Kernel Traffic #290 by Zack Brown
[email protected] Mon, 03 Jan 2005 09:25:24 -0800
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Kernel Traffic #290 For 3 Jan
By Zack Brown
Table Of Contents
* Standard Format
* Text Format
* XML Source
* Mailing List Stats For This Week
* Threads Covered
1. 11 Nov 2004 - 18 Nov 2004 (72 Copyright Assignments For ReiserFS
posts) And XFS
2. 30 Nov 2004 - 14 Dec 2004 (53 Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm4 Released
posts)
3. 1 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (22 Status Of IBM HD Shock Detection
posts)
4. 9 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (2 posts) Disk ioctl Documentation
5. 10 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (8 posts) SquashFS Likely To Go Into Official
Tree
6. 11 Dec 2004 (1 post) Linux 2.6.9-ac15 Released
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 1325 posts in 8550K.
There were 386 different contributors. 198 posted more than once. 170 posted
last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
* 93 posts in 659K by Adrian Bunk
* 40 posts in 249K by Andrew Morton
* 40 posts in 219K by Greg KH
* 35 posts in 272K by Jesper Juhl
* 33 posts in 673K by Roland Dreier
* Full Stats
1. Copyright Assignments For ReiserFS And XFS
11 Nov 2004 - 18 Nov 2004 (72 posts) Subject: "2.6.10-rc1-mm5"
Topics: FS: ReiserFS, FS: XFS, Kernel Release Announcement
People: Adrian Bunk, Linus Torvalds, Christoph Hellwig, Hans Reiser, Andrew
Morton
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.10-rc1-mm5, with no spectacular changes, and
Adrian Bunk noticed the following copyright statement in the Reiser 3 and 4
code:
Reiser4 is hereby licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.
Source code files that contain the phrase "licensing governed by reiser4/
README" are "governed files" throughout this file. Governed files are
licensed under the GPL. The portions of them owned by Hans Reiser, or
authorized to be licensed by him, have been in the past, and likely will be
in the future, licensed to other parties under other licenses. If you add
your code to governed files, and don't want it to be owned by Hans Reiser,
put your copyright label on that code so the poor blight and his customers
can keep things straight. All portions of governed files not labeled
otherwise are owned by Hans Reiser, and by adding your code to it, widely
distributing it to others or sending us a patch, and leaving the sentence
in stating that licensing is governed by the statement in this file, you
accept this.
Adrian said:
I have no problem with dual-licensed code, but I do strongly dislike having
this "unlike you explicitley state otherwise, you transfer all rights to
Hans Reiser" in the kernel.
Besides the fact that giving the copyright completely away is nothing that
is legally possible in at least Germany, I'm not happy with having to check
every single file in the source tree for additional licence clauses before
editing it - and then to consider whether my contribution might deserve a
copyright label according to my local law.
Linus Torvalds replied:
I don't see any reasonable alternatives. The alternative is for Hans Reiser
to not be able to merge with the kernel, which is kind of against the
_point_ of having a dual license.
If the wording grates or assignment is an issue (and yes, in the US you
technically really need to have an express _signed_ assignment, implied
assignments just don't work), asking people to make their changes PD
instead might work (they'd obviously immediately be subsumed under the GPL
as far as the kernel is concerned, but would allow the dual-licensing to
continue to work).
That said, I don't think at least _this_ particular area has been
problematic, because quite frankly, very few people end up working on other
peoples filesystems, so as far as I can tell, almost all reiserfs fixes
have really been mainlt due to interface changes, nothing else. So
assignment of copyright etc doesn't really ever become an issue, if only
because copyrights require a bit of actual artistic value ;)
Christoph Hellwig pointed out:
If you touch e.g. XFS for a non-trivial change you'll also get a mail from
SGI politely asking to assign your copyright. Doing this implicit is IMHO a
reall bad thing.
IF you really think it's something we should do the least thing to do is to
put a BIG WAIVER into every file for which this is in effect.
He added that a few years ago, Hans Reiser took the same route as SGI, instead
of the current implicit assignment. At one point down the thread, Hans replied:
Please understand it as the emphasis is on don't obscure and distort my
definition in my labeling of the code of what I have copyrights to. I
believe that for that reason, a court would allow it. I could be wrong.
That is why I ask everyone I detect for a copyright assignment, still to
this day. I don't 100% trust the code acceptance process to guarantee that
I will catch everyone....
In a world with SCOs, we need to be over careful not under careful about
such things.
2. Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm4 Released
30 Nov 2004 - 14 Dec 2004 (53 posts) Subject: "2.6.10-rc2-mm4"
Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Virtual Memory
People: 2.6.10-rc2-mm4, Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.10-rc2-mm4, saying:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.10-rc2/
2.6.10-rc2-mm4/
+ Various fixes and cleanups
+ A decent-sized x86_64 update.
+ x86_64 supports a fourth VM zone: ZONE_DMA32. This may affect memory
reclaim, but shouldn't.
3. Status Of IBM HD Shock Detection
1 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (22 posts) Subject: "[WISHLIST] IBM HD Shock Detection
in Linux"
People: Robert Love, Ian Soboroff, Lee Revell, Alan Cox, Shawn Starr
Shawn Starr asked if anyone was working on IBM's HD shock detection; Lee Revell
had never heard of this, and Robert Love explained:
Modern ThinkPads have accelerometers in their hard drives that detect
sudden movement and spin down the drive or otherwise protect it.
The device is pretty basic, though, and you can just read it directly to
watch the movement of your laptop. E.g., pick your laptop up and a little
icon in your GNOME panel can show an up arrow. Pretty neat.
I am sure Google has more information.
Ian Soboroff added:
This needs to be added to the input layer!
Till Harbaum wired up an accelerometer inside his Palm Pilot, then wrote a
marble rolling game that you could play by tilting the palm to move the
marble. http://www.harbaum.org/till/palm/adxl202/index.html
Kay Sievers gave a link to an IBM whitepaper (ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/
pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/aps2mst.pdf) on shock detection. Shawn asked for more
technical details, and Lee kvetched, "Exactly. All the IBM people on this list
and not one remotely useful post. I can contact [email protected] or something
if I want a bunch of fluff. That whitepaper is just a user level guide for the
Windows driver ferchrissake. Obviously it's a motion detector on the
motherboard. How do we freaking TALK to it? As in, what bits to we write to
what registers to do what." Kay suggested reverse-engineering the Windows
driver, but Lee retched into his hand, and suggested that Shawn ask IBM for the
data-sheet. Alan Cox remarked at this point, "IBM are still really really bad
about external data sheets and the like. I spent over three years chasing IBM
for docking station chip information."
4. Disk ioctl Documentation
9 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (2 posts) Subject: "[PATCH] final polish on disk ioctl
documentation"
Topics: Disks: IDE, Ioctls
People: Edward Falk, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
Edward Falk, continuing the work covered in Issue #287, Section #15 (
18 Nov 2004: Documenting ioctls) and Issue #288, Section #3 (23 Nov 2004: IDE
And CDROM ioctl Documentation) , posted a patch to polish off disk ioctl
documentation; and Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz applied it.
5. SquashFS Likely To Go Into Official Tree
10 Dec 2004 - 13 Dec 2004 (8 posts) Subject: "[Announce] Squashfs 2.1 released
(compressed filesystem)"
Topics: Access Control Lists, FS: SquashFS, FS: ramfs, Feature Freeze
People: Phillip Lougher, Greg KH, Willy Tarreau
Phillip Lougher said:
I'm pleased to announce the release of Squashfs 2.1. This release
introduces indexed directories which considerably speed up directory lookup
(ls, find, etc.) for directories which are greater than 8K in size. All
directories are now also sorted alphabetically which further speeds up
directory lookup.
Many smaller improvements have also been made in this release, and there
are, for the first time, the results of some tests of Squashfs lookup and I
/O performance against Zisofs, Cloop, and CRAMFS.
For further details please go to the project page http://
squashfs.sourceforge.net.
Willy Tarreau was very excited by all this, and said his own tests showed great
performance results. He also pointed out that SquashFS wouldn't compile with
GCC versions prior to version 3, and posted a small patch to address that
issue. Phillip said he'd do another release, to take care of the compiler
incompatibilities.
Elsewhere, Greg KH asked, "Are you going to submit this fs for inclusion in the
main kernel tree? I'm getting tired of maintaining it as part of the Gentoo
kernel patch set :)" Phillip replied:
Good question... When I originally released Squashfs (Oct 2002) the 2.5
kernel had just gone into the feature freeze and I was waiting for the
unfreeze that would happen when 2.7 arrived. As the official stance on
additions to 2.6 has been relaxed I have thought about submitting it.
I need to tidy up the code a bit before I submit it to the merciless
scrutiny of LKML :-) Nothing bad (I hope) but there's lots of long lines
and I do know LKML'mers like 80 columns.
I'm planning on adding ea/acl support (people have been asking for them), I
can't decide whether to submit it now or wait until I've finished them.
Suggestions and advice would be welcome.
Slightly off topic, I've noticed you're the kernel maintainer for Gentoo.
You mentioned somewhere you're down to 4 kernel patches, including
Squashfs? :) A lot of people/projects are now using Squashfs and it would
help a lot of people (and me) if it did get into the kernel. Plus it would
be a nice thing for me anyway to have finally got it included.
Greg urged Phillip to submit SquashFS now, because "it's self contained
(doesn't patch anything outside it's own directory), and is useful in it's
current state for a lot of people." Regarding SquashFS in Gentoo, Greg
explained:
Yes, squashfs is one of the four non-bugfix patches in the Gentoo kernel
2.6 kernel package.
For those who are interested, the other three are:
+ fbsplash, the "next-gen" version of bootsplash. No more image decoders
in kernelspace (compared to bootsplash), and a few more features.
+ speakup, a driver package for visually-impaired users.
+ vesafb-tng, a "next-gen" version of vesafb-tng.
+ inotify.
Ok, there are now 5 patches, I forgot we addeed inotify recently to make
the Gnome developers happy.
6. Linux 2.6.9-ac15 Released
11 Dec 2004 (1 post) Subject: "Linux 2.6.9-ac15"
People: Alan Cox, Arjan van de Ven
Alan Cox announced Linux 2.6.9-ac15, saying:
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 HPT366 rework project is also not ready (its gone back to the drawing
board until the current panic is over 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/
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