Re: Linux 2.6.20-rc1

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

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 <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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