What's new in the Linux kernel
and what's missing in Debian
Ben Hutchings
Ben Hutchings
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Professional software engineer by day, Debian developer by night
(or sometimes the other way round)
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Regular Linux contributor in both roles since 2008
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Working on various drivers and kernel code in my day job
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Debian kernel team member, now doing most of the unstable
maintenance aside from ports
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Maintaining Linux 3.2.y stable update series on
kernel.org
Linux releases early and often
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Linux is released about 5 times a year (plus stable updates
every week or two)
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...though some features aren't ready to use when they firat
appear in a release
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Since my talk last year, Linus has made 6 releases (3.11-3.16)
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Good news: we have lots of new kernel features in testing/unstable
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Bad news: some of them won't really work without new userland
Recap of last year's features (1)
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Team device driver: userland package (libteam) was uploaded in
October
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Transcendent memory: frontswap, zswap and Xen tmem will be
enabled in next kernel upload
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New KMS drivers: should all work with current Xorg drivers
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Module signing: still not enabled, but probably will be if we
do Secure Boot
Recap of last year's features (2)
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More support for discard: still not enabled at install time
(#690977)
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More support for containers: XFS was fixed, and user namespaces
have been enabled
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bcache: userland package (bcache-tools) still not quite ready
(#708132)
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ARMv7 multiplatform: d-i works on some platforms but
I'm still not sure which. Some progress on GPU drivers, but not
in Debian yet.
Unnamed temporary files [3.11]
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Open directory with option O_TMPFILE to create an
unnamed temporary file on that filesystem
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As with tmpfile(), the file disppears on
last close()
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File can be linked into the filesystem using
linkat(..., AT_EMPTY_PATH), allowing for 'atomic'
creation of file with complete contents and metadata
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Not supported on all filesystem types, so you will usually need
a fallback
Lustre filesystem [3.12]
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A distributed filesystem, popular for cluster computing
applications
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Developed out-of-tree since 1999, but now added to Linux staging
directory
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Was included in squeeze but dropped from wheezy as it didn't
support Linux 3.2
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Userland is now missing from Debian
Questions?
Credits
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Linux 'Tux' logo © Larry Ewing, Simon Budig.
- Modified by Ben to add Debian open-ND logo
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Debian open-ND logo © Software in the Public Interest, Inc.