Linux news
Removing the Big Kernel Lock
"As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL. Ingo explained:
"This task is not easy at all. 12 years after Linux has been converted to an SMP OS we still have 1300+ legacy BKL using sites. There are 400+ lock_kernel() critical sections and 800+ ioctls. They are spread out across rather difficult areas of often legacy code that few people understand and few people dare to touch. It takes top people like Alan Cox to map the semantics and to remove BKL code, and even for Alan (who is doing this for the TTY code) it is a long and difficult task."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System
"I'm please to announce [the] POHMEL high performance network filesystem. POHMELFS stands for Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System," began Evgeniy Polyakov, explaining:
"This is a high performance network filesystem with local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data. Network filesystem is a client transport. POHMELFS protocol was proven to be superior to NFS in lots (if not all, then it is in a roadmap) operations."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
2.6.26-rc2, "Little Exciting Here"
"About 45% architecture updates (counting the include files too), about 30% drivers, and about 25% odds-and-ends. The odds-and-ends are mainly Documentation, filesystems (mostly cifs) and core kernel (scheduler updates etc)," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc2 kernel. He added, "if you read the shortlog and get the feeling that most of it is pretty boring small details, you'd be right. There is little exciting there." He continued:
"A fairly small part of it, but quite possibly the most noticeable one, is how the semaphore changes impacted the BKL (the old 'big kernel lock' that is still used for some legacy code, for you non-core people out there), which in the past had different versions ('regular', 'preemptable'). A few months ago we dropped the regular BKL version, but in 2.6.25-rc1 we then had performance (and then correctness) issues with the interaction between the semaphore implementation and the preemptable BKL, so we're back to the old regular version for now."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
xkcd Style WEP Cracking in Real Life
My love for xkcd comics has influenced me to write this modified autoconfig “cracking” tool that cracks wifi WEP password from your neighbors, exactly the way shown in xkcd comic number 416:
(click for larger view)
Here is the tool in action:
As you can see there are some state of the art features added to this version. This tools is the result of weeks of sleepless night, yet I am not too sure whether I should release this version to the public. There are some sick people out there who can seriously abuse this tool. If you are still skeptical about the existence of this, you can watch it live in action:
Remember, hacking is serious business.
Disclaimer: No Children or neighbors were hurt (that I know of) during this demo.
Installing Four Other Desktop Edition on Ubuntu
Most of us know Ubuntu by it’s default gnome desktop look, but very few have ever tried other forms of desktop environment that are available besides gnome for ubuntu. There are four other main desktop environments for Ubuntu:
kubuntu, based on K Desktop Environment.
Edubuntu, is based on both gnome and K desktop environment, but it’s designed for young users. Edubuntu also provides three different theme setups, ‘young’, for younger users, ‘plain’ for a clean desktop setup, and ‘default’, which is a general purpose theme setup.
Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment, arguably the lightest, fastest linux desktop environment out there.
Gobuntu, strictly follows Free Software Foundation’s four freedoms. Which means there will be no firmware, drivers, applications, or content included in Gobuntu that does not include the full source or whose license does not provide the right to use, study, modify, and redistribute the body of work.
Creating Seamless Virtual Machine with Virtualbox 1.6
Virtualbox 1.6, which was released in May 2, was the first major release since Sun took over virtualbox. All I can say is Wow!! This is perhaps the single biggest, most important open source release which will change the face of how computers are used for years to come. Hell this is even bigger than the release of hardy heron (IMO), and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was a very important release.
One single feature of virtualbox, seamless, will make some major software completely redundant in coming years. Don’t get me wrong, seamless was possible with virtualbox since the last release before 1.6; but it was buggy, not a part of the features and needed a decent amount of hack and workaround to even get it to work. So seamless was possible, but never like this. With virtualbox 1.6 seamless is truly effortless, and well integrated, and super fast.
2.6.26-rc1, "Less Scary Stuff Going On"
"So this merge window was somewhat rocky in the sense that there was a lot of arguments about it, but at the same time I at least personally think that from a technical angle, we had somewhat less scary stuff going on than has been almost the rule lately," noted Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc1 kernel. He continued:
"Lots of changes, but nothing that really feels all that fragile to me. Famous last words. I expect that the x86 PAT support (which has been long in the making) has the potential to have some issues, but the obvious problems were hashed out long ago, and while the merge window already showed one bug, that one was fairly benign and quickly fixed."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
Active Merge Windows
"This is starting to get beyond frustrating for me," complained David Miller of the latest merge window, launching what turned into a very lengthy and ongoing discussion about the Linux kernel development process. The concept of a regular "merge window" was first discussed in July of 2005 with the release of the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel, following the 2005 Developers' Summit. From 2.6.14 on, the release of each official 2.6.y kernel has been followed by a two week period during which major changes are merged into the kernel, followed by a 2.6.y-rc1 release. David complained that this particular merge window has been more painful than others, "the tree breaks every day, and it's becoming an extremely non-fun environment to work in. We need to slow down the merging, we need to review things more, we need people to test their [...] changes!"
During the lengthy discussion, Linux creator Linus Torvalds explained:
Btrfs 0.14, Managing Multiple Devices
"Btrfs v0.14 is now available for download," Chris Mason announced, adding, "please note the disk format has changed, and it is not compatible with older versions of Btrfs." The project has gained a new wiki home page on the kernel.org domain, where it is explained, "Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone." Regarding the latest release, Chris explained:
"v0.14 has a few performance fixes and closes some races that could have allowed corrupted metadata in v0.13. The major new feature is the ability to manage multiple devices under a single Btrfs mount. Raid0, raid1 and raid10 are supported. Even for single device filesystems, metadata is now duplicated by default. Checksums are verified after reads finish and duplicate copies are used if the checksums don't match."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
Ksplice, Rebootless Linux Kernel Security Updates
"I've put together an automatic system for applying kernel security patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting it, and I wanted to share this system with the community in case others find it useful or interesting," said Jeff Arnold, announcing ksplice. He explained, "the system takes as input a kernel security patch (which can be a unified diff taken directly from Linus' GIT tree) and the source code corresponding to the running kernel, and it automatically creates a set of kernel modules to perform the update. The running kernel does not need to have been customized in advance in any way." The project's website notes, "ksplice cannot handle semantic changes to data structures—that is, changes that would require existing instances of kernel data structures to be transformed." With this limitation, Jeff suggested ksplice is still able to automatically apply 84% of the kernel security patches released between May 2005 and December 2007. He continued:
The Usefulness Of Linux-Next
Discussing the latest breakage of the linux-next tree, Stephen Rothwell noted that the problem went unnoticed due to the arm tree not currently being included, "this is why I would have liked you to participate in the linux-next tree ...". Arm maintainer Russell King questioned the usefulness, saying, "linux-next will not give me anything which -mm isn't giving me. As I said in the discussion, linux-next value is _very_ small for me. Sorry but true." Several stepped in to offer some reasons that the linux-next tree is useful.
Defaulting To 4K Stacks
Andrew Morton replied to a commit message making 4k stacks the default, saying, "this patch will cause kernels to crash." Ingo Molnar replied, "what mainline kernels crash and how will they crash? Fedora and other distros have had 4K stacks enabled for years." He added, "we've conducted tens of thousands of bootup tests with all sorts of drivers and kernel options enabled and have yet to see a single crash due to 4K stacks." During the lengthy discussion it was suggested that nfs+xfs+raid kernel configurations, and using ndiswrapper are the most common reasons for overflowing a 4K stack size.
2.6.25, "Long Promised"
"It's been long promised, but there it is now," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, "special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries." Linus added:
Memory Corruption Bug Solved, 2.6.25 Expected Today
"Finally found it ... the patch below solves the sparsemem crash and the test system boots up fine now," announced Ingo Molnar. He described the patch as fixing a "memory corruption and crash on 32-bit x86 systems. If a !PAE x86 kernel is booted on a 32-bit system with more than 4GB of RAM, then we call memory_present() with a start/end that goes outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS." He included a source snippet with the loop that could corrupt memory, "depending on what that memory is, we might crash, misbehave or just not notice the bug." Ingo went on to note that the bug was first introduced with sparsemem support in the 2.6.16 kernel:
"I believe this was the reason why my many bisection attempts were unsuccessful: the bug pattern was not stable and seemingly working kernels had the memory corruption too. It was pure luck that v2.6.24 'worked' and v2.6.25-rc9 broke visibly."
Source: KernelTrap - Kernel newsBookmark/Search this post with:
Budget Fair Queuing IO Scheduler
"We are working [on] a new I/O scheduler based on CFQ, aiming at improved predictability and fairness of the service, while maintaining the high throughput it already provides," began Fabio Checconi, announcing the BFQ I/O scheduler. "The Budget Fair Queueing (BFQ) scheduler turns the CFQ Round-Robin scheduling policy of time slices into a fair queuing scheduling of sector budgets," he continued, "more precisely, each task is assigned a budget measured in number of sectors instead of amount of time, and budgets are scheduled using a slightly modified version of WF2Q+. The budget assigned to each task varies over time as a function of its behaviour. However, one can set the maximum value of the budget that BFQ can assign to any task." Fabio went on to explain:
