Linus Torvalds announced 2.5.73, and said, Various updates all over the map here. Lots of ia64 updates, and Andrew merged the ext3 locking cleanups/fixes that have been in the -mm tree for a while.

Mel Gorman posted a small document and explained, I'm writing a small paper on the 2.6 VM for a conference. It is based on 2.5.73 and is basically an introduction to some of the new features that are up and coming. As it's only an introduction, it's a little light on heavy detail. Below is the parts of the paper which I thought would be of general interest (I left out stuff like the abstract, introduction, conclusion and bibliography). Daniel Phillips replied, Nice stuff, and very timely. And Mel said, I was hoping someone else would write it so I could read it but thats what I said about the 2.4 VM :-) . Yep, once again, my contributions are mainly documenting related, believe it or not, I actually do code a bit from time to time. He went on, I was going to update the whole document based on this thread and repost it but it's looking like it'll take me a few days for a week before I work through it all (so I'm slow, sue me). This is especially true as there is a lot of old email threads I need to read before I understand 100% of the current discussion (which is also why I'm not replying to most posts in this thread). Instead, I'm going to post up the bits that are changed and hopefully get everything together. Elsewhere, a lot of folks discussed the technical issues Mel had referred to; and Mel worked on collecting it all together.

Andries Brouwer posted a patch which adds a module cryptoloop, with source file drivers/block/cryptoloop.c and config option BLK_DEV_CRYPTOLOOP. It is the missing link between the kernel crypto subdirectory and the loop device. He went on, This means that one no longer needs kernel patches to use encryption via the loop device. This goes together with mount and losetup from util-linux 2.12 which will be released as soon as this goes in.

Andrew Morton pointed out some complication in the code, that he felt was unnecessary. He suggested a solution, but Andries replied that Andrew's suggestion would change the APIs, and require source modifications of all modules currently using the loop device. He said he'd be willing to do it if no one objected, and Christoph Hellwig said, I don't think that matters. This is 2.5 and APIs tend to change in unstable series :)

Jari Ruusu protested that this would be a big inconvenience for him personally, as he would have to clean up the loop-AES code to compensate for the API change. The discussion began to revolve around Jari's patch submission practices. Christoph and Andrew said he should send small, self-contained patches that might get into the official tree, instead of the big one he'd sent earlier. Christoph in particular said that if Jari didn't want to take the necessary steps to get his code into the tree where it could be better protected from these kinds of API changes, then he would have to deal with them himself.

The thread petered out around there, with the API change looking more likely than the status quo.

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 2.5.74 and said:

Stephen Smalley announced, The patch against 2.5.74-bk1 available from http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/lk/2.5.74-bk1-selinux.patch.gz adds the SELinux module to the tree and modifies the security/Makefile and security/KConfig files for SELinux. The last dependency for SELinux, the vm_enough_memory security hook, was included in -bk1. Comments were generally favorable, though several folks had suggestions for implementation details.

James Simmons said:

Joshua Kwan asked if James worked on RadeonFB issues in 2.5, since that driver had been flaking out for a long time. But James replied, Nope. I don't have this hardware. Once I get my hands on that kind of hardware I will give it a shot. Elsewhere, Scott Robert Ladd also asked about the RadeonFB, and James said he'd accept patches if anyone else wanted to send them to him. Scott said he'd take a look and see if he could tackle it.

Sancho Dauskardt had a question about the FAT filesystem, but could not get any reply from the maintainer, Gordon Chaffee. He posted to the list, remarking on Gordon's disappearance, and Randy Dunlap replied, Try asking OGAWA Hirofumi (cc-ed). He's the de facto FAT maintainter. (I asked him to add a patch to MAINTAINTERS...) OGAWA Hirofumi replied thanking Randy for the vote of confidence, but adding, honestly, I may not have skill enough. Jeff Garzik said with a smile, The people who apply your patches think you do. Christoph Hellwig also said, Given that you have done a nice job ob fatfs in 2.5 and there's no one coming near that many useful contributions in that timeframe I think it would be a good idea to declare you maintainer. According to MAINTAINERS it currently doesn't have any formal maintainer anyway. Ogawa said OK, he'd give it a try; and posted a patch listing himself as maintainer.

Jeff Garzik announced:

Willy Tarreau was very happy to hear about this, and pointed out a bug, which Jeff fixed.

Andrew Morton announced:

Daniel Stekloff said: