What's new in the Linux kernel

and what's missing in Debian

Ben Hutchings

Ben Hutchings

• Professional software engineer by day, Debian developer by night
• Regular Linux contributor in both roles since 2008
• Working on various drivers and kernel code in my day job
• Debian kernel team member, now doing most of the unstable maintenance aside from ports
• Maintaining Linux 3.2.y stable update series on kernel.org

Linux releases early and often

• 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
• 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
• Bad news: some of them won't really work without new userland

Recap of last year's features (1)

• Team device driver: userland package (libteam) was uploaded in October
• Transcendent memory: frontswap, zswap and Xen tmem will be enabled in next kernel upload
• New KMS drivers: should all work with current Xorg drivers
• Module signing: still not enabled, but probably will be if we do Secure Boot

Recap of last year's features (2)

• More support for discard: still not enabled at install time (#690977)
• More support for containers: XFS was fixed, and user namespaces have been enabled
• bcache: userland package (bcache-tools) still not quite ready (#708132)
• 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.

Questions?

Credits

• Linux 'Tux' logo © Larry Ewing, Simon Budig.
  • Modified by Ben to add Debian open-ND logo
• Debian open-ND logo © Software in the Public Interest, Inc.