As originally submitted to KernelTrap by gncuster and reported on OSNews, the AtheOS operating system has been forked by Bill Hayden. The new creation is temporarily called New Atheos while Bill secures the domain names and trademark for the official and as-of-yet unnannounced name. Essentially he has merged the AtheOS and BeOS API's, porting it all to run on the Linux kernel. This results in significantly increased driver support, powerPC support, and the ability for most BeOS programs to compile and run with little or no changes. There has not yet been any source released, nor a date set for the official release.

Bill says, "I forked Atheos about 6 months ago and have been continuously developing it since that time. I've taken it in some very new directions. I should warn you that some of you will absolutely love the changes, and some of you will perhaps feel that the "dream" of Atheos has been sold out." Bill's announcement and much of the resulting thread follows. Find more information about AtheOS in this earlier review from OSNews.

Theo de Raadt recently announced that the Sparc64 port of OpenBSD has had a memory model change. Due to this change, there will be no supported upgrade from 3.0 to the upcoming 3.1 release. Instead, one will need to reinstall... In rather non-technical speak, Theo explains, "You must reinstall, due to the binaries having been changed in fiddly internal ways." He adds, "So just reinstall if you have a sparc64, ok? You will be happy. Some compiler bugs are fixed as a result!"

This only affects the Sparc64 port - no others.

Anton Altaparmakov recently annouced the 2.0.0 release of NTFS for the Linux 2.5.x kernel. This version is targetted for 2.5 inclusion, and is claimed to offer around a 20% speed gain over earlier NTFS drivers. You can browse the source code here. Full details follow.

From the Linux-NTFS FAQ:

"NTFS is an abbreviation for New Technology Filesystem. 'NT' because it was originally used in Windows NT and a filesystem is just how the computer stores files on disk. Different operating system, stores files in different ways. NTFS is used by Windows NT, 2000 and XP."

Richard Gooch today released version 1.3.25 of the Device FileSystem daemon. A list of changes follows.

"Devfsd provides configurable management of device nodes using the Linux Device Filesystem". [*]

A recent email brought to my attention the existence of the freebsdforums, a website with online bulletin boards for discussions about FreeBSD. The site looks fairly active...

The latest LWN kernel report is out. Included is a discussion of the 2.4 VM patches from Andrea Arcangeli.

The latest kernel trap is out. A lot of discussion on SCM (not just BitKeeper) this week as well some notes about the SSSCA and the zlib security affecting the kernel.

Linux 2.5.7 is out. As usual, the changelog can be found here. Linus also points out that he'll be on vacation for the next two weeks.

Anton Blanchard posted on the lkml he had a kernel compile on 7.52 sec using a 32 way logical partition, 1.1GHz POWER4, 60G RAM

Marcelo Tosatti has begun using BitKeeper to keep a hold on the 2.4 tree. You can read the juicy details in the thread here.

LWN.net has posted this week's kernel update.

...yep, There's an short article at http://www.idg.net/ic_829012_4394_1-3921.html with some information about the Hurd, the title says "could be in production this year". Stallman is quoted on a few Hurd/Linux issues in the article. It could be time to try out the Hurd.

With the recent zlib bug getting a fair amount of press, I was curious of its potential impact on OpenBSD's security record. Reading through the past couple day's mail, I found I wasn't alone in this curiousity. Todd Miller says, "Actually, I committed a fix for the problem in January. We didn't realize it was a security problem at the time (and neither did the zlib folks)".

Alan Cox released the 2.2.21-rc1 kernel today. Today's patch is the first release candidate that should become 2.2.21-final, barring any unforseen issues. This puts him a little behind his earlier tentative schedule, but we expect to see the final release soon. This patch includes a few minor bug fixes, and the reversal of an earlier fix ("back out problem mce change").

The previous release of this stable 2.2 kernel series was 2.2.20 on November 2nd, 2001. The first release, 2.2.0, was on January 26th, 1999.

New Kernel Trafic digest #157 at http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html