KernelTrap - -rc5

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."

2.6.26-rc5, "Another Batch Of Mostly Pretty Small Fixes"

Jeremy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:05:35 +0000

"Another week, another batch of mostly pretty small fixes. Hopefully the regression list is shrinking, and we've fixed at least a couple of the oopses on Arjan's list," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc5 kernel. He added, "as usual, the bulk of the changes are in drivers and arch code - together they are about 70% of the diffstat. And the arch stats are bloated by some new/updated SH and avr defconfig files, which is also fairly common at this stage." Linus concluded:

"Perhaps unusually, 13% is in kernel/, almost all of it fixing up some scheduler issues - with the bulk of it by far being a couple of reverts due to performance regressions. But there's a few other fixes too. And then there is networking and some ocfs2 updates. Along with various one-liners sprinkled all around.

"The shortlog (appended) gives a reasonable view of it all. Nothing hugely exciting sticks to my mind, but then I don't think we've had any really hugely exciting problem spots either.."

2.6.24-rc5, No Final Before Xmas

Jeremy — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:02:06 +0000

"It's been a week, and I promised to be a good boy and try to follow my release rules, so here is the next -rc," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.24-rc5 kernel. He noted:

"Things _have_ slowed down, although I'd obviously be lying if I said we've got all the regressions handled and under control. They are being worked on, and the list is shrinking, but at a guess, we're definitely not going to have a final 2.6.24 out before xmas unless santa puts some more elves to work on those regressions. So any elves out there - please keep working."

Linus added that there were no major changes in the latest release candidate, stating that because of this it wasn't worth posting a diffstat, "it only highlights a textually big PA-RISC revert, and the powerpc defconfig updates. And the Blackfin SPI driver. The rest is largely random noise in various subsystems (drivers/net, xfs filesystem, and arch updates are some of the areas that show more changes)."

Linux 2.6.23-rc6

Jeremy — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:10:49 +0000

Linus Torvalds announced the sixth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, a final release expected within the next few weeks. He noted:

"So last week was a bust, with a lot of core people away for the kernel summit, and with -rc5 having two rather nasty (and silly) one-liner problems that bit a number of people - a missing NULL pointer check in TCP, and a missing list terminator in ata_piix.

"So the fixes for those things were both pretty trivial, and they've been in the -git trees for the last few days, but I just pushed out an -rc6 that also merges up some other updates that did come in during the week."

The -rc6 source level changes can be browsed via the gitweb interface.

Linux: 2.6.23-rc5, Kernel Summit

Jeremy — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 19:17:00 +0000

Linus Torvalds announced the fifth release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 Linux kernel noting that he was on his way to Cambridge, England, for the 2007 kernel summit. The invite-only kernel summit has been hosted in Ontario, Canada the past five years, this being the first year it has been hosted in Europe. It will happen over three days, from September 4'th through September 6'th.

Regarding 2.6.23-rc5, Linus noted, "hopefully we've addressed most regressions, so please do give it a good testing." He went on to summarize, "the shortlog and diffstat are appended: the diffstat is uglified by some powerpc defconfig updates, but otherwise it all looks pretty nice and small. The shortlog is fairly informative if you care about the details of what changed, but it does end up boiling down to 'fixing a number of generally pretty small issues'. Mostly in drivers and SCTP. So have fun, give it a go, and expect a quiet week next week."