3.5 merge window part 2

The 3.5 merge window continued in full force after last week's summary, with another 4,000 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline since then; there have now been over 8,600 changes merged for 3.5, and the merge window is not done yet. The most significant user-visible changes are:

• The autosleep patch set, implementing Android-style opportunistic suspend (with a different API) has been merged. Associated with this work is a new epoll flag (EPOLLWAKEUP) which causes a wakeup event to be activated, preventing suspend when an event is available for processing.

• The user namespace rework gets the kernel closer to being able to safely run processes as root within a container.

• RAID10 arrays managed by the MD layer can now be reshaped.

• After years of attempts, the uprobes subsystem has been merged. See this article for more information on the version of uprobes that was merged for 3.5.

• The tmpfs filesystem now supports hole punching and the SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE lseek() options.

• The removal of old code continues; victims include Microchannel bus support, legacy CRIS RTC drivers, the imxmmc driver, the swap token code, and the lumpy reclaim mechanism.

• New drivers include:
  • Systems and processors: Renesas SH7264, SH7269, and SH7734 processors, ST SPEAr13xx processors, Atheros DB120 reference boards, and Lantiq FALCON processors.

  • Audio: Freescale MC13783 codecs, Cirrus Logic CS42L52 low power stereo codecs, LAPIS Semiconductor ML26124 codecs, TI LM49453 codecs, and ST Ericsson Ux500-based audio platform devices.

  • Block: Cirrus Logic EP93xx PATA controllers.

  • Graphics: Aspeed Technologies AST 2000, 2100, 2200, 2150 and 2300 chips, MGA G200 server engines, and QEMU-emulated Cirrus GPUs.

  • Input: I2C-based Wacom tablets, National Semiconductor LM8333 keypad controllers, Dialog DA9052/DA9053 touchscreen controllers, and Synaptics NavPoint touchpads on PXA27x SSP ports.

  • Miscellaneous: STA2X11 "ConneXt" I/O hubs, Power 7+ Nest crypto accelerators, Texas Instruments INA219 and INA226 power management chips, Intel Atom E6xx watchdogs, Intel MSIC mixed signal gpio controllers, RICOH RC5T583 GPIO controllers, Samsung Exynos I/O memory management units, and Dialog DA9052 watchdogs.

  • Multi-function chipsets: Maxim Semiconductor MAX77693 PMICs, Intel ICH LPC bridges, ST Microelectronics ConneXt (STA2X11) I/O hubs, and National Semiconductor / TI LM3533 lighting power chips.

  • Network: NXP PN544 NFC controllers.

  • Video4Linux: Infineon TUA 9001 silicon tuners, Afatech AF9033 DVB-T demodulators, Afatech AF9035 based DVB USB receivers, Fitipower FC0011 silicon tuners, LG Electronics LG216x-based ATSC-MH demodulators, Fitipower FC0012 and FC0013 silicon tuners, STA2x11 video input ports, and SMIA++/SMIA-compliant sensors.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• The kernel's exception table can now be sorted at build time, speeding the boot process somewhat.

• The ALSA core now supports "dynamic PCM" devices, being audio devices split into front and back ends which allow arbitrary routing of audio data between the front and back end devices.

• The contiguous memory allocator patch set, designed to make life easier on systems where large chunks of physically-contiguous memory are needed on occasion, has been merged at last. The same pull included a complete rework of the ARM DMA mapping subsystem, adding CMA support and support for I/O memory management units.

• The DMA buffer sharing subsystem has gained support for mapping buffers into user space. Also added is a new dma_buf_vmap() function for mapping buffers (using the vmalloc() area) into kernel space.

• <asm/word-at-a-time.h> has been significantly reworked (by Linus) to be more efficient on all architectures; strnlen_user() has then been rewritten to use it in a generic manner.

• The LED subsystem now supports one-shot timed operation; see ledtrig-transient.txt for details.

• The error detection and correction (EDAC) subsystem has been massively reworked to better handle contemporary processors and memory controllers.

As of this writing, the 3.5 merge window has a few more days left to run. The final article in this series will come out once the merge window has closed.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/3.5

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