The 2.6.23 stragglers

Linus has closed the 2.6.23 merge window. Before that happened, however, a few more patches slipped through:

• New drivers for LM93 hardware monitoring chips, SMSC DME1737 hardware monitoring chips, AMD5536 UDC USB controllers, OpenMoko Neo1973 audio controllers, Renesas SH7760 audio controllers, SEGA Dreamcast Yamaha AICA PCM sound devices, Cyrix Geode 5530 audio controllers, PS3 audio controllers, Xbox 360 pad LEDs, Fujitsu serial touch screens, Simtek STK17TA8 timekeeping chips, and GPIO-connected LEDs.

• The UIO API for the creation of simple device drivers in user space has been merged.

• Japanese and Chinese versions of Documentation/HOWTO and stable_api_nonsense.txt have been added to the tree. There is resistance to carrying translated versions of kernel documents in general, but it is hoped that translations of some of the introductory documents will help new developers to join the process.

• The Lguest virtualization mechanism has been merged. Puppies for everybody!

• Process entries in /proc now have a coredump_filter file which controls which memory areas will be written out should a core dump become necessary.

• The on-demand readahead patches have finally found their way into the mainline.

Changes visible to kernel developers include:

• unregister_chrdev() now returns void.

• There is a new notifier chain which can be used (by calling register_pm_notifier()) to obtain notification before and after suspend and hibernate operations.

• The new "lockstat" infrastructure provides statistics on the amount of time threads spend waiting for and holding locks.

• The new fault() VMA operation replaces nopage() and populate(). See this article for a description of the current fault() API.

• The generic netlink API now has the ability to register (and unregister) multicast groups on the fly.

• The destructor argument has been removed from kmem_cache_create(), as destructors are no longer supported. All in-kernel callers have been updated.

• There is now support for profiling Cell SPU usage in oprofile.

Since the merge window is now closed, that should be the end of new features for this development cycle. There could be an exception or two, though: a few developers appear to have missed the window and are hoping to slip in a few post -rc1 changes.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/2.6.23

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