Kernel Traffic #323 For 3 Sep 2005 By Zack Brown Table Of Contents * Standard Format * Text Format * XML Source * Mailing List Stats For This Week * Threads Covered 1. 26 Jul 2005 - 10 Aug 2005 (65 Cleaning Up The Reboot Code Path posts) 2. 28 Jul 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (94 Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3 Released posts) 3. 31 Jul 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (25 Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1 Released posts) 4. 2 Aug 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (15 Documentation On How To Apply Patches posts) Against Various Trees 5. 3 Aug 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (6 Speeding Up Directory Reads For Large posts) FAT Filesystems 6. 5 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (6 Weekly Kernel Status Summaries posts) 7. 5 Aug 2005 (5 New PCIE And SHPC Hotplug Driver posts) Maintainer 8. 7 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (10 Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1 Released posts) 9. 7 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (6 Advansys SCSI Driver Unmaintained; posts) Rocketport Driver Ailing 10. 8 Aug 2005 (1 Linux 2.4.32-pre3 Released post) 11. 8 Aug 2005 - 9 Aug 2005 (2 Some Discussion Of Submitting posts) Documentation Patches 12. 9 Aug 2005 - 11 Aug 2005 (10 New Server Hosting The linux-kernel posts) Mailing List 13. 11 Aug 2005 (1 libata PATA To-Do List post) 14. 11 Aug 2005 (18 Stable Kernel Review Cycle Begins For posts) 2.6.12.5 Mailing List Stats For This Week We looked at 2346 posts in 14MB. See the Full Statistics. There were 730 different contributors. 285 posted more than once. The average length of each message was 106 lines. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |The top posters of the week | The top subjects of the week were: | | were: | | |----------------------------+------------------------------------------------| |102 posts in 495KB by andrew| | |morton |90 posts in 588KB for "2.6.13-rc3-mm3" | |60 posts in 313KB by |47 posts in 190KB for "[patch] driver core: add | |linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org|the ability to unbind drivers to devices from | |48 posts in 187KB by |userspace" | |christoph lameter |41 posts in 166KB for "[patch 00/14] gfs" | |47 posts in 170KB by andi |33 posts in 136KB for "[patch] string | |kleen |conversions for memory policy" | |46 posts in 222KB by |30 posts in 131KB for "gfs" | |ebiederm@xmission.com | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ These stats generated by mboxstats version 2.8 1. Cleaning Up The Reboot Code Path 26 Jul 2005 - 10 Aug 2005 (65 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH 0/23] reboot-fixes" People: Eric W. Biederman Eric W. Biederman said: The reboot code paths seems to be suffering from 15 years of people only looking at the code when it breaks. The result is there are several code paths in which different callers expect different semantics from the same functions, and a fair amount of imperfect inline replication of code. For a year or more every time I fix one bug in the bug fix reveals yet another bug. In an attempt to end the cycle of bug fixes revealing yet more bugs I have generated a series of patches to clean up the semantics along the reboot path. With the callers all agreeing on what to expect from the functions they call it should at least be possible to kill bugs without more showing up because of the bug fix. My primary approach is to factor sys_reboot into several smaller functions and provide those functions for the general kernel consumers instead of the architecture dependent restart and halt hooks. I don't expect this to noticeably fix any bugs along the main code paths but magic sysrq and several of the more obscure code paths should work much more reliably. 2. Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3 Released 28 Jul 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (94 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc3-mm3" Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Networking People: Andrew Morton Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc3-mm3, saying: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc3/ 2.6.13-rc3-mm3/ * Added the anonymous pagefault scalability enhancement patches. I remain fairly dubious about this - it seems a fairly specific and complex piece of work to speed up one extremely specific part of one type of computer's one type of workload. Surely there's a better way :( The patches at present spit warnings or don't compile on lots of architectures. x86, x86_64, ppc64 and ia64 are OK. * There's a pretty large x86_64 update here which naughty maintainer wants in 2.6.13. Extra testing, please. * Dropped git-net.patch (davem's net devel tree). I'm seeing weird TCP hangs. I'm fairly sure they're present in mainline, but was unable to reproduce it without git-net.patch when I was actually trying. 3. Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1 Released 31 Jul 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (25 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc4-mm1" Topics: Kernel Release Announcement, Sound: ALSA People: Andrew Morton, Felipe Alfaro Solana, Adrian Bunk, James Courtier-Dutton Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc4-mm1, saying: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc4/ 2.6.13-rc4-mm1/ * Dropped areca-raid-linux-scsi-driver.patch and iteraid.patch. People who need these can get them from 2.6.13-rc3-mm3. * Dropped the CKRM patches. I don't think they were doing much in -mm and we didn't find many problems with them anyway. * Dropped the connector patches: turns out that we no longer have a netlink slot available for them anyway. Felipe Alfaro Solana asked, "Why was the KERNEL_VERSION(a,b,c) macro removed from include/linux/version.h? The removal breaks external drivers like NDISWRAPPER or nVidia propietary." Adrian Bunk replied, "That's their problem," and explained thta the macro had "moved to a different header file." James Courtier-Dutton asked, "Where have they moved to? This will break ALSA as well." And Adrian pointed folks to utsname.h. 4. Documentation On How To Apply Patches Against Various Trees 2 Aug 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (15 posts) Archive Link: "Documentation - how to apply patches for various trees" People: Jesper Juhl, Linus Torvalds Jesper Juhl said: How to apply the -rc, -git, -mm and the 2.6.x.y (-stable) patches is a quite frequently asked question on LKML and elsewhere. Since so many people seem to be confused by this I gathered it ought to be properly documented once and for all so we a) get more people testing those trees and b) get asked this question less often. So, I sat down and wrote such a document. Below is a patch to add a new file "applying-patches.txt" to Documentation/ This document describes each of the trees and gives examples on how to apply the various patches. Looking forward to your feedback (and possible inclusion). I guess this document could also be placed somewhere on kernel.org and linked to from the front page so that people downloading the various patches will have this information available at their fingertips. In the course of discussion, Linus Torvalds said: Can we have more whitespace? You either have very long paragraphs, or no whitespace between them: I can't quite decide which one. So leave an empty line between paragraphs (and if you already do, you need to split them ;) because it's very tiring to not have a nice break every once in the flow of text. Long paragraphs may be acceptable in fictional literary work that you read without thinking about what you're reading. There you get into the "flow" of the text, and you hopefully don't need to have very many visual breaks to keep as acnhor-points. However, the same is certainly not true in technical text, especially something like this where you're trying to explain somethign that the recipient doesn't ncessarily know. My rule of thumb is that if you don't have a new paragraph roughly every five or six lines, it's likely problematic. Maybe I have a shorter attention span than most, but I don't think so - I just find it much easier to read text that is nicely broken up, and when it's a "pure ASCII" medium the only break that works well is an empty line (possibly with indentation for further visual help - although in this context indentation tends to be used for a separate issue: examples etc, and is not good for paragraphs). And since we have a single empty line implying paragraph breaks, feel free to use multiple empty lines to imply "bigger" breaks (you seem to do this already). This email was written with an average paragraph length of 4 lines. Jesper posted an updated version with more whitespace. Various folks offered praise and suggestions for his work. 5. Speeding Up Directory Reads For Large FAT Filesystems 3 Aug 2005 - 5 Aug 2005 (6 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] Speedup FAT filesystem directory reads" Topics: Disks: IDE, FS: FAT, USB People: Karsten Wiese, Hirofumi Ogawa Karsten Wiese said: Please give this a try and commit to -mm or mainline, if approved. Summary: This speeds up directory reads for large FAT partitions, if the buffercache has to be filled from the drive. Following values were taken from: $ time find path_to_freshly_mounted_fat > /dev/null on an otherwise idle system. FAT with 16KB Clusters on IDE attached drive: Factor 2 FAT with 32KB Clusters on USB2 attached drive: Factor 10 (!) Its less than 1/10 slower, if the buffercache is uptodate. The patch touches 3 areas: * fat_bmap() returns the sector's offset in the cluster or a negativ error code instead of 0 or the negativ error code. It's callers are changed accordingly. * fat__get_entry() calls sb_breadahead() to readahead a whole cluster, if the requested sector is the first one in a cluster. It is usefull to do this, because on FAT directories occupy whole clusters. Readahead is only done, if the cluster's first sector is not uptodate to avoid overhead, when the buffer cache is already uptodate. Note that on memory pressure, the maximal byte count wasted (read: has to be red from disk twice) is 1 cluster's size. Thats 64KB. Hirofumi Ogawa offered his own updates to Karsten's patch, which Karsten accepted gratefully, resubmitting the updated patch. 6. Weekly Kernel Status Summaries 5 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (6 posts) Archive Link: "kernel status, 4 Aug 2005" Topics: Bug Tracking, Disk Arrays: RAID, Disks: IDE, FS: NFS, FS: ReiserFS, FS: sysfs, I2C, I2O, Kernel Build System, Networking, Power Management: ACPI, SMP, Serial ATA, Software Suspend, Sound, USB People: Andrew Morton Andrew Morton said: At kernel summit I pledged to put out weekly where-we're-at summaries, mainly so that subsystem maintainers could get an estimate of when the next major kernel release will be, so they can plan their merge windows. Of course, I don't have a clue when the next release will be because the timing is driven by perception-of-stability. But I can guess. Current kernel version: 2.6.13-rc5-git3 ETA for 2.6.13: August 12-19 Status of subsystem trees: 3190002 git-acpi.patch 68299 git-alsa.patch 96 git-arm.patch 100 git-arm-smp.patch 31799 git-audit.patch 113 git-cpufreq.patch 14257 git-cryptodev.patch 107590 git-drm.patch 122 git-drm-via.patch 112 git-ia64.patch 109 git-input.patch 32153 git-ipsec.patch 4781 git-jfs.patch 41254 git-kbuild.patch 21659 git-libata-adma-mwi.patch 17964 git-libata-chs-support.patch 36338 git-libata-ncq.patch 21535 git-libata-passthru.patch 3944 git-libata-promise-sata-pata.patch 91 git-libata-upstream-fixes.patch 85 git-libata-upstream.patch 96 git-mmc.patch 7729 git-mtd.patch 255866 git-netdev-chelsio.patch 10606 git-netdev-e100.patch 1290162 git-netdev-ieee80211-wifi.patch 48220 git-netdev-sis190.patch 4899 git-netdev-smc91x-eeprom.patch 132 git-netdev-upstream-fixes.patch 178991 git-netdev-upstream.patch 955 git-net-gregkh-i2c-w1-netlink-callbacks-fix.patch 443989 git-net.patch 101 git-nfs.patch 119 git-ntfs.patch 1321859 git-ocfs2.patch 88683 git-scsi-block.patch 331078 git-scsi-misc.patch 121 git-scsi-rc-fixes.patch 34584 git-serial.patch 1890 git-sparc64.patch That's all 2.6.14 material - no subsystem merges pending. Open bugs: This is based on my reading of what's real and of what's worth attending to. Quite a few things get culled up-front. There are several emailed bug reports which are probably live bugs but they have gone stale hence I have asked the reporters to raise bugzilla reports, so more post-2.6.12 bugs will appear as the reporters retest 2.6.13-rc6. I really don't want to have to track bugs which aren't in bugzilla. If an emailed bug report comes in and we can address it within a few days and a few emails then fine. If that doesn't happen I'll be asking reporters to open bugzilla reports. All bugs reported prior to the 2.6.12 release have been discarded. I'll henceforth track bugs across succeeding major release, so this list will just grow. There are 60 bugs here. They're almost all post-2.6.12 regressions. Longer-term we simply have to do better than this, else we'll stabilise at a pretty buggy level. No matter what process changes we make, the bottom line is that developers/maintainers will need to spend more of their time working with reporters on fixing bugs. If you wish to provide an update on one of the below bugs, please do it in bugzilla if it's bugzilla-based. Or in reply to the original email thread if it's email-based. Failing all that, please at least rewrite the Subject: when replying so I don't lose my mind, thanks. Lots of USB stuff, some ACPI and we seem to have broken parallel-IDE. idr_remove Looks like SELinux is removing IDR entries which don't exist. [Bugme-new] [Bug 4768] New: Screen appears at mid-right section http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4768 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4769] New: PC104plus BT848 card stop working in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4769 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4771] New: Linux 2.6.11.10 + reiserfs + usrquota, http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4771 Re: 2.6.12-rc6-mm1 This is the note: mono[26736] exited with preempt_count 1 scheduling while atomic: mono/0x10000001/26736 x86_64 bug. [Bugme-new] [Bug 4773] New: 8139too module got "eth0: transmit http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4773 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4776] New: uhci_hcd: host controller halted, http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4777] New: Cyrix 6x86MX PR200+ incorrectly http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4777 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4779] New: amd64: raw1394 returns EINVAL http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4779 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4781] New: Conservative governor makes me lose my http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4781 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4791] New: ACPI + SERIO_I8042 bug/conflict http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4791 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4793] New: Battery reads result in high cpu usage http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4793 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4823] New: alsa modules snd_virmidi & snd_mpu401 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4823 variable used before set Silly scsi bug. 2.6.12-rc6 mm->total_vm accounting imbalance? Might be fixed [Bugme-new] [Bug 4829] New: Problem with sym53c8xx_2 and target http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4829 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4831] New: Bad soundcard patches for Intel ICH4 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4831 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4851] New: x86-64 userspace random segfaults and http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4851 AACRAID failure with 2.6.13-rc1 Might be fixed [Bugme-new] [Bug 4853] New: pf: Oops with Imation SuperDisk http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4853 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4860] New: sata_sx4 doesn't recognize Promise http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4860 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4866] New: motherboard ga-k8nf-9: ehci_hcd doesn't http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4866 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4869] New: Screen stays blank upon resume http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4869 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4880] New: dpt_i2o.c does not register itself with http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4880 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4888] New: kernel 2.6.12.2 will only do audio when http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4888 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4916] New: USB mouse stops working after inserting http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4916 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4917] New: Lacie 250Go USB http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4917 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4919] New: APM resume: freeze at disk access http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4919 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4920] New: IDE CD Driver not able to read audio http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4920 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4929] New: problem with aic7xxx driver on 2.6.x http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4929 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4940] New: Repeatable Kernel Panic on Adaptec http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4940 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4944] New: uhci_hcd hangs on intel 810 when http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4944 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4950] New: battery state don't change http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4950 [Bug 4951] System freezes with SMP kernel on AMD X2 4600 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4951 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4962] New: ? http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4962 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4963] New: Encounter this Kernel oops while http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4963 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4965] New: Dual-head not working correctly with http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4965 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4966] New: ehci_hcd on x86_64 causes more than http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4966 .13 mptfusion changes. mpt-fusion needs initrd rework and will break existing userspace. sysfs double entry. duplicate entries in /sys/devices/system/ [Bugme-new] [Bug 4968] New: sata_nv buffer I/O errors http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4968 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4971] New: dual head and 2.6.13rc4 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4971 Re: [linux-usb-devel] Fw: BUG: Kernel panic when disconnecting Edirol USB2 audio interface 2.6.13-rc4 - kernel panic - BUG at net/ipv4/tcp_output.c:918 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4974] New: ide2usb adapter do not working with usb http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4974 Re: 2.6.13-rc4 use after free in class_device_attr_show [Bugme-new] [Bug 4978] New: Failed to allocate mem resource for AGP http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4978 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4981] New: changes in 2.6.12-rc1 causes ati-remote http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4981 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4982] New: Usenet gateway crashes under heavy http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4982 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4983] New: Paralell ZIP disappearing http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4983 Re: aio-fix-races-in-callback-path.patch added to -mm tree [Bugme-new] [Bug 4992] New: Power off stops http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4992 lpfc: system freezing if FC connection is broken under load MCE problem on dual Opteron PROBLEM: reproductible oops, NFS, gigabit network, x86_64 b44 transmit timeout with kernel 2.6 [Bugme-new] [Bug 4998] New: "init 0" broken between 2.6.12 and http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4998 Regression: radeonfb: No synchronisation on CRT with linux-2.6.13-rc5 [Bugme-new] [Bug 5000] New: fan always on after waking from swsusp http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5000 Re: tungsten t5 doesn't sync anymore with kernel 2.6.12 [Bugme-new] [Bug 5001] New: USB: usblp must be unloaded before Scanner is available, MFP Epson CX3650 (& Epson CX6600) http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5001 7. New PCIE And SHPC Hotplug Driver Maintainer 5 Aug 2005 (5 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] new contact info" Topics: Hot-Plugging, MAINTAINERS File, PCI People: Bjorn Helgaas Kristen Carlson Accardi of Intel posted a patch to update a lot of maintainer information in various source files in the PCI Hotplug area, to list her as maintainer instead of Dely L. Sy (also of Intel). Bjorn Helgaas asked for a patch to the MAINTAINERS file as well, and Kristen accomodated, listing herself as the PCIE hotplug driver maintainer, and the SHPC hotplug driver maintainer. 8. Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1 Released 7 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (10 posts) Archive Link: "2.6.13-rc5-mm1" Topics: Bug Tracking, Disks: SCSI, FS: CacheFS, Kernel Release Announcement, Sound: ALSA People: Andrew Morton, Rog?rio Brito, James Bottomley Andrew Morton announced Linux 2.6.13-rc5-mm1, saying: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc5/ 2.6.13-rc5-mm1/ (Grab it from http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/2.6.13-rc5-mm1.gz until the kernel.org mirrors catch up) * Added the git-scsi-iscsi.patch tree: iSCSI drivers (James Bottomley) * This kernel is broken on ia64: the spinlock consolidation patch needs fixing. * The acpi development tree is back in -mm. * Dropped cachefs and the cachefs-for-AFS patches. These get in the way of memory management testing a bit, and they're being redone anyway. Rog?rio Brito replied: Thanks Andrew, for including the vfat speedup patch. It has really improved a lot the performance of access to directories having many subdirectories in an external Firewire HD that I have. I'd say that if others don't have problems with it, then it should be in 2.6.13, as far as I am concerned. BTW, everything is working fine with the sbp2/ieee1394 drivers that are in the mm tree. It seems that there are some issues with ALSA, though. I will report back as soon as I see if these are userland problems or not (it worked fine with vanilla 2.6.13-rc5). Andrew replied that it was probably too late for this to get into 2.6.13, but would be likely to get into 2.6.14. He added, "thanks for testing and reporting. Our turnaround time for ALSA fixes is not fantastic, really, so any problems which we currently have will probably carry over into 2.6.13. If you can raise a bugzilla record for any problems in -rc6 I'll make sure they aren't forgotten." 9. Advansys SCSI Driver Unmaintained; Rocketport Driver Ailing 7 Aug 2005 - 8 Aug 2005 (6 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] Removing maintainer's bad e-mails" Topics: Disks: SCSI, MAINTAINERS File People: Dave Jones, Adrian Bunk, Kurt Wall Jiri Slaby posted a patch to remove some bogus emails from the MAINTAINERS file, under the Advansys SCSI driver, and the Rocketport driver. Dave Jones remarked, "You may as well change the S: to unmaintained whilst you're there, it hasn't seen any updates in a long time, and still uses several out-of-date SCSI APIs." Adrian Bunk added, "Or he could completely remove the entry. We don't have entries for every single unmaintained driver, and the smaller MAINTAINERS is the higher is the possibility of not missing a relevant entry when checking whom to send an email." Jiri posted a new patch, to remove the Advansys entry altogether, and take out the incorrect Rocketport email. He credited Rolf Eike Beer with identifying the busted Rocketport email. At one point, Kurt Wall said, "Hmm, so if a subsystem or driver (more drivers, I should think) lacks an entry in MAINTAINERS, is it then reasonable to assume that it is unmaintained? If not, perhaps creating a separate list of unmaintained subsystems and/or drivers is prudent?" Adrian replied: For unmaintained drivers or drivers maintained by the subsystem maintainers (which can be the reason why there's no entry for this driver) contact the subsystem maintainer. Unmaintained subsystems are a problem. I've already started contacting subsystem maintainers that seem to be inactive, and I have some restructuring of MAINTAINERS (tree structure with drivers behind subsystems) on my TODO list. 10. Linux 2.4.32-pre3 Released 8 Aug 2005 (1 post) Subject: "Linux 2.4.32-pre3" Topics: Compression, Networking, USB People: Marcelo Tosatti, Patrick McHardy, Jeff Garzik, Linus Torvalds, Lars Marowsky-Bree, Alan Stern, i810_audio, John W. Linville Marcelo Tosatti announced Linux 2.4.32-pre3, saying: Here goes v2.4.32-pre3. It contains several v2.6 backported fixes, amongst them: * libata update * networking fixes (most notably Netfilter) Please refer to the changelog for the detailed information Summary of changes from v2.4.32-pre2 to v2.4.32-pre3 ============================================ Aaron Grothe: Fix XTEA implementation Alan Stern: Revert USB UHCI changes Aleksey Gorelov: Fix incorrect Asus k7m irq router detection bdupree@techfinesse.com: Fix Alpha AXP Cabriolet build deep-blue@t-online.de: fix RedBlackTree rb_next/rb_prev functions Harald Welte: Remove bogus declaration of ipt_mutex Horms: ppc32: stop misusing ntps time_offset value Jeff Garzik: libata: update to 2.6.x latest John W. Linville: i810_audio: use MMIO on systems that support it i810_audio: offset LVI from CIV to avoid stalled start Ju, Seokmann: megaraid2 v2.10.10.1 Lars Marowsky-Bree: fix oops when starting md multipath 2.4 kernel Linus Torvalds: PATCH: Fix outstanding gzip/zlib security issues Marcelo Tosatti: Change VERSION to v2.4.32-pre3 Merge rsync://rsync.kernel.org/.../davem/net-2.4 Patrick McHardy: [NETFILTER]: Use correct byteorder in ICMP NAT [NETFILTER]: Fix potential memory corruption in NAT code (aka memory NAT) [NETFILTER]: Fix ip6t_LOG sit tunnel logging [NETFILTER]: Restore netfilter assumption in IPv6 multicast [NETFILTER]: Fix deadlock with ip_queue/ip6_queue [NETFILTER]: Ignore PSH on SYN/ACK in ipt_unclean Willy TARREAU: fix potential NULL dereferences in several serial driver methods (Julien Tinnes) 11. Some Discussion Of Submitting Documentation Patches 8 Aug 2005 - 9 Aug 2005 (2 posts) Archive Link: "Documentation maintainer?" People: Pierre Ossman, Jesper Juhl, Andrew Morton Pierre Ossman asked, "Who should be cc:d for document additions? It's a brand new document, not updates to an existing one. I sent it out without any cc at all (Subject: [PATCH] ISA DMA API documentation) which got some attention, but not from anyone with the possibility to commit it would seem." Jesper Juhl replied, "I don't think there's a central documentation maintainer as such. I recently submitted a brand new document myself and added Andrew Morton to CC since he's the overall 2.6 maintainer, and Andrew has been kind enough to add my document to the -mm tree for starters. Hopefully it'll then migrate onto mainline eventually." 12. New Server Hosting The linux-kernel Mailing List 9 Aug 2005 - 11 Aug 2005 (10 posts) Archive Link: "VGER news" Topics: Version Control People: Matti Aarnio, Petr Vandrovec, David S. Miller, Lee Revell, Willy Tarreau Matti Aarnio said: Folks at Dell have donated a new machine to be VGER, and folks at RedHat have installed it into co-location facility with 1000Mbps network connection into the machine. This update got considerable performance increase into the machine for our list loads. In terms of Bogomips around 7-8, but for actual loads nearly twice as much. We did system switchover last weekend, and nobody reacted trulu adversely. Probably nobody noticed it either. :-) Petr Vandrovec replied, "Ah, that's the reason why commit messages are now sent from git-commits-head-owner@vger.kernel.org instead of from bk-commits-head-owner@vger.kernel.org like they were until Friday ?" But Matti said, "That is probably something else. Davem may have changed list name at this time as well." And David S. Miller confirmed, "Yes, I did a s/bk-/git-/ on those list names last week while I was in the UK due to popular request." Elsewhere, several folks were already impressed by the performance increase. Lee Revell said, "It's definitely faster. Lately I have had a few replies to list messages where the reply hit LKML several minutes before my inbox. This *never* happened before the changeover." And Willy Tarreau added, "OK, I better understand now why the message I posted this morning from mutt on tty1 was already caught by the other mutt when I switched to tty2 to check other messages on the list. I can imagine that from now, we'll get a very good interactivity again." 13. libata PATA To-Do List 11 Aug 2005 (1 post) Archive Link: "libata PATA todo list" Topics: Disks: IDE, PCI People: Jeff Garzik Jeff Garzik said: Since there's been some recent interest in the subject, I thought I would post the PATA todo list for libata. Some of these items are from my memory, and some are from a list Alan was kind enough to create. The items verbatim from Alan are prefixed "Alan: ". 1. Locked device/host speed To support devices such as those in the ide/pci/generic.c list, we need to ensure that libata -never- attempts to change the device speed (ata_dev_set_xfermode should be avoided). 2. Simplex DMA PCI IDE specification has a 'simplex' DMA bit, which should be tested. Simplex means that only one command can be outstanding, for BOTH port0 and port1, at any given time. Possibly some hosts also need Simplex DMA, but may not assert the standard PCI IDE Simplex DMA capability bit. I don't know. 3. Speed change on error Downshift device to a slower UDMA speed, and eventually from DMA->PIO, as errors persist. There is no 'specified way' to do this, this is purely hueristic. 4. Alan: Command filter Alan -- explanation? I know one line item here, at least: Promise controllers snoop SET FEATURES - XFER MODE command. We must stop command processing on ALL ports when this command is issued, to avoid corruption. 5. Alan: MWDMA broken still? is piix doc correct? 6. Alan: some PATA LBA48 devices cannot do > 256 sectors. 7. Alan: Some ALi requires LBA48 be done via PIO. LBA28 DMA is OK. 8. ATAPI device CDB interrupt Some older ATAPI devices require the OS driver to wait for an interrupt, after CDB is written, before command processing proceeds. 9. ATAPI devices may delay setting DRQ=1 for up to 3ms. Make sure we honor the delay noted in IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE word 0. 10. ATAPI DMA alignment (discussed elsewhere) Needed even for PATA, AFAICT. 14. Stable Kernel Review Cycle Begins For 2.6.12.5 11 Aug 2005 (18 posts) Archive Link: "[patch 0/8] -stable review" Topics: Compression, SMP People: Chris Wright, Eric W. Biederman, Peter Osterlund, Andi Kleen Chris Wright said: This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 2.6.12.5 release. There are 8 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let us know. If anyone is a maintainer of the proper subsystem, and wants to add a signed-off-by: line to the patch, please respond with it. These patches are sent out with a number of different people on the Cc: line. If you wish to be a reviewer, please email stable@kernel.org to add your name to the list. If you want to be off the reviewer list, also email us. Responses should be made by Sat, Aug 13, 22:00 UTC. Anything received after that time, might be too late. The changelogs were attached at the top of each patch: 1. A kernel BUG() is triggered by a call to set_mempolicy() with a negative first argument. This is because the mode is declared as an int, and the validity check doesnt check < 0 values. Alternatively, mode could be declared as unsigned int or unsigned long. 2. This fixes a bug in SRAT handling on AMD systems that was introduced with the dual core support. It would be disabled on CPUs without dual core. Just drop the bogus check. 3. It's not the real deflateBound() in newer zlib libraries, partly because the upcoming usage of it won't have the "stream" available, so we can't have the same interfaces anyway. This uses the new deflateBound() thing to sanity-check the input to the zlib decompressor before we even bother to start reading in the blocks. Problem noted by Tim Yamin 4. from hanging future joins in the D state [CAN-2005-2098]. The problem is that the error handling path for the KEYCTL_JOIN_SESSION_KEYRING operation has one error path that doesn't release the session management semaphore. Further attempts to get the semaphore will then sleep for ever in the D state. This can happen in four situations, all involving an attempt to allocate a new session keyring: 1. ENOMEM. 2. The users key quota being reached. 3. A keyring name that is an empty string. 4. A keyring name that is too long. Any user may attempt this operation, and so any user can cause the problem to occur. None of the above had any objections raised against them. However, two others posted by Chris did. The first had the following changelog: introduced in 2.6.12. Please apply to stable. From Eric Biederman sync_tsc was using smp_call_function to ask the boot processor to report it's tsc value. smp_call_function performs an IPI_send_allbutself which is a broadcast ipi. There is a window during processor startup during which the target cpu has started and before it has initialized it's interrupt vectors so it can properly process an interrupt. Receveing an interrupt during that window will triple fault the cpu and do other nasty things. Why cli does not protect us from that is beyond me. The simple fix is to match ia64 and provide a smp_call_function_single. Which avoids the broadcast and is more efficient. This certainly fixes the problem of getting stuck on boot which was very easy to trigger on my SMP Hyperthreaded Xeon, and I think it fixes it for the right reasons. Andi Kleen noticed a bug in the patch, fairly trivial to fix. Chris thanked him for the heads up and said he'd fix it in the tree, instead of requiring an additional submission. And Eric W. Biederman, who authored the change, added, "Someone needs to send the patch to Linus for 2.6.13 as well. Is someone else going to or should I. I knew I was confused about physical versus logical apic ids when I generated the patch." The second of Chris's stable tree patches to find criticism had the following changelog: a) http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-gnu-utils/1999-06/msg00183.html b) http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94584 Peter Osterlund asked: Why does this 6 year old bug have to be fixed in the 2.6.12 stable series? Doesn't the patch violate this stable series rule? * It must fix a real bug that bothers people (not a, "This could be a problem..." type thing.) Maybe the motivation was just missing from the patch description? Chris replied, "These can manifest as possible overflow (1st one, given CAN-2005-2458), or NULL deref (2nd one given CAN-2005-2459), which could have possible security consequences." Sharon And Joy Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.