[STATUS 2.5] January 23, 2002

Guillaume Boissiere (boissiere@mediaone.net)
Wed, 23 Jan 2002 01:23:39 -0500


Lots of new things this week. First, a new URL that (yes!) people can
bookmark:

http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/status.html

Many thanks to John Levon, Rik van Riel and the folks at kernelnewbies.org
for providing the hosting! You guys rock.

Also, lots of new features (in bold) have been added this week. Hopefully,
most of the *truly* important stuff should be in the list now, maybe except
a few things (nfs4? scsi?). Otherwise, if more features get added than
merged any given week, 2.5 is going to be long in the coming :-)

Finally, I have to admit the amount of feedback I have received has been
incredible and has helped improve this list dramatically, so big thanks
to everyone who has sent me pointers, keep doing it. My main concern right
now is to keep this status list to a reasonnable size, otherwise it will
become unmanageable. My plan is pretty simple, I will only accept:

1. A major feature, i.e. *lots* of people are anxious to get this in the
2.5 tree because they will use it (i.e kbuild or NAPI)
OR
2. A feature/cleanup that touches critical parts of the kernel and
requires lots of people to know about it because they will be affected
--> i.e. good communication of status is important (i.e some of the
VFS work).

In short, don't bother sending me driver updates...
And as usual, let me know of any inaccuracies, and I'll be happy to
correct them.

Cheers,

-- Guillaume

-------------------------------------------------------------
Kernel 2.5 status - January 23th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.3-pre3)

Features:

o Merged New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar, Davide Libenzi)
o Merged Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer (Jens Axboe)
o Merged New kernel device structure (kdev_t) (Linus Torvalds, etc)
o Merged Initial support for USB 2.0 (David Brownell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, others)
* Merged Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups (Al Viro, Manfred Spraul)
o Merged IDE layer update (Andre Hedrick)
o Merged New driver API for Wireless Extensions (1/2) (Jean Tourrilhes)

o Pending Finalize new device naming convention (Linus Torvalds)
o in -dj Porting all input devices over to input API (Vojtech Pavlik, James Simmons)

o Ready Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o Ready HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update (Krzysztof Halasa)
o Ready Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) (ALSA team)
* Ready Support reiserfs external journal (Reiserfs team)
* Ready Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team)
o Ready Add preempt kernel option (Robert Love)

o <1 month New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5) (Keith Owens)
o <1 month New kernel config system: CML2 (Eric Raymond)

o Beta Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling (Erik Mouw, Dave Jones, Russell King, Arjan van de
Ven)
o Beta Serial driver restructure (Russell King)
o Beta New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe)
o Beta NAPI Network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim, Robert Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov)
o Beta Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM) (JFS team)
o Beta Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
o Beta New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o Beta Add resheduling points to remove latency (Andrew Morton)
o Beta Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)
o Beta Better event logging for enterprise systems (evlog team)
* Beta Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team)
* Beta Generic ACL (Access Control List) support (Nathan Scott)
* Beta Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
* Beta Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)

o Alpha Better support of high-end NUMA machines (NUMA team)
o Alpha Add Asynchronous IO (aio) support (Ben LaHaise)
o Alpha EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) (EVMS team)
o Alpha Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse, David Hinds)
o Alpha Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Alpha More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist, from Procom donated code)
* Alpha LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0 (Heintz Mauelshagen, Andreas Dilger, LVM team)
* Alpha Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty Russell, LSE Team)
* Alpha Full compliance with IPv6 (Alexey Kuznetzov, Jun Murai, Yoshifuji Hideaki,
USAGI team)
* Alpha Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman)
* Alpha First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman)
* Alpha UMSDOS Rewrite (Al Viro)

o Started Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o Started New driver model & unified device tree (Patrick Mochel)
o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
o Started More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, from Procom donated code)

o Draft #2 New lightweight library (klibc) (Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o Draft #3 Replace initrd by initramfs (H. Peter Anvin, Al Viro)
o Planning Change all drivers to new driver model (All maintainers)
o Planning Add thrashing control (Rik van Riel)
o Planning Remove all hardwired drivers from kernel (Alan Cox, etc)
o Planning Generic parameter/command line interface (Keith Owens)
* Planning Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) (Alan Cox, Robert Love, Neil Brown, others)
* Planning New mount API (Al Viro)

Cleanups:

o Ready Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
* Ready Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type (Al Viro)
* Ready ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes (Al Viro)

o Beta file.h and INIT_TASK (Benjamin LaHaise)
* Beta Remove dcache_lock (Maneesh Soni, IBM team)
* Beta Proper UFS fixes, ext2 and locking cleanups (Al Viro)
* Beta Lifting limitations on mount(2) (Al Viro)

o Started Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h (Daniel Phillips, Jeff Garzik)
* Started Killing kdev_t for block devices (Al Viro)

Have some free time and want to help? Check out the Kernel Janitor TO DO list for a list of source code
cleanups you can work on. A great place to start learning more about kernel internals!

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