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By Jonathan Corbet
March 5, 2013
By the time that Linus released the 3.9-rc1
kernel prepatch and closed the merge window for this cycle, he had pulled a
total of 10,265 non-merge changesets into the mainline repository. That is
just over 2,000 changes since last week's
summary. The most significant user-visible changes merged at the end
of the merge window include:
March 5, 2013
- The block I/O controller now has full hierarchical control group support.
- The NFS code has gained network namespace support, allowing the operation of per-container NFS servers.
- The Intel PowerClamp driver has been merged; PowerClamp allows the regulation of a CPU's power consumption through the injection of forced idle states.
- The device mapper has gained support for a new "dm-cache" target that is able to use a fast drive (like a solid-state device) as a cache in front of slower storage devices. See Documentation/device-mapper/cache.txt for details.
- RAID 5 and 6 support for the Btrfs filesystem has been merged at last.
- Btrfs defragmentation code has gained snapshot awareness, meaning that sharing of data between snapshots will no longer be lost when defragmentation runs.
- Architecture support for the Synopsys ARC and ImgTec Meta architectures has been added.
- New hardware support includes:
- Systems and processors: Marvell Armada XP development boards, Ralink MIPS-based system-on-chip processors, Atheros AP136 reference boards, and Google Pixel laptops.
- Block: IBM RamSam PCIe Flash SSD devices and Broadcom BCM2835 SD/MMC controllers.
- Display: TI LP8788 backlight controllers.
- Miscellaneous: Kirkwood 88F6282 and 88F6283 thermal sensors, Marvell Dove thermal sensors, and Nokia "Retu" watchdog devices.
Changes visible to kernel developers include:
- The configuration tool now has proper "save" and "load" buttons.
- The rework of the IDR API has been merged, simplifying code that uses IDR to generate unique integer identifiers. Users throughout the kernel tree have been updated to the new API.
- The iterator has lost the unused "" parameter.
At this point, the stabilization period for the 3.9 kernel has begun. If
the usual pattern holds, the final 3.9 release can be expected sometime
around the beginning of May.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/3.9 |