Linus recently returned from a two week vacation, announcing the release of "a largish 2.5.8-pre1 patch". Following the announcement, he commented on the earlier April Fool's message. He says, "PS.

A recent thread on the lkml discussed the addition of another scheduler priority. Currently, referring to 'linux/include/schedule.h' in 2.4 (follows), there are three such priorities available. SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR and SCHED_OTHER. The additional priority in question is SCHED_IDLE.

This first two, SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR, are for real time processing. The former handles processes "first in, first out". Once a SCHED_FIFO process gets the CPU, it keeps it until finished, or until a higher priority process comes along. The latter handles processes "round robin", sharing time slices among all SCHED_RR process of equal priority. The third, SCHED_OTHER, is the standard, aka "time-share processing".

As for the discussed potential SCHED_IDLE, it would schedule a process to run only when the CPU was idle, not busy with other tasks. In the following thread, Robert Love says, "There is just a lot more to SCHED_IDLE than 'make the task only run when nothing else wants to'", explaining that as simple as it sounds, a lot of work is involved in the implementation.

JFS v1.0.17 for Linux was released today. The announcement/changelog follows.

Regarding JFS:

"IBM's journaled file system technology, currently used in IBM enterprise servers, is designed for high-throughput server environments, key to running intranet and other high-performance e-business file servers. IBM is contributing this technology to the Linux open source community with the hope that some or all of it will be useful in bringing the best of journaling capabilities to the Linux operating system."

The latest KernelTraffic is available...

KernelTraffic offers an interesting summary of the past week in lkml traffic.

Straight out of George Orwell's novel, 1984, an email hit the OpenBSD announce mailing list attributed to the Minister of Propaganda. It "announced" Microsoft's decision to drop the NT kernel in favor of a new secure effort based on OpenBSD, called Windows BSD.

Par for the course, "shocking" email hit the lkml on April 1'st attributed to Linus Torvalds. This year's email stated, "Linux needs new leadership", putting Linus' succesor up to a vote. A surprising number of people thought the email was real, expressing dismay at Linus' "choice" to abandon Linux. The contrived email follows.

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt announced today that OpenBSD now supports wavelan bridging: "In the past, many of you have asked if you can do wavelan bridging. We kept saying no, because you cannot run the wavelan in AP mode. There's no way to to put these cards into AP mode. For prism II based cards, however, you now can. Be sure to use a very new firmware on the cards, though."

Find more information on the Prism II chipset here. This link is focused on Linux, but offers more information on wireless LANs.

Jeremy Jackson asked "which kernel debugger is 'best'?" on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

NTFS v2.0.1 has been released, quickly following 2.0.0 (see earlier story). The main reason for this quick follow-up release is to provide a new download link - the old link is evidently no longer valid. Additionally, there has been a minor source code change to set the executable bit on NTFS mounted binaries by default, as "has often been requested by wine users".

The Enterprise Volume Managment System Project has released v1.0.0 of their storage management system. The GPL'd code is developed by IBM, and is compatible with both stable kernel 2.4.17 and development kernel 2.5.3. Find more information on their docs page, and in the latest release notes.

"The Enterprise Volume Management System ( EVMS ) Project has the goal of providing unparalleled flexibility and extensibility in managing storage. It represents a new approach to logical volume management, as the architecture introduces a plug-in model that allows for easy expansion or customization of various levels of volume management."

The latest LWN.net kernel development summary has been released. As always, it is an interesting summary of the last week in Linux kernel development.

Larry McVoy recently reported a disk failure on the server that is 'bkbits.net', the BitKeeper online source code repository. Larry explains,

"We did indeed lose the primary disk (IBM 40GB, I am starting to lose all the respect I had for IBM drives, this is one of many that has failed on me personally). I have restored from the backup disk, and in the process redone hardlinks across all the linux kernel trees, which saved about 5GB (nice). All trees which are now on bkbits.net check clean, which means BK thinks all the files are there and that the checksums are correct, a fairly reasonable indication that we are in good shape."

Find an earlier discussion about BitKeeper here. Larry's full emails follow.

Will Dyson has release version 0.92 of the Be FileSystem driver. He says of the driver, "It still isn't quite ready for inclusion in the mainline kernel (it doesn't yet conform to the kernel coding style, for one thing), but I use it all the time on my system and have yet to have any kind of stability issue with it".

The latest Kernel Traffic is out. Yes it's less then a week from the last one.

Richard Gooch released version 199.10 of the devfs patch today. His announcement email follows.

From the FAQ:

"Devfs is an alternative to "real" character and block special devices on your root filesystem. Kernel device drivers can register devices by name rather than major and minor numbers. These devices will appear in devfs automatically, with whatever default ownership and protection the driver specified. A daemon (devfsd) can be used to override these defaults. Devfs has been in the kernel since 2.3.46."