Free Software Linux

The final 2.6.24 Linux kernel is expected any day now, so the various subsystem maintainers have begun summarizing what changes are expected to be merged into the mainline kernel during the 2.6.25 merge window. Ingo Molnar spoke to changes for the x86 architecture, "there are 763 commits in x86.git so far, from more than 90 contributors, so it would be difficult to mention and credit every contribution in this mail." Along with a lengthy list of other changes, he included: "Continued, intense arch/x86 unification and cleanup work by lots of people; FIFO ticket spinlocks for better spinlock scalability; 'regset' generalizations - the most important step towards utrace support (==next-gen ptrace); support for more than 255 CPUs [up to 4096 - in theory up to 65535]; almost complete 64-bit paravirt guest support; KGDB support on x86, finally!" read more

"This series kill the old i386 and x86_64 directories. The relevant files are moved and adapted and Kconfig.debug was consolidated (thanks to Randy)," Sam Ravnborg said, describing a set of 6 patches to finish the migration of physical files into the new x86 architecture directory. He described it as "a nice patch series that deletes more lines than it adds," going on to explain:

"I had to modify both the top-level Makefile and the kconfig Makefile to accomplish this. It was done in such a way that it is trivial for other archs to use the same mechanism should they have the need.

Source:

"Can we please finish up this merge a little more before we freeze 2.6.24?