• Free
• join
• auto
• surf
• traffic
• exchange
• online

The web-graphics RSS feed has a new address, please update: http://web-graphics.com/index.xml

Andrew Morton [interview] posted an overview of patches in -mm, discussing what is destined for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.18 Linux kernel. He noted, "there is an unusually large amount of difficult material here." Patch sets that were discussed include a cleanup of kernel headers, klibc, various subsystem cleanups, the ACX1xx wireless driver, swsup cleanups, per-task statistic metrics, a clocksource management infrastructure, smpnice, swap prefetching [story], priority-inheriting futexes, a revamp of /proc/pid, ecryptfs, utsname virtualization [story], readahead, reiser4 improvements, a statistics infrastructure, and lock validation code.

Following up on a couple of features discussed earlier on KernelTrap, both swap-prefetching and utsname virtualization were briefly discussed. In regards to swap-prefetching Andrew noted, "I remain skeptical, but I have a lot of RAM. Multiple people have sung its praises. I guess I'll re-review and tentatively plan on sending them along or 2.6.18. Opinions are sought." As for utsname virtualization, "this doesn't seem very pointful as a standalone thing. That's a general problem with infrastructural work for a very large new feature. So probably I'll continue to babysit these patches, unless someone can identify a decent reason why mainline needs this work. I don't want to carry an ever-growing stream of OS-virtualisation groundwork patches for ever and ever so if we're going to do this thing... faster, please."

• We exist to provide the global
• computer graphics community with the best
• training, technology and talent in the. . .
  read more:

Nigel Cunningham submitted his suspend2 patches [story] to the lkml for review and inclusion into Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm tree [story]. Jens Axboe summarized the current roadblocks to merging suspend2, "now I haven't followed the suspend2 vs swsusp debate very closely, but it seems to me that your biggest problem with getting this merged is getting consensus on where exactly this is going. Nobody wants two different suspend modules in the kernel. So there are two options - suspend2 is deemed the way to go, and it gets merged and replaces swsusp. Or the other way around - people like swsusp more, and you are doomed to maintain suspend2 outside the tree."

Greg KH pointed out that the current focus with swsusp is to move the functionality from the kernel into userspace, called uswsusp, "Pavel and others have a working implementation and are slowly moving toward adding all of the 'bright and shiny' features that is in suspend2 to it (encryption, progress screens, abort by pressing a key, etc.) so that there is no loss of functionality." Nigel countered that only some of swsusp is being moved to userland, adding, "and there _is_ loss of functionality - uswsusp still doesn't support writing a full image of memory, writing to multiple swap devices (partitions or files), or writing to ordinary files. They're getting the low hanging fruit, but when it comes to these parts of the problem, they're going to require either smoke and very good mirrors (eg the swap prefetching trick), or simply refuse to implement them." Pavel Machek, maintainer of swsusp and uswsusp, replied item by item to Nigel's list of suspend2 advantages noting that uswsusp now has or soon will have the same capabilities. It was further noted that the submitted patches will need to be consolidated into logical pieces and resubmitted for proper review.