KernelTrap - 2.6.27

2.6.27-rc8, "This One Should Be The Last One"

Jeremy — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:55:51 +0000

"So yet another week, another -rc," began Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc8 Linux kernel. He continued, "this one should be the last one: we're certainly not running out of regressions, but at the same time, at some point I just have to pick some point, and on the whole the regressions don't look _too_ scary. And -rc8 obviously does fix more of them." Linus went on to note that most of the changes since -rc7 are small, "and there aren't even a whole lot of them."

Jiri Kosina cautioned that there is still an unknown bug affecting the e1000e driver currently in the 2.6.27 kernel, "rendering the cards unusable for most of the i-am-not-a-hacker users (and remember, even Dave Airlie bricked his laptop completely to death, when trying to restore eeprom contents)" When asked how to duplicate the bug, Jiri noted that the inability to reliably reproduce the bug added to the difficulty in debugging the problem, "apparently it is some kind of race, as it usually takes multiple cycles to trigger".

2.6.27-rc6, "Things Are Calming Down"

Jeremy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:42:58 +0000

"The patches most people hopefully care about tend to be small details," noted Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc6 kernel. He continued, "and so more regressions should hopefully be closed now, some by just reverting the commits that caused breakage. I don't think anything special merits explicit comment, but you can get a flavor for things by scanning the appended shortlog." Earlier in the announcement email, Linus did note some specifics about which drivers caused the bulk of the patch:

"Same old deal - except it's been almost two weeks since -rc5. That said, the diff is actually about the same size, so I guess that means things are calming down. Most of the diff (bulk-wise) is updates to the new gspca (standard USB webcam) driver, although some of it is also removal of the dead miropcm20* driver."

2.6.27-rc5, Fixing Regressions

Jeremy — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:48:03 +0000

Linus Torvalds announced the 2.6.27-rc5 Linux Kernel, noting that his "weekly releases" tend to happen every eight days, adding, "the bulk of it is all config updates, and with arm and powerpc leading the pack." Linus continued:

"While the config updates amount to about three quarters of the diff, and if you don't use a rename-aware diff the blackfin include file movement pretty much accounts for the rest, hidden behind all those trivial (but bulky) changes are a lot of small changes that hopefully fix a number of regressions.

"The most exciting (well, for me personally - my life is apparently too boring for words) was how we had some stack overflows that totally corrupted some basic thread data structures. That's exciting because we haven't had those in a long time. The cause turned out to be a somewhat overly optimistic increase in the maximum NR_CPUS value, but it also caused some introspection about our stack usage in general. Including things like a patch to gcc to fix insane stack usage for vararg functions on x86-64. But that one would only hit anybody who was a bit too adventurous and selected the big 4096 CPU configuration. The rest of the regressions fixed are a bit more pedestrian."

2.6.27-rc4, "Random Stuff All Over"

Jeremy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:10:02 +0000

"Another week, another -rc," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc4 Linux kernel, continuing, "this time the diffstat is almost totally dominated by the addition of the musb driver that drives the MUSB and TUSB controllers integrated into omap2430 and davinci. That, together with the removal of the auerswald USB driver (replaced by libusb version) is more than half of the bulk of the patch, and obviously most users won't ever notice." Linus added:

"Apart from those bulky USB updates, there's some arch updates (blackfin and ia64), network and input driver updates, and an XFS and UBIFS update. The rest is mostly random stuff all over, probably best described by the appended shortlog. A number of regressions should be off the table, but more remain..."

2.6.27-rc3, "Things Really _Have_ Calmed Down"

Jeremy — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:49:12 +0000

"Things really _have_ calmed down, and hopefully we've also resolved a lot of the regressions in -rc3," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc3 Linux kernel. He noted that much of the patch size was from the inclusion of the new ath9k wireless driver, with much of the rest of the patch size due to the renaming of many arch include files in the ARM, AVR32 and m68lnommu architectures. Linus continued:

"All the small changes are where the regression fixes are, and other random improvements. And they're all over. The ShortLog (appended) probably gives a taste of it."