Kernel development news
The second "must fix" IRC sessionThe second IRC discussion on the 2.6 "must fix" list was held on May 21. The full transcript is available for those who are interested. Below is a quick summary of some of the high points.
Power management. Patrick Mochel is in a debugging stage; in any case, power management changes could go in after 2.6.0.
Frame buffer restore after suspending, lots of pending issues, especially on 3d systems. "It's gonna be hell and will take time." Not necessarily a show stopper for 2.6.0.
IDE suspend/resume: patches exist which put suspend and resume operations on request queues so they are properly serialized with other activity.
I/O scheduler selection; some way of choosing between I/O schedulers is needed before the new schedulers can be merged. The anticipatory scheduler still has enough problems on some loads that it cannot go in otherwise.
qlogic drivers: several exist, none really work. Consensus seems to be that the "feral" driver is the one to go forward with.
Crypto loopback driver, would be nice for 2.6, but nobody seems to be working on it.
ext3 big kernel lock removal: Patches exist, but some "deep surgery" is required to make it all work. There are concerns that none of the Linux journaling filesystems perform all that well on SMP systems.
ext2 and ext3 block allocations: the filesystems can allocate blocks poorly. Not necessarily a 2.6.0 issue.
IRQ balancing, mostly a question of whether the user space tools should be bundled with the kernel. What's really needed, perhaps, is a better distribution mechanism for user-space kernel tools.
klibc: was awaiting users before it could be merged into 2.5, but those users have not yet materialized. Alexander Viro has things that would use it, so this work may move forward before 2.6.
kexec (booting one kernel directly from another): is working, but "seems intrusive and late." It's very useful for some users, though.
Object-based reverse mapping VM: it still has issues with highly-shared pages and nonlinear mappings. The latter problem has been solved. Some think that, if objrmap is merged at all, it should be marked experimental.
Networking: Andrew says "net/ is boring, it just works all the time."
Early console/printk and a general API for reporting errors to user space. This stuff looks too late and slow to get in this time around.
Kbuild: a better way of building external modules, and allowing separate source and object directories. "Both sound important." Conclusion was that it will happen, but it could be after 2.6.0.
Firmware loading: Greg KH pointed out the driver model firmware interface currently in patch form (see this LWN article). Should be merged soon.
ACPI: still has problems, but work is proceeding.
Asynchronous I/O: I/O to files still is not truly asynchronous. Patches exist, but are "late, a bit intrusive, a bit messy." People think they are important, however; work will be done to clean them up.
No further discussions have been scheduled at this time.
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