Cliff’s List Filter – Aug 24-30

It’s Thursday, and time for another set of updates featuring news, tips, and patches from the Linux Kernel, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla developer’s discussions. In this edition: both stable Linux kernels (2.4 and 2.6) get an update, and in the case of the 2.6 series, there’s a lot of activity a-going on; a new Balsa release is riding into town; and a bit of controversy has arisen over the Linux driver for Phillips webcams.

Linux Kernel

• In the latest news in the War on Linux Latencies, Ingo Molnar has released version 2.6.8.1-P9 of his voluntary preemption changes to the Linux kernel (if you are on the bleeding edge of the BitKeeper tree, you can get the more recent 2.6.9-rc1-bk4-Q5 version). With most of the reported latencies at or below the 2ms mark, it looks like the quest for Kernel responsiveness is progressing at a decent clip, although there is still no word on whether these changes will be rolled into the mainline kernel anytime soon.
• Several high profile patchset and related projects were released against 2.6.8.1, this week. Guillaume Thouvenin announced the release of ELSA v0.1 on August 24. New in this version is the addition of process “banks” which can be used to track memory, I/O or CPU usage of a group of processes. Processes are added and removed from these banks using “elsacct” program. A new version of the Comprehensive System Accounting patch (refresh only, there were no new functional changes) has been made against Linux 2.6.8. Another small patch that may prove useful to embedded users of 2.6.8.1 is a port of a feature from 2.4.x which allows the kernel user space to be split into 1, 2 or 3GB sections. Mariusz Mazur refreshes the linux-libc-headers package on August 29. Additionally, Michael Halcrow posted his patchset, which implements BSD Secure Levels as a Linux Security Module on August 30.
• Linus announces the release of the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.9 on August 24, which sparks a flurry of activity. First off there are numerouscompilationfixestoapply if you want a clean compile. Another minor patch was made post-release to fix certain locking aspects of the kernel NAT code, and another to correct Netfilter configuration information. As an extra bonus, Joanne Dow submitted some corrections to the Amiga partition handling code which will apply to this kernel and below down to Linux 2.6.4. Additionally, there may be some problems with the CD-Rom driver as a result of some of the recent changes, and some logic corrections to cdrom.c were suggested by Andy Polyakov to address these issues.
• Some quiet changes made to the Reiser4 filesystem code have sparked quite a bit of discussion on the list. If you are following ReiserFS development, you may want to follow along and see how the discussion shakes out as it may affect development of userland code. Warning: the thread is rather long.
• Budding kernel developers looking to use semaphors inside their kernel code might appreciate a pointer to a guide on kernel locking. from Paulo Marques.
• Ryan Arnold contributed an interrupt-driven driver and PPC64 fixes to allow an HVC console to register as a VIO device, in addition to adding hotplug features.
• Olaf Dabrunz submitted a patch that corrects a problem with console redirection. Without the patch, any user could redirect console output to another TTY and either block or send messages to the console at will.
• Marcelo Tosatti, the Linux 2.4 wrangler, has released Linux 2.4.28-pre2 on August 25.
• As an easier way to extract the information exposed by the /proc filesystem, Roger Luethi has come up with a way to provide the /proc data using netlink, which he calls “nproc”. While “nproc” is still experimental, it provides vast performance improvements obtaining the kernel data as opposed to scanning and parsing the data via its /proc node.
• Unfortunately, a bit of controversy has arisen over the Philips Webcam Driver. It appears that Nemasoft, the provider of the kernel driver for this family of webcams, has asked that their driver be removed from the Linux Kernel due to an argument with the driver’s kernel maintainer on another mailing list. For more information on this issue, you can read the kernel maintainers side of the story (which provides a bit of recap). Another thread was started on the list regarding the legalities surrounding the issue, and yet another thread about the impact this decision will have and on the proper way kernel modules should load proprietary code.

GNOME

• Gaphor 0.5.0, a Python-based UML modeling environment, is released on August 25.
• Gnome OSD 0.5.0, an on-screen display system for the GNOME desktop, is released on August 28.
• Balsa 2.2.4, the up-and-coming MUA for the GNOME desktop, is also released on August 28.
• While, not-quite-yet-perfect, Daniel Godas Lopez has made a few changes to Nautilus that may add a bit of bounce in the step of your icons.

KDE

• akregator 1.0-beta 6, a feed reader for the KDE desktop, was released on August 26.
• Since many people find it useful to run different versions of desktop environments at the same time (I’ve done this with KDE, in the past), it might be useful to read this article on parallel installation which Jean Michel Fayard pointed out in this thread in the KDE-imaging mailing list.
• A user contributed a KFile plugin that displayes the metadata for Theora-encoded video files. This code may later show up in the KDE CVS, but for now, it’s in patch form if you are interested in using it.

Mozilla

• Mozilla/Firefox users on XP who are constantly getting Outlook for their mailto: links as opposed to something else, may need to look elsewhere for the solution, as this is not a problem with Mozilla, but with XP’s protocol handling.
• Be aware that if you are running Mozilla on an XP+SP2 machine under its Windows Application Compatibility Mode, you may have to turn off the compatibility mode for Mozilla to work properly.
• Want to open the Mozilla Calendar in a Mozilla tab? Be sure you’ve installed the latest .xpis for the calendar and you can open a new tab and use a chrome:// URL to open the calendar. Be aware that using this method of opening the calendar has its drawbacks and may make your browser unstable.