John Ogness posted Wire Up Nbcon Consoles, which aims to refactor how the kernel’s printk console logging system works to use the nbcon (non-BKL or Big Kernel Lock) consoles. The idea is to build upon this patch with additional patches that will add threaded printing, atomic printing regions and other goodies that should improve console performance impact on systems. It may sound mundane but in fact this can be a real problem on large servers.
Artem S Tashkinov expressed dislike about how firmware loading is handled: “Many modules don’t report which firmware files are getting loaded” and often what is reported does not include the version, date or size of these files. Sam James agreed, and added that Gentoo has been applying a downstream patch “for a little while” to fix this and posted it upstream at some point.