Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:50:14 -0500 | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: Linux 2.6.20-rc1 |
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Linus Torvalds wrote: > Ok, the two-week merge period is over, and -rc1 is out there. > > I'm _really_ hoping that we can keep the 2.6.20 release calmer and without > any of the dragging-out-due-to-core-changes that we've had lately. We > didn't actually merge any really core changes here, with the biggest > conceptual one being the "work_struct" split into regular work and > "delayed" work, so I'm hoping we can really end up with an easy 2.6.20 > release. > > Some of the commits there are pretty big patches, but more than a couple > of them are due to fairly straightforward search-and-replace things (like > a largely scripted removal of unnecessary casts of the return value of > "kmalloc()", for example, or the switch to "ktermios" for the tty layer, > or the introduction of "struct path" in the VFS layer instead of keeping > the f_{dentry,vfsmnt} entries separate, or indeed the removal of SLAB_xxx > constant names in favour of the standard GFP_xxx ones). > > So while the patch itself isn't actually all that much smaller than usual, > at least my personal gut feel is that the actual changes are not as > intrusive, just in some cases have big diffs. > > But both the diffstat and the shortlog are still too big to fit in the > kernel mailing list limits, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Or > get the git repo, and do your own delving into things with > > git log v2.6.19..v2.6.20-rc1 | git shortlog > > There _are_ a few areas of note: > > - the aforementioned "workqueue" changes (where we still have some work > to do to finalize the proper actions on all architectures: it's being > somewhat discussed on the arch mailing lists, hopefully we'll have it > all resolved by -rc2, and it doesn't really worry me) > > - lockless page cache (RCU lookups of radix trees) > > - kvm driver for all those crazy virtualization people to play with > > - networking updates (DCCP, address-family agnostic connection tracking > in netfilter, sparse byte order annotations, yadda yadda) > > - HID layer separated out of the USB stuff (bluetooth apparently wants > the HID stuff too) > > - tons and tons of driver (ftape removal, ATA, pcmcia, i2c, > infiniband, dvb, networking..) and architecture updates (arm, mips, > powerpc, sh) > Did I miss an alternate method of handling ftape devices, or are these old beasts now unsupported? I occasionally have to be able to handle that media, since the industrial device using ftape for control updates cost more than a small house.
I can obviously keep an old slow machine to do the job, but I'd like to know if I need to.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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