There was a soft updates bug that crept into 4.5-RELEASE, and could cause corruption on shutdown if there was heavy disk activity before the shutdown took place. This hasn't shown up on any lists I read, but it seemed a bit more noteworthy than the latest security hole in some obscure port (no, not PHP).

LWN.net has posted the kernel update for this week.

This week, KernelTrap has spoken with Linux kernel hacker Rik van Riel. Rik is perhaps most recognized for his impressive rmap VM efforts. He's also the founder of kernelnewbies. Living in Brazil, he works for Conectiva.

Marcello released the 2.4.18-final kernel today, then twenty minutes later apologized, "Ok, DAMN. I missed the -rc4 patch in 2.4.18. Real sorry about that". A steady stream of email began flooding the lkml, full of numerous suggestions on how to resolve "the problem". The story was quickly picked up by Slashdot, which only added to the confusion.

In reality, it was nothing more than a relatively minor mistake. 2.4.18-rc4, which quickly followed 2.4.18-rc3 (see this earlier story) included a small patch (to 'fs/binfmt_elf.c') that was then not included in the final 2.4.18. In other words, 2.4.18-final is 2.4.18-rc3, not 2.4.18-rc4 as intended. The missing patch (which you can add yourself here) was a fix for a bug introduced recently, around -pre6, affecting non-x86 ports. In Marcelo's words, "The patch which I missed only breaks static apps on _some_ architectures (not including x86)".

Some of the relevant emails follow, as does the 2.4.19-pre1 changelog. Released today, this -pre patch includes the fix dropped from 2.4.18-final, and many other changes.

Alan Cox released the 2.2.21-pre3 kernel patch today, building toward a targeted final release of the stable 2.2.21 kernel on March 10th. The changelog for this current -pre patch includes a fairly large set of fixes and updates, catching up with a backlog. Alan goes on to point out that -pre4 will include several more important fixes.

Alan's announcement email follows, including the full changelog.

Robert Love posted a small patch to the lkml, providing an i386 only IRQ-safe atomic counter without locks. The conversation that followed between Robert and Andrew Morton is quite interesting, offering a little perspective into the complexities of dealing with multiple processors and the many Linux ports.

Robert Watson, of the core FreeBSD team, recently sent a message to the 'Current' FreeBSD mailing list, looking to initiate a constructive discussion to develop guidelines for the use of source control software beyond the main CVS repository. The end goal to create "a set of recommendations to maximize communication and acceptance by the broader community".

This is in response to recent lengthy discussion of the many source code repositories used, and the lack/difficulty of communication between all involved as to what's where. Robert's full email follows.

Jeff Garzik recently posted a BitKeeper Kernel Hacking HOWTO (titled Doing the BK Thing, Penguin-Style) to the lkml. Now that Linus is using BitKeeper to manage the 2.5 development kernel tree, many other Linux kernel hackers are beginning to use the tool. The HOWTO, a work in progress, provides an excellent overview of BitKeeper, helping a person use the tool to provide patches to Linus. The actual user's guide can be found here.

GCC 3.0.4, the last of the 3.0 series (the next release will be 3.1, around April 15) has been released. It's a "bugfix release" that (you guessed it) has many bugfixes. Read on for the full announcement.

New in 3.0.4:

• GCC 3.0 now supports newer versions of the NetBSD operating system, which use the ELF object file format, on x86 processors.
• Correct debugging information is generated from functions that have lines from multiple files (e.g. yacc output).
• A fix for whitespace handling in the -traditional preprocessor, which can affect Fortran.
• Fixes to the exception handling runtime.
• More fixes for bad code generation in C++.
• A fix for shared library generation under AIX 4.3.
• Documentation updates.
• Port of GCC to Tensilica's Xtensa processor contributed.
• A fix for compiling the PPC Linux kernel (FAT fs wouldn't link).

Marcelo released 2.4.18-rc3 last night, saying, "So here goes rc3: hopefully the last. I'll only release another -rc in case of really bad problems". This morning 2.4.18-rc4 was released, Marcelo commenting, "Unfortunately something really bad (for some non-x86 archs) [showed] up, so here goes rc4". The changelog for -rc4 described the fix by Tom Gall as "Load code did not set personality for binaries without an interpreter: This was breaking static apps on several archs". Certainly nice to have caught the bug in a release candidate, and not the actual release.

Find the -rc patches here, and the full changelog here.

A recent conversation on the FreeBSD hackers mailing list discussed the possibility of remote kernel debugging, utilizing the polling support of some Ethernet drivers. This is implemented on other systems already, including, it was pointed out, on Apple's Darwin.

The ensuing conversation on the FreeBSD hackers list follows.

This week, KernelTrap has been speaking with Linux kernel hacker Rik van Riel. Rik is most recognized for his impressive rmap VM efforts, available as a patch for the 2.4 kernel here. He's also the founder of kernelnewbies. Living in Brazil, he works for Conectiva.

Guillaume Boissiere announced that a new update on 2.5 kernel status is available on kernelnewbies, following the release of development kernel 2.5.5.

His latest status page includes two new merges:

 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)

As KernelTrap has recently migrated to drupal, we've gained some new features. The one that I'd like to draw people's attention to at this time is the introduction of "sections". In addition to the news that makes it to the front page, other stories will also be posted on the section pages.

If I deem a story to be interesting, but not worthy of the front page, it will instead be posted to a section page. The currently defined sections are listed below: