Kernel Traffic #326 For 5�Sep�2005

I really wanted to release a 2.6.13, but there's been enough changes while we've been waiting for other issues to resolve that I think it's best to do a -rc7 first.

Most of the -rc7 changes are pretty trivial, either one-liners or affecting some particular specific driver or unusual configuration. The shortlog (appended) should give a pretty good idea of what's up.

This is a work-in-progress version of the SPU file system.

Since the previous version, a lot of features have been added and a number of bugs has been fixed. We now support doing read() on the /run file to start executing code on an SPU. Some files have been added to give access to more hardware features, especially the signal notification channels.

Most importantly, we now have a working context save and restore functionality for SPEs, which is written by Mark Nutter and will eventually lead to having a scheduler for SPUs in the kernel. Since this has grown the file system a lot, I now split it up into a few smaller patches.

Within the next weeks, we will do some larger reworks on the code base, so this version is probably the last one that is binary compatible to the earlier releases.

If you have specific requirements that are not met by spufs in its present incarnation, now would be a good time to tell us.

I never really thought of it as a device driver but rather an architecture extension, so it started out in arch/ppc64/kernel. Since most of the code is interacting with VFS, it is now in fs/spufs. I don't really care about the location, but I among the possible places to put the code (with the unified arch/powerpc tree), I'd suggest (best first)

1. arch/powerpc/platforms/cell
2. arch/powerpc/spe
3. fs/spufs
4. drivers/spe

1) would be the place where I want to have the low-level code (currently arch/ppc64/kernel/spu_base.c) anyway, so it makes sense to have everything in there that I maintain.

2) might work better if we at a later point have multiple platform types in arch/powerpc that use SPEs, e.g if we want to keep Playstation code separate from generic Cell.

I have been working on a driver for the IBM Hard Drive Active Protection System (HDAPS), which provides a two-axis accelerometer and some other misc. data. The hardware is found on recent IBM ThinkPad laptops.

The following patch adds the driver to 2.6.13-rc6-mm2. It is self-contained and fairly simple.

Let me be clear, it has an init routine that effectively probes for the device.

It just lacks a simple quick non-invasive check.

The driver will definitely fail to load on a laptop without the requisite hardware.

First, I am not asking that Linus merge this. Everyone needs to relax.

Second, we don't know a DMI-based solution will work. I'll check it out.

We (the -stable team) are announcing the release of the 2.6.12.6 kernel. This is final one for 2.6.12 now that 2.6.13 has been released.

The diffstat and short summary of the fixes are below.

I'll also be replying to this message with a copy of the patch between 2.6.12.5 and 2.6.12.6, as it is small enough to do so.

The updated 2.6.12.y git tree can be found at:
rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/chrisw/linux-2.6.12.y.git
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
www.kernel.org/git/

Summary of changes from v2.6.12.5 to v2.6.12.6
==============================================

Bhavesh P. Davda: NPTL signal delivery deadlock fix

Chris Wright:
Linux 2.6.12.6

Herbert Xu:
Restrict socket policy loading to CAP_NET_ADMIN - CAN-2005-2555

Jan Blunck:
sg.c: fix a memory leak in devices seq_file implementation (2nd)

lepton:
fix gl_skb/skb type error in genelink driver in usbnet

Linus Torvalds:
Revert unnecessary zlib_inflate/inftrees.c fix

Patrick McHardy:
Fix DST leak in icmp_push_reply()
Fix SKB leak in ip6_input_finish()

Here goes the 8xx PCMCIA driver, originally written by Magnus Damm, with several improvements and fixes.

The driver was merged in v2.4 but never forward ported to v2.6.

Please review, comments are welcome (including aesthetic enhancements).

Nice to see that this driver gets forward ported to 2.6. I originally wrote it for pcmcia-cs, but it made its way into 2.4 after a while. Thanks to all the people who added code and fixes.

I'm not sure how the current Linux pcmcia layer works, and I am not involved in powerpc land anymore so I have no comments on the porting work or the driver itself.

During the Kernel Summit somebody raised the point that it's not clear how much testing each rc/pre/git kernel gets before the final release.

So I setup a server to track automatically the amount of testing that each kernel gets. Clearly this will be a very rough approximation and it can't be reliable, but perhaps it'll be useful. If this won't be useful, the time I spent on it is very minor so no problem ;).

All the details can be found in the project website:

http://klive.cpushare.com/

Full source (server included) is here:

http://klive.cpushare.com/downloads/klive-0.0.tar.bz2

To run the client:

wget http://klive.cpushare.com/klive.tac

Then at every boot (like in /etc/init.d/boot.local):

twistd -oy klive.tac

In theory we could get rid of the client entirely and make it a kernel config option, but I've no idea if this project is useful, so I don't want to spend too much time on it at this point.