Kernel Watch
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Things were looking up following the slow start to this development cycle when seemingly out of the blue Linus sent a follow-up email titled “A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag.” In it, he provided a warning about a data-corrupting bug that had snuck through. This particular one affected those using swap files (but not swap partitions, which are still generally the default option in common use) and it affected them badly by destroying the filesystem they were stored on.
Like most other operating systems, Linux uses the concept of “swapping” (or perhaps more technically correct “paging”) less recently used data out to disk when there’s a memory crunch that necessitates freeing up some RAM. Because application memory is “virtual” in nature, every access by a program to its memory goes through a translation (paging) process that converts the virtual address as seen by the program into a physical address as seen by hardware.