The latest 2.5 status update is available for your enjoyment.
Highlights of this week are some work on initialization and
booting getting more mature, as well as Rik's new reverse
mapping getting ready for inclusion soon.
Check out what's new at http://kernelnewbies.org/status/
Enjoy!
-- Guillaume
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Kernel 2.5 status - April 3rd, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.7)
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)
o 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)
o 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)
o in 2.5.7 Futexes (Fast Lightweight Userspace Semaphores) (Rusty Russell, etc.)
o in 2.5.7+ NAPI network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim,
Robert Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov)
o in 2.5.7+ ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) (Andy Grover, ACPI team)
o Pending Finalize new device naming convention (Linus Torvalds)
o in -dj Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o in -ac Strict address space accounting (Alan Cox)
o in -ac PCMCIA Zoom video support (Alan Cox)
o in -ac More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist,
from Procom donated code)
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 Ready Better event logging for enterprise systems (Larry Kessler, evlog
team)
o Ready New quota system supporting plugins (Jan Kara)
o Ready Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Ready New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o Ready Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman)
o Ready First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman)
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 Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
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 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 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)
o Beta ext2/ext3 online resize support (Andreas Dilger)
o Beta Radix-tree pagecache (Momchil Velikov,
Christoph Hellwig)
o Beta Fast walk dcache (Hanna Linder)
o Beta Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o Beta UDF Write support for CD-RW and CD-R (Jens Axboe, Peter
Osterlund)
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 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)
o Alpha Delayed disk block allocation (Andrew Morton)
o Alpha Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer (Alan Cox)
o Alpha New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Patrick Mochel)
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)
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 Alpha Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Patrick Mochel)
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!