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Full of Character

With 2.6.31, the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace)-based CUSE (Character device in Userspace) feature will be integrated into Linux. It allows userspace programs to emulate virtual devices that are accessible to other programs via the usual character-oriented device files in the same way as "proper" character devices implemented via a kernel driver.

This enables programmers to develop, for example, a userspace program that emulates the obsolete OSS (Open Sound System); it implements the devices expected by OSS programs via CUSE and then uses these devices to accept the data, process it and output it using the current ALSA sound system. The developer of CUSE, a Novell employee, has released such an OSS proxy for testing. Find further background information about CUSE and its potential uses in an article released on LWN.net some time ago.

Miscellaneous

From 2.6.31, Linux will address 2^46 instead of 2^44 bytes of RAM on x86-64 CPUs – however, this currently affects very few people, as systems offering 16 to 64 Tbytes of RAM are still rather rare.

A number of patches submitted by Mel Gorman are designed to optimise the page allocator responsible for memory allocation – a few benchmark results can be found in the commit comment.

The kernel hackers have integrated the acerhdf driver, which provides temperature read-outs and fan control options for Acer's Aspire One netbook.

Summary of 2.6.31

One of the most important new features of the new kernel version is probably its USB 3.0 support. Those who own a PCI sound card from Creative's Soundblaster X-Fi series will probably be more than pleased that their driver odyssey has finally come to an end, although the newly integrated driver is still missing numerous functions and doesn't yet support some of the X-Fi hardware.

With KMS being available for Radeon hardware and Intel's focus on KMS, the technology is becoming more and more widely accepted. The KMS code for NVIDIA chips is already being developed – it seems rather unlikely, but not entirely impossible, that it will make it into 2.6.32.

Boosted by contributions from developers of a variety of companies, the fast development of Btrfs gives rise to the hope that the experimental filesystem could be ready for production use earlier than originally expected – although this will still require at least a few months.

In addition to these major changes, the latest kernel version offers the usual multitude of promising detail improvements -- among them faster booting for systems with recent Intel southbridges, a reworked Rfkill framework and better support of the power saving techniques offered by modern Wi-Fi hardware. Dozens of additional new and improved drivers further enhance the hardware support of Linux.

Next: Dates and figures

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