[STATUS 2.5] March 13, 2002

[Guillaume Boissiere]

Spring must be on the way because a there has been a lot of activity
and merging in the past week.  
As usual, the gory details are at http://kernelnewbies.org/status/

The "Merged" category is growing steadily, now accounting for more
than 30% of the items in the list, which means 2.6 is well under
way.

If you don't see your favorite feature in there or if you can spot 
any inaccuracy, wave your hand.
Enjoy!

-- Guillaume

-------------------------------------------------
Kernel 2.5 status  -  March 13th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.7-pre1)

Features:

Merged
o in 2.5.1+   Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer             (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.2    Initial support for USB 2.0                     (David Brownell, Greg 
Kroah-Hartman, etc.)
o in 2.5.2    Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups      (Al Viro, Manfred Spraul)
o in 2.5.2+   New scheduler for improved scalability          (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.2+   New kernel device structure (kdev_t)            (Linus Torvalds, etc.)
o in 2.5.3    IDE layer update                                (Andre Hedrick)
o in 2.5.3    Support reiserfs external journal               (Reiserfs team)
o in 2.5.3    Generic ACL (Access Control List) support       (Nathan Scott)
o in 2.5.3    PnP BIOS driver                                 (Alan Cox, Thomas Hood, 
Dave Jones, etc.)
o in 2.5.3+   New driver model & unified device tree          (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.4    Add preempt kernel option                       (Robert Love, MontaVista 
team)
o in 2.5.4    Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading     (NGPT team)
o in 2.5.4+   Porting all input devices over to input API     (Vojtech Pavlik, James 
Simmons)
o in 2.5.5    Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)    (ALSA team)
o in 2.5.5    Pagetables in highmem support                   (Ingo Molnar, Arjan van de 
Ven)
o in 2.5.5    New architecture: AMD 64-bit (x86-64)           (Andi Kleen, x86-64 Linux 
team)
* in 2.5.5    New architecture: PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64)        (Anton Blanchard, ppc64 
team)
o in 2.5.6    Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM)        (JFS team)
o in 2.5.6    per_cpu infrastructure                          (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.6    HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update      (Krzysztof Halasa)
* in 2.5.6    smbfs Unicode and large file support            (Urban Widmark) 
o in 2.5.7    New driver API for Wireless Extensions          (Jean Tourrilhes)
o in 2.5.7    Video for Linux (V4L) redesign                  (Gerd Knorr)
* in 2.5.7    Futexes (Fast Lightweight Userspace Semaphores) (Rusty Russell, etc.)

o Pending     Finalize new device naming convention           (Linus Torvalds)
o in -ac      32bit UID quota support                         (Jan Kara)
o in -dj      Rewrite of the framebuffer layer                (James Simmons)

o Ready       Add User-Mode Linux (UML)                       (Jeff Dike)
o Ready       Add hardware sensors drivers                    (lm_sensors team)
o Ready       New kernel config system: CML2                  (Eric Raymond)
o Ready       Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion               (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty 
Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)

o Beta        New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5)            (Keith Owens)
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 XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI)      (XFS team)
o Beta        New VM with reverse mappings                    (Rik van Riel)
o Beta        Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency  (Andrew Morton, Robert 
Love, etc.)
o Beta        Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT)      (Karim Yaghmour)
o Beta        Better event logging for enterprise systems     (evlog team)
o Beta        Add Linux Security Module (LSM)                 (LSM team)
o Beta        Hotplug CPU support                             (Rusty Russell)
o Beta        Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)
o Beta        EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System)      (EVMS team)
o Beta        LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0               (LVM team)
o Beta        Linux booting ELF images                        (Eric Biederman)
o Beta        First pass at LinuxBIOS support                 (Eric Biederman)
o Beta        Dynamic Probes                                  (Suparna Bhattacharya, 
dprobes team)
o Beta        Scalable CPU bitmasks                           (Russ Weight)
o Beta        Page table sharing                              (Daniel Phillips)
o Beta        Rewrite of the console layer                    (James Simmons)
* Beta        ext2/ext3 online resize support                 (Andreas Dilger)
* Beta        Radix-tree pagecache                            (Momchil Velikov, 
Christoph Hellwig)
o Beta        Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver    (Anton Altaparmakov)
* Beta        Fast walk dcache                                (Hanna Linder)

o Alpha       Better support of high-end NUMA machines        (NUMA team)
o Alpha       Add Asynchronous IO (aio) support               (Ben LaHaise)
o Alpha       Overhaul PCMCIA support                         (David Woodhouse, David 
Hinds)
o Alpha       More complete IEEE 802.2 stack                  (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist, 
from Procom donated code)
o Alpha       Full compliance with IPv6                       (Alexey Kuznetzov, Jun 
Murai, Yoshifuji Hideaki, USAGI team)
o Alpha       UMSDOS (Unix under MS-DOS) Rewrite              (Al Viro)
o Alpha       Scalable Statistics Counter                     (Ravikiran Thirumalai)
o Alpha       Linux Kernel Crash Dumps                        (Matt Robinson, LKCD team)
o Alpha       Add support for NFS v4                          (NFS v4 team)
o Alpha       ext2/ext3 large directory support: HTree index  (Daniel Phillips, 
Christopher Li, Ted Ts'o)
* Alpha       Delayed disk block allocation                   (Andrew Morton)

o Started     More complete NetBEUI stack                     (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, 
from Procom donated code)
o Started     Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock)         (Alan Cox, Robert Love, 
Neil Brown, etc.)
o Started     Change all drivers to new driver model          (All maintainers)
o Started     Reiserfs v4                                     (Reiserfs team)
o Started     Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface         (ISDN4Linux team)

o Draft #2    New lightweight library (klibc)                 (Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o Draft #3    Replace initrd by initramfs                     (H. Peter Anvin, Al Viro)
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)
o Planning    New mount API                                   (Al Viro)
o Planning    New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver    (Dave Jones)

Cleanups:

Merged
o in 2.5.3    Break Configure.help into multiple files        (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.3    Untangle include file dependancies              (Dave Jones, Roman Zippel)
o in 2.5.4    Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h         (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o in 2.5.4    Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h                 (Daniel Phillips, Jeff 
Garzik, Al Viro)
o in 2.5.6    Killing kdev_t for block devices                (Al Viro)

o Ready       Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type    (Al Viro)
o Ready       ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes  (Al Viro)
o Ready       Remove dcache_lock                              (Maneesh Soni, IBM team)

o Beta        file.h and INIT_TASK                            (Benjamin LaHaise)
o Beta        Proper UFS fixes, ext2 and locking cleanups     (Al Viro)
o Beta        Lifting limitations on mount(2)                 (Al Viro)

o Started     Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces      (Dave Jones, Randy Dunlap)
o Started     Reorder x86 initialization                      (Dave Jones, Randy Dunlap)

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!