KERNEL WATCH
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, because someone has to.
L inus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.15, renamed to “Trick or Treat” in recognition of its release on Halloween. We have mentioned many of the headline features previously, but every kernel has hundreds more. You can find a great (expansive) list maintained by volunteers at https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges.
Among those listed is a new process_ mrelease system call. This benefits those with userspace OOM (Out Of Memory) killer processes that limit memory hogs, enabling more timely cleanup. A second interesting feature is “DAMON”, a “data access monitor” that allows userspace applications to watch the memory access patterns of applications, seeing which memory is actively in use, and which could be proactively swapped out to disk to free up resources.