Kernel: Link Time Optimizations (LTO), LWN Articles, SMB and SCO
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Linux Kernel Patches Add Clang LTO Support
Patches by an Android security team member at Google allow the Linux kernel to be compiled with Clang using Link Time Optimizations (LTO).
Sami Tolvanen of Google posted the kernel patches on Friday to support building the Linux kernel with Clang using LTO enabled and paired with GNU Gold with the LLVMgold plug-in for linking the kernel build.
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Patch flow into the mainline for 4.14 [Ed: these LWN articles are no longer behind a paywall]
There is a lot of information buried in the kernel's Git repositories that, if one looks closely enough, can yield insights into how the development community works in the real world. It can show how the idealized hierarchical model of the kernel development community matches what actually happens and provide a picture of how the community's web of trust is used to verify c
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A look at the 4.14 development cycle
The 4.14 kernel, due in the first half of November, is moving into the relatively slow part of the development cycle as of this writing. The time is thus ripe for a look at the changes that went into this kernel cycle and how they got there. While 4.14 is a fairly typical kernel development cycle, there are a couple of aspects that stand out this time around.
As of the 4.14-rc5 prepatch, 12,757 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline; that makes 4.14 slightly busier than its predecessor, but it remains a fairly normal development cycle overall. If, as some have worried, developers have pushed unready code into 4.14 so that it would be present in a long-term-support release, it doesn't show in the overall patch volume.
1,649 developers have contributed code in this development cycle, a number that will almost certainly increase slightly by the time the final 4.14 release is made. Again, that is up slightly from 4.13. Of those developers, 240 made their first contribution to the kernel in 4.14. The numbers are fairly normal, but a look at the most active developers this time around shows a couple of unusual aspects.
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Digging in the kernel dust
Refactoring the kernel means taking some part of the kernel that is showing its age and rewriting it so it works better. Thomas Gleixner has done a lot of this over the past decade; he spoke at Kernel Recipes about the details of some of that work and the lessons that he learned. By way of foreshadowing how much fun this can be, he subtitled the talk "Digging in Dust".
Gleixner's original motivation for taking up his spade was to get the realtime (RT) patches into the mainline kernel, which he found involved constantly working around the shortcomings of the mainline code base. In addition, ten years of spending every working day digging around in dust can make you quite angry, he said, which can also be a big incentive to make things better.
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A block layer introduction part 1: the bio layer
The term "block layer" is often used to talk about that part of the Linux kernel which implements the interface that applications and filesystems use to access various storage devices. Exactly which code constitutes this layer is a question that reasonable people could disagree on. The simplest answer is that it is all the code inside the block subdirectory of the Linux kernel source. This collection of code can be seen as providing two layers rather than just one; they are closely related but clearly distinct. I know of no generally agreed names for these sub-layers and so choose to call them the "bio layer" and the "request layer". The remainder of this article will take us down into the former while the latter will be left for a subsequent article.
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Linux kernel 4.13 and SMB protocol version fun
There’s been a rather interesting change in the Linux kernel recently, which may affect you if you’re mounting network drives using SMB (the Windows native protocol, occasionally also called CIFS).
There have been several versions of the protocol – Wikipedia has a good writeup. Both servers and clients may support different versions; when accessing a shared resource, the client tells the server which protocol version it wants to use, and if the server supports that version then everyone’s happy and the access goes ahead; if the server doesn’t support that version, you get an error and no-one’s happy.
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SCO versus IBM (and Linux) springs back to life after court ruling
SCO, the Unix operating systems vendor that turned on Linux in a bid to claim proprietorial ownership of the open-source operating system that effectively ate its lunch, has won a surprise victory in the US Court of Appeals against systems giant IBM.
The victory will spark new life - not a lot, but some - into the effectively defunct company's intellectual property [sic] claims.
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