What's new in the Linux kernel

Ben Hutchings

Ben Hutchings

• Professional software engineer by day, Debian developer by night
• Regular Linux contributor in both roles since 2008
  • Maintaining a net driver in my day job, plus core networking and PCI code as necessary
  • 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)
• For 'wheezy' we chose to freeze with Linux 3.2, which was getting pretty old by the time of release
• Good news: we have lots of new kernel features in testing/unstable
• Bad news: some of them won't really work without new userland

Team device driver [3.3]

• Alternative to the bonding driver - simpler, modular, high-level control deferred to userland
• Basic configuration can be done with ip, but it really needs new tools - teamd, teamnl, etc.
• Want to make it work? See http://bugs.debian.org/695850

Transcendent memory [3.0-3.5]

• Abstract storage for memory pages, expected to be slower than regular memory but faster than disk
• Can provide a second layer of page cache (cleancache and frontswap)
• Pages stored by hypervisor (Xen), compressed local memory (zcache) or cluster of machines (RAMster)
• Not yet enabled in Debian kernels, and needs some thought about configuration
• Want to make it work? See https://lwn.net/Articles/454795/ and mail debian-kernel

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.