4.10 Merge window part 2
shaping up to be on the smaller side". As of this writing, 11,087 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for 4.10. So this release isn't shaping up to be all that small in the end. It will not match 4.9 (which saw 14,308 changesets during the merge window), but it will be comparable with most other recent development cycles.
Just over 4,000 of those changes have been pulled since last week's summary. Some of the more interesting user-visible changes merged since then are:
- "Fail fast" support has been added to
the MD RAID subsystem. If a
drive starts showing errors in a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, it
will be immediately marked bad and avoided, thus avoiding long delays
while error recovery is attempted.
- The XFS barrier and nobarrier mount options don't
actually do anything in current kernels; they have been deprecated
with removal targeted for 4.15 or later.
- The UBIFS filesystem now supports encryption.
- Tracepoint filters have long supported simple wildcard matching; in
4.10, that has been expanded to something closer to the file-name
matching supported by shells.
- There is a new crypto device in the virtio subsystem, allowing the
provision of cryptographic operations to virtualized guests.
- The PowerPC architecture has gained support for the
kexec_file_load() system call
and for compilation with stack protection.
- The logfs filesystem, unmaintained for
years and seemingly unused, has been removed from the kernel.
- The kernel's integrity measurement
subsystem has been extended with the ability to carry the measurement
list across a soft reboot of the system. The measurement depends on
TPM PCR registers, and those are only reset in a hard boot, so
validation after a soft reboot requires this capability.
- New hardware support includes:
- Audio:
Cirrus Logic CS35L34 and CS42L42 codecs,
Cirrus Logic wm8581 codecs,
Qualcomm MSM8916 WCD analog codecs,
Qualcomm MSM8916 WCD digital codecs,
Axentia TSE-850 transmitter station equipment,
Realtek rt5665 codecs, and
Allwinner sun8i codec analog controls.
- Input:
ASUS I2C touchpads and
THQ PS3 uDraw tablets.
- Miscellaneous: HiSilicon BVT pulse-width modulators, VMware paravirtualized RDMA adapters, Mellanox CPLD-based I2C multiplexers, IMX low-power I2C interfaces, ARC 32-bit timers, NVIDIA Tegra boot and power management processors, NVIDIA Tegra generic memory interfaces, Texas Instruments da8xx DDR2/mDDR memory controllers, TI system control interfaces, Renesas fine display processors, Oxford Semiconductor OXNAS NAND controllers, Tango NAND flash controllers, and EPSON TOYOCOM RTC-7301SF/DG realtime clocks.
- Audio:
Cirrus Logic CS35L34 and CS42L42 codecs,
Cirrus Logic wm8581 codecs,
Qualcomm MSM8916 WCD analog codecs,
Qualcomm MSM8916 WCD digital codecs,
Axentia TSE-850 transmitter station equipment,
Realtek rt5665 codecs, and
Allwinner sun8i codec analog controls.
Changes visible to kernel developers include:
- The crypto layer includes a new "acomp" subsystem to perform asynchronous compression of data; several algorithms are supported. For the time being, the only documentation available is the kerneldoc comments in this commit.
At this point, the flow of changes into the mainline has slowed
significantly; most maintainers appear to have respected Linus's request to
get their pull requests in early. The 4.10-rc1 release can be expected on
or before December 25; chances are that there will be few additional
significant changes during that time. Should any happen, though, they will
be summarized in the January 5 edition.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/4.10 |
Posted Dec 23, 2016 6:51 UTC (Fri)
by citypw (guest, #82661)
[Link]
Posted Jan 5, 2017 5:53 UTC (Thu)
by [email protected] (subscriber, #60682)
[Link]
Posted Jan 9, 2017 4:01 UTC (Mon)
by jd (subscriber, #26381)
[Link] (1 responses)
I use a wide range of filesystems. By using multiple mountpoints, old-style, I can choose a filesystem whose characteristics best match the requirements of a particular section of the directory tree.
So, for example, I see no value in a journalled filesystem for /tmp - there's nothing in it that needs preserving between reboots. You want fast reads and writes on short files, but that's it.
For database files, you want reliable recovery/fallback, database engines are a good deal slower than most filesystems, corruption affects way too much and can be difficult to impossible to recover from, and databases suffer from fragmentation so migration is not an issue and may even reduce the problem. Logfs is an obvious choice.
Nilfs seems to be best for /var/log, as you can not only detect tampering but revert to what was there prior to the editing.
So logfs is valuable, but because it's valuable only in critical situations, having it unmaintained is worse than not having it at all. Given I tend to use Linux for all kinds of freaky stuff, that's always going to be true for me.
No, I'm not going to press for it to be added back. Partly because I'm a very minor nobody in Linux development, but also because if I'm the only one interested, I should maintain my own copy out-of-tree. Complexity is the enemy of stability and security. I care about technology getting showcased, but that's been done and the verdicts recorded.
Posted Jan 9, 2017 4:06 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
4.10 Merge window part 2
arm64: split thread_info from task stack:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linu...
4.10 Merge window part 2
enables endian-ness checks for all sparse builds. You no longer
need to request it with __CHECK_ENDIAN__, and all drivers are
expected to get endian tags correctly.
4.10 Merge window part 2
4.10 Merge window part 2
Except that most databases already have native transaction logs and recovery mechanisms. And log-structure filesystems slow down databases immensely.