ONGOING DEVELOPMENT…
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.4- rc6, saying, “I don’t think we’ve had anything hugely interesting happen the last week, and the whole 6.4 release really does feel like it’s going fairly smoothly. Knock wood, famous last words, you know the drill.” This contrasts with the previous rc5 release, in which Linus had to revert a well-intended fix to module loading that turned out to break some systems. If things continue on the current track, we’ll likely be covering the 6.5 merge window (period of time during which disruptive patches are merged for a new kernel release cycle) in next month’s edition.
Randy Dunlap reminded Linus (and everyone else) of the existence of the scripts/parse-maintainers.pl script for sorting the entries in the kernel MAINTAINERS file. He noted that “it was giant, more than 100 out-of-order entries since it was last sorted”. Linus responded, “Ugh. That file causes the most conflicts, and sorting it makes it horrendous.” A suggestion to sort each RC1 was made (because Linus effectively owns the tree at that point).
Finally this month, I would like to give a shout-out to the coverage over at Linux Weekly News of the recent Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. Their coverage includes several read-outs on ongoing developments with CXL (Compute Express Link), in some respects a successor to PCI Express that allows for such innovations as memory expansion via CXL. Among the use cases covered was live migration of VMs without copying memory by leveraging shared CXL memory pools at the data centre level.