The 3.5 merge window opens

Shortly after the release of the 3.4 kernel, Linus started the entire process all over again for the 3.5 development cycle; over 2,500 changesets were pulled into the mainline on the first day, and 4,600 have been merged as of this writing. It looks like it will be an interesting cycle with a lot of new stuff coming in and the removal of a bunch of old cruft. As of this writing, user-visible changes pulled for 3.5 include:

• The TCP connection repair interface, useful for the implementation of checkpoint/restart functionality, has been merged.

• The networking stack has gained support for RFC 5827 early retransmit, a mechanism aimed at speeding recovery from packet loss.

• The CoDel queue management algorithm, which, hopefully, will be an important component in the solution to the bufferbloat problem, has been merged.

• The seccomp filters mechanism has been merged; it allows processes to reduce the set of available system calls through the use of a mechanism based on the Berkeley packet filter. See Documentation/prctl/seccomp_filter.txt for details.

• The Yama security module has two increasingly restrictive modes for controlling access to the PTRACE_ATTACH functionality.

• The logging reliability patch set has been merged.

• The NUMA scheduler has been rewritten with the result that it will make different, hopefully better scheduling decisions. Also, as has been threatened for some months, the power-aware scheduling code has been removed in the hope that somebody will replace it with something that actually works.

• A lot of code has been removed in this development cycle, including the ixp2000 Ethernet driver, support for the sun4c SPARC CPU, the ip_queue netfilter module (superseded by nfnetlink_queue), all support for token ring networking, drivers for all MCA-based network cards, support for the Econet protocol, support for ARMv3 processors, support for Intel IXP2xxx (XScale) processors, support for ST-Ericsson U5500 development boards, the Motorola 68360 serial port driver, and the workqueue tracer.

• New drivers include:
  • Processors and systems: Blackfin BF609-based boards, and Renesas Armadillo-800 EVA and KZM-A9-GT boards.

  • Miscellaneous: TI TPS65090 power regulators, TI Palmas series power management chips, RICOH RC5T583 power regulators, Freescale MXS, IMX6Q, IMX53 and IMX51 IOMUX controllers, ST Microelectronics SPEAr3xx pin controllers, Renesas Emma Mobile SoC GPIO controllers and integrated serial ports, Intersil ISL29028 concurrent light and proximity sensors, TAOS TSL/TMD2x71 and TSL/TMD2x72 light and proximity sensors, Analog Devices AD8366 variable gain amplifiers, and Atmel AT91 analog to digital converters.

  • Network: WIZnet W5100 and W5300 adapters, Marvell Avastar 88W8797 wireless chipsets, Emulex One Connect InfiniBand-over-Ethernet controllers, and GCT Semiconductor GDM72xx WiMAX controllers.

  • USB: Marvell PXA USB OTG controllers, Broadcom BCMA and SSB host controllers, NXP ISP1301 USB transceivers, and NXP LPC32XX USB peripheral controllers. Also added is a "configurable composite gadget" driver that allows user-space configuration of enabled functions.

  • Staging graduations: the industrial I/O (IIO) core has moved into drivers/iio; VME drivers are now in drivers/vme, and the Intel management engine interface (MEI) driver is now in drivers/misc.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• The many variants of the NLA_PUT() macro used with netlink have been removed. Code should use one of the nla_put() versions instead and make its error handling explicit.

• The mac80211 layer has gained support for MBSS mesh synchronization.

• There is new core support for the writing of near-field communication (NFC) drivers using the HCI specification; see Documentation/nfc/nfc-hci.txt for details.

• The "regmap" subsystem, which centralizes the handling of banks of device registers, now has support for registers in I/O memory.

• The pin control subsystem now has full device tree support.

• The Android "switch" class has been brought into the mainline and extended into a general "external connector" framework.

• The "ramoops" mechanism has been reworked to use the pstore interface.

If the usual schedule holds, this merge window can be expected to close around June 4. Watch this space next week for coverage of the next sets of patches to be pulled into the mainline for the 3.5 development cycle.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/3.5

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