Free Software Linux

Ingo Molnar summarized his pull request for changes to the x86 architecture bound for mainline inclusion in 2.6.25 noting, "it's not a small merge, it consists of 908 commits from 96 individual arch/x86 developers (!)". He continued, "a number of core files are changed as well: most notably percpu, debugging details, timers, the firewire remote debugging patch and ... the KGDB remote debugging stub in kernel/kgdb.c." He went on to detail the extent of the testing this tree has received, "in the past few weeks tens of thousands of random x86.git bzImages were successfully built and booted on a number of (commodity) 32-bit and 64-bit testsystems - and there has been a fair amount of test exposure on -mm as well." Regarding the remote kernel debugger, Ingo explained: "We tested KGDB to be merge-worthy within the x86 architecture (the only supported architecture for now) and it's better to have kernel/kgdb.c than arch/x86/kernel/kgdb.c. The code is reasonably clean and the user-space exposure is small - the only real exposure is the decades-old remote GDB protocol. We are happy to fix up any further cleanliness comments that people might have - but we really wanted to start somewhere and get this thing moving. As an added bonus: finally a kernel debugger that can be read without puking too much ;-) [anyone remember KDB?]" read more

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