Wednesday 11 May 2011

BFS 0.402 test2 for 2.6.39-rc7

Well it looks like another stable release is just around the corner, so it's time for me to sync up. Here's the first BFS test release patch for 2.6.39-rc7:

2.6.39-rc7-sched-bfs-402-test2.patch.lrz

Of course I've used my evil powers to compress it with lrzip as a ploy to make you all have to use it again.

I've been using it for a few hours and it seems to be stable enough, but all the usual warnings apply. I also tested it on the most common configurations, but that doesn't mean it will definitely build fine on all configurations.

The only changes in the impending final release of BFS version 0.402 include some changes inspired by the people posting changes here in the forums (Thanks guys!), though not exactly in the form offered, and a resync of the new changes required to support 2.6.39. Specifically there is more high resolution IRQ accounting, and a new syscall "yield_to".

Funnily enough, it was a good 6 years or so ago I had a discussion with William Lee Irwin III who suggested such a yield call as a useful programming addition which of course was discounted by the mainline maintainers back then. Now they suddenly find it's a useful idea after all, since there may well be scenarios where a directed yield is helpful instead of strict locking semantics. Oh well, I guess there is the adage that you should only ever implement a feature at the time you need it rather than "for when you might need it in the future". The difference now from back then is that the people who wanted it back then couldn't push so hard since they weren't kernel hackers themselves. This time it's KVM that desires it, so it's required by another part of the kernel instead of userspace.

So anyway, please test and report back, and enjoy!

1 comment:

  1. builds and runs fine here at work (with a kvm machine in the background too): thanks Con! :)

    When back at home I'll try it with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory... :D

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