"This is the listing of the open bugs that are relatively new, around 2.6.22 and up. They are vaguely classified by specific area," Natalie Protasevich said, posting a current list of bugs each linking to an appropriate bugzilla.kernel.org entry. Andrew Morton reviewed the list, noting "no response from developers" in response to many of the bugs. David Miller pointed out that in some cases this wasn't true, referring to 46 bug fixes queued in his networking tree and another 10 already pushed upstream, "when someone like me is bug fixing full time, I take massive offense to the impression you're trying to give especially when it's directed at the networking. So turn it down a notch Andrew." Andrew wasn't convinced, "first we need to work out whether we have a problem. If we do this, then we can then have a think about what to do about it. I tried to convince the 2006 KS attendees that we have a problem and I resoundingly failed. People seemed to think that we're doing OK." He continued:

"This is not a minor matter. If the kernel _is_ slowly deteriorating then this won't become readily apparent until it has been happening for a number of years. By that stage there will be so much work to do to get us back to an acceptable level that it will take a huge effort. And it will take a long time after that for the kerel to get its reputation back. So it is important that we catch deterioration *early* if it is happening."

"I'm pleased to announce [the] 7'th and final release of the distributed storage subsystem (DST)," Evgeniy Polyakov stated, completing the TODO list on the project's web page. He titled the release, "squizzed black-out of the dancing back-aching hippo", noting, "it clearly shows my condition". New features in this release include checksum support, extended auto-configuration for detecting and auto-enabling checksums if supported by the remote host, new sysfs files for marking a given node as clean (in-sync) or dirty (not-in-sync), and numerous bug fixes.

Evgeniy released the first version of his distributed storage subsystem in July of 2007. In September he explained that this was the first step in a larger distributed filesystem project he's planning. In late October, Andrew Morton noted that the work looked ready to be merged into his -mm kernel.

Andrew Morton responded favorably to Evgeniy Polyakov's most recent release of his distributed storage subsystem, "I went back and re-read last month's discussion and I'm not seeing any reason why we shouldn't start thinking about merging this." He then asked, "how close is it to that stage? A peek at your development blog indicates that things are still changing at a moderate rate?" Evgeniy replied:

"I completed storage layer development itself, the only remaining todo item is to implement [a] new redundancy algorithm, but I did not see major demand on that, so it will stay for now with low priority. I will use DST as a transport layer for [a] distributed filesystem, and probably that will require additional features, I have no clean design so far, but right now I have nothing in the pipe to commit to DST."

A recent report on the lkml suggested improved IO/writeback performance in the recently released 2.6.24-rc1 kernel compared to the earlier 2.6.19.2 and 2.6.22.6 kernels. Credit was given to some patches by Peter Zijlstra. Ingo Molnar replied, "wow, really nice results! Peter does know how to make stuff fast :) Now lets pick up some of Peter's other, previously discarded patches as well :-)" He pointed to several patches "as a starter", then quipped, "I think the MM should get out of deep-feature-freeze mode - there's tons of room to improve :-/"

Andrew Morton replied, "kidding. We merged about 265 MM patches in 2.6.24-rc1: 482 files changed, 8071 insertions(+), 5142 deletions(-)". He added, "a lot of that was new functionality. That's easier to add than things which change long-standing functionality." Of the patches Ingo pointed to, Peter noted he was currently working on polishing the swap-over-NFS patch, "will post that one again, soonish.... Esp. after Linus professed liking to have swap over NFS." Rik van Riel also replied regarding rewriting the page replacement code, "at the moment I only have the basic 'plumbing' of the split VM working and am fixing some bugs in that. Expect a patch series with that soon, so you guys can review that code and tell me where to beat it into shape some more :)"

"The Manageability Engine Interface (aka HECI) allows applications to communicate with the Intel(R) Manageability Engine (ME) firmware. It is meant to be used by user-space manageability applications to access ME features such as Intel(R) Active Management Technology, Intel(R) Quiet System Technology and ASF," Anas Nashif began, describing a new driver for accessing services found in most recent Intel desktop chipsets. Andrew Morton offered an initial review of the patch and asked for additional information, "why do we want to include this code in Linux? What value has it to our users, etc? Basically: tell us more stuff.". Anas added:

"The core hardware architecture of Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT) is resident in firmware. The micro-controller within the chipset's graphics and memory controller (MCH) hub houses the Management Engine (ME) firmware, which implements various services on behalf of management applications. Additionally, flash memory houses system BIOS, code used by the management engine, and a third-party data store (3PDS) that enables applications to store information as needed in non-volatile memory."