"A change after 2.6.24 broke ndiswrapper by accidentally removing its access to GPL-only symbols," noted Pavel Roskin, offering a patch to address the issue. Linux creator Linus Torvalds was unimpressed, "I'm not seeing why ndiswrapper should be treated separately. If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols." The NDISwrapper project page explains, "many vendors do not release specifications of the hardware or provide a Linux driver for their wireless network cards. This project implements Windows kernel API and NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) API within Linux kernel. A Windows driver for wireless network card is then linked to this implementation so that the driver runs natively, as though it is in Windows, without binary emulation." Due to this, Linus explained:

"Ndiswrapper itself is *not* compatible with the GPL. Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads modules that aren't is stupid and pointless. Clearly it just re-exports those GPLONLY functions to code that is *not* GPL'd."

"Hello everyone! We are happy to say that the 1.12 release is now available!" began Matthew Dillon, announcing the latest stable version of DragonFly BSD. The project's home page explains, "DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems." Regarding the latest release, Matt explained:

"This release is primarily a maintenance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel.

"The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release."

"Ok, it's out there, ready for your enjoyment," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.25-rc3 kernel. He summarized the changes:

"As usual, most of the updates are in architecture and drivers, with the dirstat showing about 37% in arch (and that's with rename detection: there's some file movement in arch/xtensa that would bring it up to 43% if you looked at it as a traditional diff) and almost 50% in drivers. Much of the include file stuff is also architecture-related updates. The driver updates are mostly fairly spread out, but some of it comes from a couple of new drivers: the mvsas SCSI driver, a new adt7473 driver, and a couple of new watchdog drivers."

Linus continued, "if you ignore the architecture-specific stuff and drivers, the rest is mostly in networking, some Documentation updates, and a few filesystem updates (mainly efs and xfs). Anyway, the upshot of it all? Quite frankly, it's all over the place. The changes in -rc3 are bigger than -rc2, probably mostly because we had some more time (-rc2 was a couple of days early because of the long weekend in the US), but hopefully also because people have started to find regressions." Among the bug fixes, he highlighted, "we had a nasty SLUB corruption issue in -rc2 that is fixed (not that very many people probably saw it), and we've hopfully fixed a number of regressions in networking and suspend/resume."

Issues reported during the suspend-to-disk process lead Linux creator Linus Torvalds to suggest, "please - just make the f*cking suspend-to-disk use other routines already. 99% of all hardware needs to do exactly *nothing* on suspend-to-disk, and the ones that really do need things tend to need to not do a whole lot." He went on to explain why sharing the code path for suspend-to-disk and freezing to RAM is wrong:

"For example, the 'freeze' action for USB (which is one of the hardest things to suspend) should literally be something like just setting the controller STOP bit, and waiting for it to have stopped. The 'unfreeze' should be to just clear the stop bit, while the 'restart' should be just a controller reset to use the current memory image. NONE OF THIS HAS ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING TO DO WITH SUSPEND. It never did. I've told people so for years. Maybe actually seeing the problems will make people realize."

Linus also noted another advantage to having separate code paths for the two actions, "the other issue is that I've long wanted to make sure that when people fix suspend-to-ram, they don't screw up suspend-to-disk by mistake and vice versa." During the discussion, Rafael Wysocki noted that he would be fixing this up presently, "I'm already convinced, really. :-)"

"These patches add local caching for network filesystems such as NFS," began David Howells describing an updated set of thirty-seven patches to introduce FS-Cache. When asked how the patches affect performance, he noted that this was dependent on the use case, highlighting issues when dealing with lots of metadata, "getting metadata from the local disk fs is slower than pulling it across an unshared gigabit ethernet from a server that already has it in memory."

David continued "these points don't mean that fscache is no use, just that you have to consider carefully whether it's of use to *you* given your particular situation, and that depends on various factors," adding, "note that currently FS-Caching is disabled for individual NFS files opened for writing as there's no way to handle the coherency problems thereby introduced." He concluded with a number of simple performance benchmarks.

"To quote you a number of years ago: 'Linux is evolution, not intelligent design'," noted Greg KH, quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Linus expanded on the statement, "evolution often does odd (and 'suboptimal') things exactly because it does incremental changes that DO NOT BREAK at any point." He continued, "in other words, exactly *because* evolution requires 'bisectability' (any non-viable point in between is a dead end by definition) and does things incrementally, it doesn't do big flips." When alternative examples in evolution were pointed out, Linus suggested that the kernel was much simpler than a mammal and more similar to bacteria:

"In bacteria (and viruses), duplication of DNA/RNA is a big cost of living in general, and as a result there is *much* less junk DNA. So in an evolutionary sense, it's much closer to what the kernel should have (with occasional duplication of code and interfaces to allow new functionality, but rather aggressive pruning of the excess baggage). In other words, all of these choices are a matter of 'balance'. In some areas, excess code is not a sufficient downside, and we keep even broken source code around with no actual function, 'just because' (or rather, because the cost of carrying it around is so small that nobody cares)."

"Ok, this kernel is a winner," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, playfully announcing the 2.6.25-rc2 kernel which gained the name "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". He continued:

"Just to show how _much_ of a winner it is, it's been awarded a coveted 'weasel' series name, which should tell you just how good it's going to be. It's a name revered in Linux kernel history, and as such this brings back the good old days where if you find a bug, you're almost certainly simply mistaken, and you probably just did something wrong. But hey, you can try to prove me wrong. I dare you."

Linus went on to describe some of the changes using 'git dirstat', "in particular, it shows that almost exactly half of the updates are to drivers, with network drivers alone being a third of the whole patch. And of the remaining half, about half was architecture updates, notably to SH." He then noted, "I'm optimistic that this release cycle won't be anywhere near the pain of what 24 was, which is why I'm just going to go off for the long weekend and stay at the beach."