-What's new in the Linux kernel - DebConf 2013
+What's new in the Linux kernel - DebConf 2014
@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
@@ -50,6 +50,7 @@
What's new in the Linux kernel
+
and what's missing in Debian
Ben Hutchings
@@ -63,8 +64,7 @@
Regular Linux contributor in both roles since 2008
- Maintaining a net driver in my day job, plus core networking
- and PCI code as necessary
+ Working on various drivers and kernel code in my day job
Debian kernel team member, now doing most of the unstable
@@ -83,10 +83,15 @@
Linux is released about 5 times a year (plus stable updates
every week or two)
+
+
+ ...though some features aren't ready to use when they firat
+ appear in a release
+
+
- For 'wheezy' we chose to freeze with Linux 3.2, which was
- getting pretty old by the time of release
+ Since my talk last year, Linus has made 6 releases (3.11-3.16)
Good news: we have lots of new kernel features in testing/unstable
@@ -202,23 +207,28 @@
-
User namespaces [3.7]
+
More support for containers
- One of the last missing pieces for OpenVZ-like containers
+ Containers are lightweight VMs - run on the same kernel as host,
+ but with limited privileges and resources
- Each user namespace has its own root user with
- privileges over the users and processes in that namespace - but
- not the whole system
+ Previously done by OpenVZ and Linux-VServer; gradually being
+ reimplemented upstream
+
+
+ User namespaces (added in 3.7) support the existence of a
+ root user inside the container that is unprivileged
+ outside the container
Currently somewhat experimental, and requires filesystem
changes which haven't been done for XFS
- Make it work: send patches to upstream XFS developers (this
- one's hard)
+ Make user namespaces work: send patches to upstream XFS
+ developers (this one's hard)
@@ -241,6 +251,30 @@
+
+
ARMv7 multiplatform
+
+
+ Until recently, each ARM kernel image could support only a small
+ set of different chips
+
+
+ Debian 'armmp' kernel now supports ARMv7 SoCs from Calxeda,
+ Freescale and Marvell, and others should be supported soon
+
+
+ Debian could run on a much larger range of ARM hardware - but we
+ need installer and boot loader support to make this easy
+
+
+ Make it work: join the ARM porters and d-i team
+
+
+ Make the GPUs work: join a reverse-engineering project
+