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Sep. 14, 2009

There's been a few changes since rc-9 to repair a couple of issues in the Linux kernel, but now the final 2.6.31 release is out in the open.

Generally speaking, the full set of 2.6.30 to 2.6.31 changes are too numerous to list here, but as usual, you'll find some high-level overviews on kernelnewbies.org. Overall, one of the more painful changes has been the new cleaned-up backend that takes care of both inotify and dnotify, and shrinks the inode while doing so, but its problems have hopefully been sorted out, at least for the most part.

There's also a fair deal of new debugging and/or performance counter stuff: memory leak detection ("kmemleak"), memory usage checking ("kmemcheck") and performance counters ("perf_counter").

Those new debugging features are not likely usable under any real load, but are good for finding kernel bugs, but, as can be expected, at a huge performance cost as far as RAM is concerned.

The performance counters are a nice option to things like oprofile, allowing you easy access to some pretty powerful profiling of hardware and sw events.

There's also been lots of work on KMS - updates on the Intel side, display port support, next-gen IGD, etc and obviously the whole new (and still experimental) radeon KMS code.

About 72 percent of all of the 2.6.30 to 2.6.31 migration is under drivers/ and there's another 6.4 percent (give or take) in firmware/ and sound/. That's not entirely unusual, but it does seem to be growing. My rough rule of thumb used to be 50 percent drivers, 50 percent everything else, but that's clearly not true any more and hasn't been for a while.

We've been 60 percent or more since after the 2.6.27 kernel and I think the whole staging is what moved things up by several percentage points as well.

This obviously means that the merge window for the 2.6.32 kernel is open as well. But give me a day or so before bombarding me with merge requests.

I like to encourage Linux developers to first give the plain new release a go, and not immediately start the crazy flood of patches, as has been pretty much the norm in the past.

If you ignore drivers/ and firmware/ and sound/ about 50 percent of the remaining changes are to arch/ code with ARM leading the way with its insane number of platforms, but MIPS, powerpc, sh and x86 are up there too.

The rest being filesystem updates, ie: VFS layer-- mostly that fsnotify thing, but also btrfs, cifs, ext3, fuse, gfs2, nfs, nilfs, xfs and with a bit of documentation, kernel and perf-tools updates.

Overall, the 2.6.31 kernel update certainly isn't the biggest and most important of updates to appear in the community in the past two years, but, as I said earlier, a lot of time has been spent on the drivers' update this time around.

I can only hope that less time will be spent on drivers when the 2.6.32 and 2.6.33 updates come.

Wishful thinking, anyway!

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Source: Linus Torvalds.

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