Linus Torvalds wrote:
Ok, the two-week merge period is over, and -rc1 is out there.
I'm _really_ hoping that we can keep the 2.6.20 release calmer and without
any of the dragging-out-due-to-core-changes that we've had lately. We
didn't actually merge any really core changes here, with the biggest
conceptual one being the "work_struct" split into regular work and
"delayed" work, so I'm hoping we can really end up with an easy 2.6.20
release.
Some of the commits there are pretty big patches, but more than a couple
of them are due to fairly straightforward search-and-replace things (like
a largely scripted removal of unnecessary casts of the return value of
"kmalloc()", for example, or the switch to "ktermios" for the tty layer,
or the introduction of "struct path" in the VFS layer instead of keeping
the f_{dentry,vfsmnt} entries separate, or indeed the removal of SLAB_xxx
constant names in favour of the standard GFP_xxx ones).
So while the patch itself isn't actually all that much smaller than usual,
at least my personal gut feel is that the actual changes are not as
intrusive, just in some cases have big diffs.
But both the diffstat and the shortlog are still too big to fit in the
kernel mailing list limits, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Or
get the git repo, and do your own delving into things with
git log v2.6.19..v2.6.20-rc1 | git shortlog
There _are_ a few areas of note:
- the aforementioned "workqueue" changes (where we still have some work
to do to finalize the proper actions on all architectures: it's being
somewhat discussed on the arch mailing lists, hopefully we'll have it
all resolved by -rc2, and it doesn't really worry me)
- lockless page cache (RCU lookups of radix trees)
- kvm driver for all those crazy virtualization people to play with
- networking updates (DCCP, address-family agnostic connection tracking
in netfilter, sparse byte order annotations, yadda yadda)
- HID layer separated out of the USB stuff (bluetooth apparently wants
the HID stuff too)
- tons and tons of driver (ftape removal, ATA, pcmcia, i2c,
infiniband, dvb, networking..) and architecture updates (arm, mips,
powerpc, sh)
Did I miss an alternate method of handling ftape devices, or are these
old beasts now unsupported? I occasionally have to be able to handle
that media, since the industrial device using ftape for control updates
cost more than a small house.
I can obviously keep an old slow machine to do the job, but I'd like to
know if I need to.
--
bill davidsen <[email protected]>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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