LWN Articles About Linux (Kernel): Linux Plumbers Conference, Staging, Linux Conference North America, Stable Statistics
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Topics from the Open Printing microconference
On day two of the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, two of the principals behind the Open Printing project led the very first Open Printing microconference. Project leader Till Kamppeter and program manager Aveek Basu described the current state of printing on Linux and some of the plans for the future, including supporting scanning for multi-function devices. The picture they painted was rosy, at least for printing, which may not quite match the experience of many Linux users. As with many projects, though, Open Printing is starved for contributors—something that was reflected in the sparse attendance at the microconference.
Basu began by pointing out that some attendees had likely printed their boarding passes from Linux, which highlights the importance of printing for Linux. People use it for bank documents, transport tickets, and more. He has been at Lexmark for 11 years, working on printing for Linux, macOS, and other Unix-based systems. Kamppeter said that he has been the Open Printing leader since 2001. The idea of the project is to do everything possible to make printing "just work" with Linux and other operating systems; the goal is "plug and print".
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What happens to kernel staging-tree code
The staging tree was added to the kernel in 2008 for the 2.6.28 development cycle as a way to ease the process of getting substandard device drivers into shape and merged into the mainline. It has been followed by controversy for just about as long. The recent disagreements over the EROFS and exFAT filesystems have reignited many of the arguments over whether the staging tree is beneficial to the kernel community or not. LWN cannot answer that question, but we can look into what has transpired in the staging tree in its first eleven years to see if there are any conclusions to be drawn there.
The core idea behind the staging tree is that it is open to code that does not live up to the normal standards for inclusion into the kernel. Once a driver is added there, it is available to anybody who is brave enough to try to make use of it, but the real purpose is to allow developers to improve the code to the point that it is ready to go into the kernel proper. It serves as an easy place for new developers to try out simple changes and, when it works well, it helps the kernel to gain hardware support that might otherwise languish out-of-tree indefinitely.
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The USB debugging arsenal
At the 2019 Embedded Linux Conference North America, which was held in San Diego in August, Krzysztof Opasiak gave a presentation on demystifying the ways to monitor—and even change—USB traffic on a Linux system. He started with the basics of the USB protocol and worked up into software and hardware tools to observe, modify, and fuzz the messages that get sent. Those tools are part of the arsenal that is available to those interested in looking deeply into USB.
Opasiak works in Poland for what he called a "small Korean company" (Samsung). He noted that it is not that easy to sniff USB traffic and that the ways to do so are not well known. But "there are no dragons"; nothing bad will happen if you do so. In some ways, USB is like the internet and some of the same tools can be used for both.
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5.3 Kernel development cycle statistics
It's that time of the development cycle again: work on the 5.3 kernel is winding down with an expected final release date of September 15. Read on for LWN's traditional look at where the code in 5.3 came from in this relatively busy development cycle.
As of this writing, 14,435 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for 5.3; these changes were contributed by 1,846 developers
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