kernel news – 04.07.2013

-Ted Ts’o calls for topics for the annual kernel summit:

The annual Kernel Summit for 2013 will be held October 23rd through
the 25th in Edinburgh, overlapping with LinuxCon Europe (which will be
held October 21th through the 23rd) at the Edinburgh International
Conference Centre in the United Kingdom.

The format of the Kernel Summit will be:

* Wednesday: Break out sessions/workshops in parallel with LinuxCon Europe
* Thursday: Core plenary sessions
* Friday: Dual-track technical sessions

As we did last year, we are issuing this general call for proposals
to attend from which we’ll select most of the Kernel Summit attendees.
We will be trying to cap the attendance at around 80-100 for the last
two days of the session, so please get your request in early!

Suggestions for topics should be sent before July 19th, 2013. Please
send them to

ksummit-2013-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org

Please summarize what expertise you will bring to the meeting, and
what you’d like to discuss. If there are people whom you believe
would be important to have for your proposed topic, please include
them. Please also tag your e-mail with [ATTEND] so we can easily pick
them out, and use separate e-mail messages for each proposed topic, so
that mail threads for each topic can be kept separate. Sending one or
more [ATTEND] messages will be considered a request to attend the
kernel summit.

Requests to attend will be looked upon more favorably if you also
participate in the discussion of topics at:

ksummit-2013-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org

You can subscribe to the list using mailman:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-2013-discuss

The best topics for the kernel summit tend to focus on topics which
are not appropriate for any of the subsystem-specific workshops or
minisummits, and which can not be easily resolved using the normal
e-mail and IRC channels. These include issues about our overall
development process, and topics which span multiple subsystems.

For reference, previous years’ kernel summit agendas can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/kernelsummit2012/agenda

https://sites.google.com/site/kernelsummit2011/agenda

-kmod 14 is released:

Some bug fixes and a new “static-nodes” command to parse
modules.devname. It was a very calm release cycle.

For the reasoning behind removing “–enable-static”: this caused
problems in real world with people linking to libkmod and since it’s
not recommended it has been disabled. I wrote to linux-modules and
systemd-devel mailing lists a while back on how to fix it if anybody
cares. Otherwise it stays disabled.

-Greg KH announces kernels 3.0.85, 3.4.52 and 3.9.9 .

-Benjamin Herrenschmidt has powerpc updates:

This is the powerpc changes for the 3.11 merge window. In addition to
the usual bug fixes and small updates, the main highlights are:

– Support for transparent huge pages by Aneesh Kumar for 64-bit server
processors. This allows the use of 16M pages as transparent huge pages
on kernels compiled with a 64K base page size.

– Base VFIO support for KVM on power by
Alexey Kardashevskiy

– Wiring up of our nvram to the pstore infrastructure, including
putting compressed oopses in there by Aruna Balakrishnaiah

– Move, rework and improve our “EEH” (basically PCI error handling
and recovery) infrastructure. It is no longer specific to pseries but is
now usable by the new “powernv” platform as well (no hypervisor) by
Gavin Shan.

– I fixed some bugs in our math-emu instruction decoding and made it
usable to emulate some optional FP instructions on processors with hard
FP that lack them (such as fsqrt on Freescale embedded processors).

– Support for Power8 “Event Based Branch” facility by Michael Ellerman.
This facility allows what is basically “userspace interrupts” for
performance monitor events.

– A bunch of Transactional Memory vs. Signals bug fixes and HW
breakpoint/watchpoint fixes by Michael Neuling.

And more … I appologize in advance if I’ve failed to highlight
something that somebody deemed worth it.