Luis Chamberlain News Today

Linux 6.8 is continuing the work toward allowing the sysctl sentinel to be removed, the final empty element on sysctl arrays

Some code cleaning within the sysctl space of the Linux kernel will eventually eliminate around 64 bytes of bloat per array within the kernel where a sentinel can be removed.

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.

At the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Luis Chamberlain led a plenary session on kernel support for block sizes larger than 4KB. There are assumptions in the current kernel that the block size used by a block-layer device is less than or equal to the systems page size—both are usually 4KB today. But there have been efforts over the years to remove that restriction; that work may be heading toward fruition, in part because of the folio efforts of late, though...

Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.

At the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Amir Goldstein and Miklos Szeredi led a discussion on a new interface for extracting information from kernel objects using the filesystem extended-attributes (xattr) interface. Since Szeredi was not present in Palm Springs, he co-led the session virtually over Zoom audio, which was the only filesystem session with a virtual leader at LSFMM this year. Szeredis proposal for an interface of that sort had been posted...

The kernels handling of concurrency has changed a lot over the years. In 2023, a kernel developers toolkit includes tools like completions, highly optimized mutexes, and a variety of lockless algorithms. But, once upon a time, concurrency control came down to the use of simple semaphores; a discussion on a small change to the semaphore API shows just how much the role of semaphores has changed over the course of the kernels history.