Kernel

Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.

The organising committee for Linux.conf.au (LCA) have finalised the program for the conference to be held at the University of Tasmania's Sandy Bay campus from January 19-24.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel after a lengthy three-month development stretch since the 2.6.25 release involving nine release candidates.

While Linus Torvalds' name is synonymous with the Linux kernel, Al Viro's may be one day, too.

The kernel source level debugger, kgdb, has been around for a long time, but never in the mainline tree. Linus Torvalds is not much of a fan of debuggers in general and has always resisted the inclusion of kgdb. That looks like it might be changing somewhat, with the inclusion of kgdb in 2.6.26 now a distinct possibility.

Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done.

The TALPA malware scanning API was covered in LWN in December, 2007. Several months later, TALPA is back - in the form of a patch set posted by a Red Hat employee. The resulting discussion has certainly not been what the TALPA developers would have hoped for; it is, instead, a good example of how a potentially useful idea can be set back by poor execution and presentation to the kernel community.

Three weeks ago, LWN looked at the renewed interest in dynamic tracing, with an emphasis on SystemTap. Tracing is a perennial presence on end-user wishlists; it remains a handy tool for companies like Sun Microsystems, which wish to show that their offerings (Solaris, for example) are superior to Linux. It is not surprising that there is a lot of interest in tracing implementations for Linux; the main surprise is that, after all this time, Linux still does not have a top-quality answer to DTrace - though, arguably, Linux had a working tracing mechanism long before DTrace made its appearance.

Even the most casual observer of the linux-kernel mailing must have noticed that, in the shadow of the firmware flame war, there is also a heated discussion over the management of security issues. There have also been some attempts to turn this local battle into a multi-list, regional conflict. Finding the right way to deal with security problems is difficult for any project, and the kernel is no exception. Whether this discussion will lead to any changes remains to be seen, but it does at least provide a clear view of where the disagreements are.

One of the fundamental data structures in the networking subsystem is the transmit queue associated with each device. The core networking code will call a driver's hard_start_xmit() function to let the driver know that a packet is ready for transmission; it is then the driver's job to feed that packet into the hardware's transmit queue.

You're now with Qumranet which is the company behind KVM. Can you briefly tell me about the design of KVM and how that differs from previous virtualization approaches such as Xen and VMware?

Computerworld catches up with the man behind Linux, Linus Torvalds, at Linux.conf.au

Jonathan Corbet is an active kernel contributor, co-founder and president of Linux development community news site LWN.net, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. His renowned Kernel Report has been presented to audiences worldwide, and this year marks his fourth appearance at Linux.conf.au. Here, Corbet offers Computerworld readers a sneak peek at the major themes behind this year's Kernel Report.