version Control
People: Mark M. Hoffman, Greg KH
Mark M. Hoffman said:
This patch vs. 2.5.70 adds support for LM78, LM78-J, and LM79 sensors chips
based on lm_sensors project CVS. This works on one of my boards.
I want to draw attention to something I did with this driver by comparing
it to it87.c in 2.5.70:
> #define IT87_INIT_TEMP_HIGH_1 600
> #define IT87_INIT_TEMP_LOW_1 200
The hardware uses degrees C, and sysfs uses degrees C * 1000. But these #
defines are apparently in units of degrees C * 10. This arbitrary
intermediate representation bugs me. And given the new 2.5 sysfs standard,
it's unnecessary.
In this patch for lm78, I rewrote the conversion routines in terms of the
sysfs units - getting rid of the intermediate nonsense. If there are no
objections, I'm going to start passing patches to do this to the other
sensor chip drivers in 2.5 as well. It would be nice to get some help with
this too... especially since I don't have all that hardware at hand to test
the results.
Greg KH asked if Mark wanted this included in the main tree, and Mark replied,
"I was hoping to get some feedback w.r.t. the conversion routines... but I
guess silence is consent. Please pass this on in the next round." So a few days
later Greg applied it, and the thread ended.
2. Mailing List And Other Kernel Discussion Archives
12 Jun - 13 Jun (8 posts) Archive Link: "Anybody gotta list archive tarball?"
People: Jonathan Corbet, Andries Brouwer, Rob Landley, Hal Duston
Jonathan Corbet asked, "Does anybody happen to have (and is willing to share) a
tarball containing archives of this list going back well into the 90's? I am,
shall we say, researching the activities of certain companies (when I should
really be working on driver books) and something greppable would be most
helpful." Andries Brouwer replied:
I tend to collect such things, but lost early stuff in disk crashes. There
is here
- stuff from ftp://ftp.uwsg.iu.edu/linux/mail.archive/kernel/
1 Mar 1996 - now.
[you can ftp that yourself, I suppose]
- stuff from linuxwww.db.erau.edu
96.06-99.09.
- linux-activists list archive
Very fragmentary, Oct 1991 to Oct 1993.
Also Oct 1993 to Jul 1995.
Also Jan 1992 to Dec 1993.
- linux-kernel
Jul 1995 to Apr 1996.
[lots of garbage in various different formats and from various sources;
very time consuming to sort out; different archives are very similar but do
not have precisely the same posts; I can make the raw stuff available if
you want - maybe you don't want]
Rob Landley also remarked, "the oldest linux list archive I know of is the one
the kansas city people have. http://www.kclug.org/old_archives/linux-activists/
"
Elsewhere, under the Subject: linux-activist archives (http://
www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0306.1/1619.html) , Hal Duston
said:
I am the webmaster for kclug.org, and can tar up the stuff I've created if
you like. I grabbed the archives from other publicly available locations
several years ago. I would assume you would rather have the originals
instead of my hackish processing of them. I do still have them as well if
the sites I obtained them from aren't available anymore.
Here is one of my sources:
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/mail-archive/
Looks like my other source has been moved there as well.
Jonathan replied:
Thanks. linux-activists, I think, predates the era I'm trying to research
now. I'd like to snarf it at some point and put together the ultimate
archive, but that comes later.
For now, I've managed to get the linux-kernel archives for the last 8 years
or so, thanks to responses to my original message - thanks. I've gotten a
little distracted now that SCO has fingered RCU as one of its areas of
concern...I think enough has been dug up now that they won't get much
further with *that* argument. Time for some more general trolling...
3. Linux 2.4.21 Released
13 Jun - 16 Jun (36 posts) Archive Link: "linux-2.4.21 released"
Topics: FS: XFS, Power Management: ACPI, Real-Time
People: Christoph Hellwig, Marcelo Tosatti, Robert Love
Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.21 (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/
ChangeLog-2.4.21) , with no changes from the 2.4.21-rc8 release. A lot of folks
were disappointed that ACPI had not been updated to include the latest patches.
Someone also suggested including XFS, and Christoph Hellwig replied, "I'll
start feeding the few remaining core changes to Marcelo now, the actual
filesystem then is just yet another driver that could be merged any time :)"
Other folks suggested the preemption patches; but Robert Love said these were
too invasive for the stable series at that point, although they were going into
2.5.
4. GNU "Free Documentation License" Disallowed From Kernel Sources
15 Jun - 16 Jun (10 posts) Archive Link: "GFDL in the kernel tree"
People: Christoph Hellwig, Linus Torvalds
Christoph Hellwig reported:
2.5.71 introduces two GFDL-licensed files in the kernel tree, there's a few
problems with this, because:
1. COPYING in the toplevel says the kernel tree is GPLv2, GFDL is GPL
incompatible.
2. Documentation/DocBook/gadget.tmpl, one of the files, includes extracted
from source files licensed under GPL, making this a GPL license
violation.
3. Documentation/kobject.txt, the other files claims it's under GFDL but
doesn't actually include the license text as mandated by the GFDL.
And of course there's still all those nasty issue with GFDL like invariant
sections and cover texts that make at least the debian-devel list believe
it's an unfree license..
Folks, could we please only use GPL-compatible licenses in the kernel tree?
Linus Torvalds replied:
I'd agree. The GFDL is a disaster anyway. You can't even fix bugs in the
documentation without having to change the title etc. There are much better
licenses around.
I'd say we just remove the files.
5. BitKeeper-to-Subversion Gateway
15 Jun - 16 Jun (4 posts) Archive Link: "bkSVN live"
Topics: Version Control
People: Ben Collins, Geert Uytterhoeven
Ben Collins announced:
Thanks to Larry, the bkSVN repo is now live. It's actually bkcvs2svn, since
I am using bkcvs's metadata. However subversion is able to make better use
of the metadata than CVS can. You can get better log output, for one. Also,
you can more easily determine the scope of a change, since subversion
supports changesets.
If you aren't familiar with subversion, please visit the URL in my sig.
Please do not ask me a lot of questions about it. First off, it's very well
documented, and second off, I am not what I would consider an expert on the
internals of SVN.
And please DO NOT email linux-kernel with any comments, suggestions,
questions regarding subversion. It is way off topic. Subversion !=
BitKeeper, and it's not intended to replace it. So this isn't a
competition. Otherwise, Larry wouldn't feel so comfortable with hosting the
repo :)
For those that know SVN, you need a recent (e.g. upcoming 0.24 release of
SVN, or current trunk) client. I am using revision r6227. If you need a
client just for testing, you can get a ra_svn only static binary from http:
//www.phunnypharm.org/pub/svn/clients/linux/. i386, sparc and ia64 are
there. I can build more if needed (I think I have access to just about
anything). You'll need glibc 2.3 for the static clients since it uses NSS
modules, and well, it just wont work with 2.2/2.1/etc. If you want to build
your own, remember, you don't need berkeley DB, or neon to access this
repo.
Now, finally the SVN URL's:
svn://kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.4
svn://kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.5
WAIT. If you don't know anything about SVN repo layouts, just remember
this:
REPO_BASE/trunk Primary (aka HEAD) development
REPO_BASE/tags/* Tagged revsions
REPO_BASE/branches/* Other development lines (not used in bkSVN)
So, to get the main development for say 2.5:
# svn co svn://kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.5/trunk linux-2.5-bkbits
Will checkout the main 2.5 trunk into a directory called linux-2.5-bkbits.
Then you can cd into that directory and do "svn up" just like CVS :). The
"svn log" output is much better than in CVS, since you can do things like
"svn log drivers/usb" and get a single list of revisions that affected
anything in drivers/usb, unlike CVS where you would get history for all
files seperately. "svn help" is really useful aswell.
If you want to checkout a particular version:
# svn co svn://kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.5/tags/v2.5.60 linux-2.5.60
Or diff versions, via URL, without a working copy:
# svn diff svn://kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.4/tags/v2.4.19 svn://
kernel.bkbits.net/linux-2.4/tags/v2.4.20 > patch-2.4.20.diff
Geert Uytterhoeven tried with an earlier version and got "svn: Malformed
network data" errors, and asked, "Can you confirm that 0.23.0 (r5962) (from
Debian unstable) is too old, or is this a PPC-specific problem?" Ben replied,
"Too old. 0.24 will release with some incompatible revamps to the ra_svn
protocol, but it improves checkout over high latency by a noticable amount."
6. Status Of ACPI In 2.5
17 Jun (5 posts) Archive Link: "ACPI broken... again!"
Topics: Microsoft, Power Management: ACPI, USB
People: Felix von Leitner, Andrew Grover
Felix von Leitner was unable to get ACPI working under kernel 2.5.70, on any of
the five machines he tried it on. He said:
The symptom is that eth0 does not see the others. /proc/interrupts has the
correct interrupt listed, so it took me a while to suspect ACPI. agpgart
also crashes, and firewire and USB didn't find any devices.
Why oh why is ACPI so horrendously broken?
And more to the point: if it _is_ this broken, why ship it at all? I don't
recall a single moment where ACPI did anything good for me, only crashes,
data loss and general brokenness. This may be a technology fitting
Microsoft and Intel PCs, but why give it even more leverage by supporting
it in Linux? I say rip this abomination right out of the kernel and be done
with it.
Someone explained why it was so hard to get ACPI right, saying, "its a
moderately bad spec that your vendor implemented to deal with a horrid redmond
interpreter. (And, to make things worse, the linux-acpi team specifically
insists on implementing the spec, not the reality. "We refuse to be bug-for-bug
compatible with the other major implementation." So linux-acpi is "right" but
redmond-acpi is tested and actually works.)"
Several other folks asked Felix for more information about his hardware, and
Andrew Grover came down on him for complaining instead of working to fix the
problems.
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