Linux Kernel News Archives

Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra on Wednesday posted the latest patches for the EEVDF scheduler, the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First approach that is based on a research paper from the late 90's. Ultimately the hope is for EEVDF to replace the existing CFS scheduler code.

Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.3.5 today along with the 5.15.114, 5.10.181, 5.4.244, 4.9.284, and 4.4.316 point releases for those long-term (LTS) kernel versions.

Due to Linus Torvalds traveling over this US Memorial Day weekend, he released Linux 6.4-rc4 about twelve hours ahead of schedule.

A fix is on its way to the mainline Linux 6.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel series to fix x86 topology reporting for Intel Hybrid systems. The topology bug within the kernel becomes more pronounced for Meteor Lake laptops where currently internal Intel test laptops can report the systems having 11 CPU sockets rather than the proper number of cores all contained within one CPU socket.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.5 cycle kicking off in about one month is a new Linux x86 optimization patch for further tuning csum_partial, the function used within the kernel for calculating 32-bit checksums on blocks of data. Much lower latency and higher throughput can be observed with the newly-optimized csum_partial on the latest Intel/AMD processors.

Following the recent removal of the SLOB allocator, SLAB is the latest on the chopping block. In order to push users to the SLUB allocator as the preferred solution, SLAB is now going through its deprecation and eventual removal process.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.4-rc3 kernel following a rather uneventful week.

A patch is pending via x86/urgent to workaround an issue with Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors that is leaving the kernel developers for the time being to disable Process Context Identifiers (PCID) with these Intel mobile/desktop processors.

There is pending patches for adding support for the LEAKSHIELD device to the Aquacomputer Linux device driver. German PC component manufacturer Aquacomputer has been enjoying support for their various products on Linux and the latest seeing support in this open-source driver is the Aquacomputer Leakshield for reporting any water cooling leaks and other performance metrics around your cooling setup.

Months in the making have been the patches for x86_64 parallel CPU boot support to allow secondary CPU cores to be booted in parallel for shortening Linux kernel boot times. Over time the Linux parallel CPU bring-up patches have gone through many revisions while it looks like this work is now positioned for introduction with the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.4 cycle.

With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the SLOB allocator is removed while next the plan is for the deprecation and eventual removal of the SLAB allocator.

An initial batch of DRM-Misc-Next patches targeting the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer were sent today to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of that next merge window.

While missing out on the recently-closed Linux 6.4 merge window, one of the patch series seeing a lot of activity in recent weeks/months has been around parallel CPU bring-up in order to speed-up the Linux kernel boot process for today's high-end desktops and many-core servers.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc1 that also marks the end of the merge window for the exciting Linux 6.4 cycle.

Going back years there has been patches for allowing the Linux x86_64 kernel to build as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code to further enhance the system security. Antgroup engineers most recently have been tackling the Linux x86_64 PIE support and last week sent out a new patch series.

While the Linux 6.4 merge window is closing this weekend, today on the last full day of the period is Jens Axboe submitting pipe FMODE_NOWAIT support as what he's described as a big performance and efficiency improvement.

While these days Linus Torvalds is mostly dealing with herding new code into the Linux kernel and being a gate keeper rather than actively developing new kernel code himself, for the in-development Linux 6.4 he's found himself doing a bit of coding.

Chinese tech company Loongson continues working on improving the upstream Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired domestic CPU architecture. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is another batch of optimizations and implementing more kernel functionality for the LoongArch CPU architecture.

The printk code changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 merge window and it's notable not for what is in the pull request but rather what is still outstanding.

Since last November has been a kernel bug report from a Canonical engineer after finding that the Intel Thunderbolt USB controller on various laptops was "dead" after resuming the system. That problem is now resolved with Linux 6.4 and this generic fix may end up helping other hardware as well.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel were all of the VirtIO and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (VDPA) changes. Interesting from that pull request is delivering a big performance bump for VDUSE.

In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code.

With the work led by Intel engineers on bringing up the Compute Express Link specification features into the open-source kernel, Linux 6.4 is another cycle seeing a lot of enablement work on the CXL front.

On Friday the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted a pull request of new Rust feature code for the Linux 6.4 kernel.

All of the scheduler changes were sent out on Thursday that are ready for the Linux 6.4 kernel.

It's likely been years since many of you have heard of Firewire and some readers likely never had the opportunity to use it. The Firewire interface was great back in the day and during the early period of digital video cameras, but modern versions of USB and Thunderbolt are far faster, allow longer cable distances, and numerous other advantages. While Firewire hasn't seen much activity in years and can be outpaced by USB 3.0 and beyond, there is a new Firewire subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel and he intends to keep at it for the next six years.

The x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window have landed. This includes numerous x86 laptop driver benefits as well as other new features for the platform-drivers-x86 subsystem.

With Linux 6.3 released that marks the opening of the two-week Linux 6.4 merge window. David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates already for Linux 6.4 with the assortment of kernel graphics/display driver updates.

Following this afternoon's release of the Linux 6.3 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.3-gnu has already been released as this downstream kernel flavor that removes support for loading binary-only modules and trying to de-blob other driver code that otherwise depends upon "non-free" code.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3 as the newest stable kernel version.

The Linux 6.3 stable kernel is likely to be released later today so here is a reminder about the most exciting aspects of this spring kernel release.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel likely being released as stable on Sunday, pull requests have already begun to be submitted of feature code for the Linux 6.4 merge window.

Linux kernel developers are preparing for the first upgrade to its Rust toolchain since the Rust code initially merged in Linux 6.1.

Linux 6.3-rc7 was just released and if the next week remains calm, it would mean that Linux 6.3 is shipping next weekend.

Sent in this morning for Linux 6.3 is a Linux CPU scheduler fix to deal with an imbalancing issue that's been present in the mainline kernel since a scheduler rework that landed back in late 2019.

Being worked on for a while has been Linux kernel patches to speed boot times by allowing the parallel bring-up of CPU cores. There were AMD boot issues since worked around and the patches gone through multiple revisions for helping with Linux kernel boot times. Those patches continue to be improved upon and yesterday saw a reworked patch series posted.

There is two weeks to go until the Linux 6.3 stable kernel is released, which could drag out to three weeks if last minute issues come about in the kernel. But given all the material queuing via the many "-next" code branches, we already have a good idea for many of the features in store for Linux 6.4.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc6 for this Easter Sunday as we work towards the official Linux 6.3 debut in the next few weeks.

As the latest effort in the quest of bringing Rust programming language usage to the Linux kernel, sent out on Thursday were initial patches for bringing Rust infrastructure to the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) framework within the media subsystem.

A patch was posted this week introducing a new "hp-wmi-sensors" Linux kernel driver for HP business-class computers for exposing WMI sensor functionality.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc5 and it's looking to be in good shape for this stage of development.

Sent to Linus Torvalds on Saturday and already merged ahead of today's Linux 6.3-rc5 release were a set of input driver fixes. Most notable with that round of fixes were addressing some touchpad and keyboard issues with some TUXEDO Computers laptops when resuming from suspend.

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has sent out updated patches on the kernel patch series he's been working on the past several months around the "EEVDF" CPU scheduler for improving upon the current CFS scheduler code.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.3-rc4 as we reach around the half-way point of the Linux 6.3 kernel's development cycle.

Rob Clark on Saturday sent out a pull request adding the DMA-BUF/DMA-FENCE deadline awareness code to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Besides the ongoing work around the reverse-engineered Apple Silicon graphics driver being brought up in the Rust programming language, the other notable Rust effort within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel subsystem is a rewrite of the basic VGEM driver in this increasingly-used programming language. That Rust VGEM driver has now been sent out on the mailing list for review as part of a request for comments.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc3 as the latest weekly test candidate for the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel that is slated to debut as stable toward the end of April.

The US and western government sanctions around the Russian government and its defense industry/companies due to their war in Ukraine has caused interesting issues in the open-source world. A few days after ipmitool was archived/suspended on GitHub that turned out to be due to the current maintainer's affiliation with a Russian tech company, separately there is now a blocking of Linux kernel contributions from selected Russian developers.

A patch series is proposing that the SLOB memory allocator be removed from the Linux 6.4 kernel this summer.