3.11 merge window part 2

As of this writing, Linus has pulled 8,275 non-merge changesets into the mainline repository for the 3.11 development cycle. Once again, a lot of the changes are internal improvements and cleanups that will not be directly visible to users of the kernel. But there has still been quite a bit of interesting work merged since last week's summary.

Some of the more noteworthy user-visible changes include:

• There is a new "soft dirty" mechanism that can be employed by user space to track the pages written to by a process. It is intended for use by the checkpoint/restart in user space code, but other uses may be possible; see Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt for details.

• The Smack security module now works with the IPv6 network protocol.

• The ICMP socket mechanism has gained support for ping over IPv6.

• The ptrace() system call has two new operations (PTRACE_GETSIGMASK and PTRACE_SETSIGMASK) to retrieve and set the blocked-signal mask.

• 64-Bit PowerPC machines can now make use of the transparent huge pages facility.

• The kernel NFS client implementation now supports version 4.2 of the NFS protocol. Also supported on the client side is labeled NFS, allowing mandatory access control to be used with NFSv4 filesystems.

• The kernel has new support for LZ4 compression, both in the cryptographic API and for compression of the kernel binary itself.

• Dynamic power management support for most AMD Radeon graphics chips (the r600 series and all that came thereafter) has been merged. It is a huge amount of code and is still considered experimental, so it is disabled by default for now; booting with the radeon.dpm=1 command-line option will turn this feature on for those who would like to help debug it.

• The low-latency network polling patches have been merged after a last-minute snag.

• The Open vSwitch subsystem now supports tunneling with the generic routing encapsulation (GRE) protocol.

• New hardware support includes:
  • Graphics: Renesas R-Car display units and AMD Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" graphics processors.

  • Input: Huion 580 tablets, ELO USB 4000/4500 touchscreens, OLPC XO-1.75 and XO-4 keyboards and touchpads, and Cypress TrueTouch Gen4 touchscreens.

  • Miscellaneous: Toumaz Xenif TZ1090 pin controllers, Intel Baytrail GPIO pin controllers, Freescale Vybrid VF610 pin controllers, Maxim MAX77693 voltage/current regulators, TI Adaptive Body Bias on-chip LDO regulators, NXP PCF2127/29 real-time clocks, SiRF SOC real-time clocks, Global Mixed-mode Technology Inc G762 and G763 fan speed PWM controller chips, Wondermedia WM8xxx SoC I2C controllers, Kontron COM I2C controllers, Kontron COM watchdog timers, NXP PCA9685 LED controllers, Renesas TPU PWM controllers, and Broadcom Kona secure DHCI controllers.

  • Networking: Allwinner A10 EMAC Ethernet interfaces, Marvell SD8897 wireless chipsets, ST-Ericsson CW1100 and CW1200 WLAN chipsets, Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ac QCA98xx wireless interfaces, and Broadcom BCM6345 SoC Ethernet adapters. There is also a new hardware simulator for near-field communications (NFC) driver development.

  • Sound: Realtek ALC5640 codecs, Analog Devices SSM2516 codecs, and M2Tech hiFace USB-SPDIF interfaces.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• Two new device callbacks — offline() and online() — have been added at the bus level. offline() will be called when a device is about to be hot-unplugged; it should verify that the device can, indeed, be unplugged, but not power the device down yet. Should the unplug be aborted, online() will be called to put the device back online. The purpose behind these calls is to ensure that hot removal can be performed before committing to the action.

• The checkpatch utility has a new, experimental --fix option that will attempt to automatically repair a range of simple formatting problems.

The merge window should remain open for the better part of another week. Next week's Kernel Page will include a summary of the final changes pulled into the mainline for the 3.11 development cycle.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/3.11

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