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Physicist Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. The field of electronics is no different; we could not have the technology we have today without the contributions of thousands of brilliant people. This series of articles is about them. by Dr David Maddison
Ingo Molnar submitted today the scheduler updates destined for the Linux 6.5 kernel
The kernel's handling of concurrency has changed a lot over the years. In 2023, a kernel developer's 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 kernel's history.
The kernel project does not host much user-space code in its repository, but there are exceptions. One of those, currently found in the tools/include/nolibc directory, has only been present since the 5.1 release. The nolibc project aims to provide minimal C-library emulation for small, low-level workloads. Read on for an overview of nolibc, its history, and future direction written by its principal contributor.
It’s going to take at least 2,200 commits to get the work done.