Kernel Traffic #288 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Sun, 02 Jan 2005 09:57:38 -0800
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Kernel Traffic #288 For 2 Jan
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 19 Nov 2004 - 25 Nov 2004 (7 Linux 2.6.9-ac11 Released
posts)
2. 21 Nov 2004 - 27 Nov 2004 (20 Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm3 Released
posts)
3. 23 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (3 IDE And CDROM ioctl Documentation
posts)
4. 23 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (5 MCA Maintainership
posts)
5. 26 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (3 Linux 2.6.9-ac12 Released
posts)
6. 27 Nov 2004 (1 post) Mailing List Troubles
7. 27 Nov 2004 - 30 Nov 2004 (3 Linux 2.4.29-pre1 Released
posts)
8. 30 Nov 2004 (6 Possible GPL Violation By iRiver
posts)
9. 30 Nov 2004 - 1 Dec 2004 (5 inotify Version 0.16 Replacement For
posts) dnotify
10. 1 Dec 2004 (4 New Document Collection Project At
posts) OSDL
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 1295 posts in 7224K.
There were 393 different contributors. 193 posted more than once. 166 posted
last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
* 65 posts in 560K by Adrian Bunk
* 51 posts in 292K by Greg KH
* 45 posts in 159K by Alan Cox
* 29 posts in 149K by Andrew Morton
* 29 posts in 88K by Jan Engelhardt
* Full Stats
1. Linux 2.6.9-ac11 Released
19 Nov 2004 - 25 Nov 2004 (7 posts) Subject: "Linux 2.6.9-ac11"
People: Alan Cox, Arjan van de Ven
Alan Cox announced Linux 2.6.9-ac11, saying:
Fix the panic spewing XFree86 keyboard printks bug (quick fix for now). Fix
a problem with legacy ide /proc and also fix the Seqpacket/SELinux
problems.
Arjan van de Ven is now building RPMS of the kernel and those can be found
in the RPM subdirectory and should be yum-able. Expect the RPMS to lag the
diff a little as the RPM builds and tests do take time.
The it8212 still doesn't default to DMA on - that is on the TODO list. The
HPT366 rework project is also not ready (its gone back to the drawing board
for a few days if you are a volunteer and wondered what is up).
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.6/2.6.9/
2. Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm3 Released
21 Nov 2004 - 27 Nov 2004 (20 posts) Subject: "2.6.10-rc2-mm3"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement
People: Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm3, saying:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.10-rc2/
2.6.10-rc2-mm3/
+ It's time to shut things down for a 2.6.10 release now. I'll do another
pass through the -mm lineup for things which should go into 2.6.10.
If anyone has patches in -mm which they think should go into 2.6.10
please let me know. (particularly ppc/ppc64). The v4l patches certainly
look like they need to go in.
+ I seem to have accumulated several tens of bug reports, most of which
are post-2.6.9 and a few of which predate 2.6.9. I'll send out another
round of emails regarding that shortly. Please let's focus on these
things so we can get a good 2.6.10 out.
+ There's a pretty big revamp of the filesystem quota code in here. If
you use quotas, please test.
+ Also a larger refactoring of the DVB code. It would be appreciated if
people could avoid little cleanups in the current code while this is
under test. Testing from DVB users would be appreciated.
3. IDE And CDROM ioctl Documentation
23 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (3 posts) Subject: "[PATCH] Documentation for IDE and
CDROM ioctls."
Topics: Disks: IDE, Ioctls
People: Edward Falk, Alan Cox, Jeff Garzik
Edward Falk, continuing the ioctl documentation work covered in Issue #287,
Section #15 (18 Nov 2004: Documenting ioctls) , said:
this should about cover it. I've written two document files, and packaged
them as a patch.
Two things caught my eye while I was writing this up:
The header comments for CDROMREADRAW, CDROMREADMODE1, and CDROMREADMODE2
disagree with the actual source code. The header comments imply that a
cdrom_read structure is used to pass data, but the source code actually
reads a cdrom_msf structure and then overwrites it with raw data. I'm not
sure if there's a bug in the header comments, in the driver source, or I
misread something.
The CDROM_LOCKDOOR ioctl seems to lock/unlock all doors on all drives,
because it uses a global variable.
Jeff Garzik was very happy to see this documentation; and Alan Cox (posting
several days later) remarked that the CDROM_LOCKDOOR issue was a "Known bug/
hideous ancient vendor hack that should never have been allowed upstream."
4. MCA Maintainership
23 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (5 posts) Subject: "[2.6 patch] small MCA cleanups
(fwd)"
Topics: Disks: SCSI, MAINTAINERS File, Networking
People: David Weinehall, James Bottomley, Alan Cox, Adrian Bunk
Adrian Bunk submitted a patch to do some MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)
cleanups, but David Weinehall replied, "Being waaaaaay to busy at work to care
about MCA-related things anymore, combined with the fact that I didn't bring
along any of my old MCA-machines when I moved the last time, I've asked James
Bottomley to take over the MCA maintainership." James Bottomley posted a
MAINTAINERS patch, saying, "OK .. I said I'd do it, so here is the formal
change of the maintainer. Note that I too only have a limited subset of MCA
hardware ... the voyager systems have a kind of super MCA bus that didn't have
any of the MCA bus limitations in the original IBM spec, so a lot of the MCA HW
I have doesn't work on ordinary MCA busses. The only standard MCA cards I have
are networking ones." Alan Cox offered to "send you some SCSI, networking and
video ones if that would be useful (Ethernet/2, MCA NE2K, 3c523/7, IBM SCSI
etc)" . And James replied, "Sure ... I have buslogic SCSI, smc_mca and 3c529,
but some of the others could do with converting to the new MCA API..."
5. Linux 2.6.9-ac12 Released
26 Nov 2004 - 28 Nov 2004 (3 posts) Subject: "Linux 2.6.9-ac12"
People: Alan Cox, Arjan van de Ven
Alan Cox announced Linux 2.6.9-ac12, saying:
This -ac is a little different. It's an experimental -ac to test the
accumulated patches it would be nice to have in -ac but which might break
something and seemed too risky. As such please test it but in general wait
for the next -ac before planning to update production systems.
Arjan van de Ven is now building RPMS of the kernel and those can be found
in the RPM subdirectory and should be yum-able. Expect the RPMS to lag the
diff a little as the RPM builds and tests do take time.
The it8212 still doesn't default to DMA on - that is on the TODO list. The
HPT366 rework project is also not ready (its gone back to the drawing board
for a few days if you are a volunteer and wondered what is up).
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.6/2.6.9/
6. Mailing List Troubles
27 Nov 2004 (1 post) Subject: "VGER had a spell of email dysfunction"
People: Matti Aarnio
Matti Aarnio (one of the mailing list's postmasters) explained:
For a while VGER did answer to all MAIL FROM and RCPT TO lines of the SMTP
protocol "450 I am sick.." (actual text was something else) and thus
refused to take any email from outside and asked for latter retry. (All
proper MTAs have a queue, and they use it.)
It is amazing how many noticed the slow-down of the message flood, and
asked from VGER's postmaster (or webmaster) about the thing. Unfortunately
at this time the problem prevented the question from being delivered to
us... Linus himself knew other addresses, and got our immediate attention.
Technically: VGER's SMTP input server's one helper program had ran out of
sockets, and it didn't do correct resource rollback in all failure
situations -> it didn't heal itself.
This had started to some extent on Wednesday morning (UTC) and it went all
bad on Thursday noonish (UTC) and finally we became aware of the thing on
Friday around 18:00 UTC, analyzed the problem, and restarted relevant
subsystem. (Restart does cure some problems, this was in that group of
things.)
Accumulated queues from all over were delivered into VGER in about 10
hours, and in about the same time they were also processed (delivery
bounces and list messages, both.)
7. Linux 2.4.29-pre1 Released
27 Nov 2004 - 30 Nov 2004 (3 posts) Subject: "Linux 2.4.29-pre1 (resend)"
Topics: FS: InterMezzo, FS: JFS, I2C, Power Management: ACPI, Serial ATA, USB,
Virtual Memory
People: Marcelo Tosatti
Marcelo Tosatti announced Linux 2.4.29-pre1, saying:
This is the start of the 29th -pre cycle of the v2.4 kernel series.
Its mainly backport of driver fixes from v2.6: SATA subsystem update,
network drivers (e1000, forcedeth, 3c59x), collection of I2C corrections,
isofs large file fix, sym53c8xx_2 fixes, InterMezzo backports, JFS update,
an IA32 microcode fix, MIPS update, couple of USB changes, amongst others.
The ACPI bug which caused I2C problems has been solved.
It also contains a VM change from Andrea which improves performance on
high-end boxes making certain loads useable on those systems.
The number of changes is small and it should keep decreasing as time
passes.
8. Possible GPL Violation By iRiver
30 Nov 2004 (6 posts) Subject: "GPL violation by iRiver"
People: Marcus Metzler, Alan Cox, Wilmer van der Gaast
Marcus Metzler reported:
I recently bought an iRiver PMP-140 portable multimedia player which runs
under Linux. Unfortunately, I could neither find the offer for the source
code required by the GPL nor would the support people at iriver USA tell me
where I can get the source code. They just said that it is not possible to
get the sources. I also emailed to iRiver Germany but haven`t received an
answer yet. Has anybody else tried to contact them? If you are interested,
there is a new firmware available here (http://service.iriver.co.kr/
cs_view.asp?idx=409&page=0&p_name=PMP-140&SrchItem=&SrchString=&SrchProduct
=) (klick on PMP100kor-v201.zip).
Using string on the unzipped files shows that at least the Linux kernel and
busybox are used in the firmware.
I tried to send this email to [email protected] but it came
back with a no route to host error which I also get for the website now,
although I could load it just a half an hour ago.
What should be the next step?
Alan Cox said he hadn't tried to contact them, "but I've received various bits
of their publicity and other stuff which clearly states they are Linux based.
They've certainly not tried to hide the fact so that is promising. In fact its
archived (http://www.iriver.com/html/company/press/copr_pr_view.asp?searchField
=&searchString=&page=1&idx=51&tmpSearchField=all&tmpSearchString=) ."
Marcus replied, "I know and it never looked like they tried to hide the fact
they were using linux. But I have bought other hardware that uses linux based
firmware and they always mentioned it in there manuals even if they neglected
to offer the sources at first. There is no mention about the GPL or Linux on
their copyrights pages or anywhere else in the manual. You can find it online
on their website: http://www.iriveramerica.com/support/pmp100.aspx"
Wilmer van der Gaast remarked, "AFAIK iRiver is a Korean company (sometiems new
versions of the firmwares are also available for download there weeks before
they're on the international site), so maybe you should try to contact them
there."
End of thread.
9. inotify Version 0.16 Replacement For dnotify
30 Nov 2004 - 1 Dec 2004 (5 posts) Subject: "[patch] inotify: a replacement for
dnotify"
Topics: FS: sysfs, Ioctls
People: Robert Love
Robert Love said:
Below is a patch adding inotify to 2.6.10-rc2.
This is version 0.16.
inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify:
+ dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory that you
intend to watch. This quickly results in too many open files and pins
removable media, preventing unmount.
+ dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects the
directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of stat structures.
+ dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals?
inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:
+ inotify's interface is a device node, not SIGIO. You open a single fd
to the device node, which is select()-able.
+ inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item you were
watching is on was unmounted."
+ inotify can watch directories or files.
The primary change since the last post is the move to new per-user resource
limits. Watches are now resource limited on a per-user level, not
per-device. These limits are now configurable via sysfs.
Added the FIONREAD ioctl for querying the number of events waiting in the
queue. The maximum number of events is configurable via sysfs.
Other changes include cleanups and bug fixes (including a nasty bug with
queue overflows).
10. New Document Collection Project At OSDL
1 Dec 2004 (4 posts) Subject: "Announcing - document collection project"
Topics: Disks: IDE, Sound: ALSA
People: Timothy D. Witham, Dave Jones, Jeff Garzik, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton
Timothy D. Witham said:
In an email conversation with Alan Cox and Andrew Morton I was asked if
OSDL could create a repository for old non-NDA manuals.
I agreed that this sort of old copyrighted but never to be reprinted
documentation needs a home and even though some said it was a monster it
looked like a nice little bunny to me so .....
I've set up a little web site and have a file cabinet all ready to go.
http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendoc/index.html
I also decided that as long as I had to keep a list of hard copy
documentation in the drawer I might as well add links to companies
providing documentation and links to any groups or standards. So if you
have favorite links or your company provides developer information for open
source folks please send the link information to [email protected].
If you have an old non-NDA manual for something that you aren't the
maintainer and no longer want the responsibility of keeping coffee or pet
stains off of it. Then please follow the instructions under "Submitting
Hardcopy".
As for any other comments I welcome them. Not set on the anything just
trying to provide a service here.
Dave Jones replied, "Thanks, this has the makings of something really useful.
One comment. Links to external documentation (like the AGP reference for eg)
has the potential to 'disappear', making this resource no better than a
collection of bookmarks. A true repository would have the actual documents,
though I understand this may mean talking with the copyright holder(s)."
Timothy was open to this, assuming the copyright holders went along with it;
and Jeff Garzik remarked:
I agree this document repository has significant potential, but I also
agree with Dave: from my own direct experience, documents DO disappear.
The ALSA project routinely asks vendors if the hardware manual can be
mirrored on their FTP site, and I have been doing the same for network and
ATA drivers:
http://gkernel.sourceforge.net/specs/
Though I cannot say that all the people who gave me permission to mirror
the site are still around, to give permission to push these specs to ODSL.
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