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New and improved drivers

As usual, the new kernel version contains numerous new and improved drivers as well as the respective adjusted subsystems. The USB subsystem, for example, was extended to provide a device recognition mechanism - these are the first components for Wireless USB support under Linux, which like Bluetooth requires authentication to prevent humorous or malicious pranks and attacks.

The libata subsystem in 2.6.24 offers ACPI-controlled hotplug functionality - this should allow swapping an integrated DVD drive for an additional battery during operation in more notebooks than before. Due to port multiplier support from 2.6.24, the ahci and sata_sil ATA drivers for AHCI and Silicon image controllers can now also address cable-connected external SATA housings containing several hard disks. A recognition mechanism for NCQ (Native Command Queuing) data errors was removed - the code didn't work properly and caused all kinds of false alarms in connection with hard disks.

Libata's ACPI support is now enabled by default (to quote from the commit: "Let's see what explodes"), which should allow the use of system sleep modes in newer notebooks when a hard disk password is set. Kernel developers now make the sata-mv driver issue a warning (1, 2) with some Highpoint RocketRAID controllers, as this type of controller writes into the normally unused first sectors of a hard disk in some modes, which could disrupt a Grub installation; the controllers are also said to overwrite data at the end of a hard disk in certain cases.

The audio subsystem is now roughly equivalent to Alsa version 1.0.15; support for the various HDA-HDA codecs can now be selected separately in the configuration. As ever, a whole range of new device-specific special features were added for various PCs, main boards and notebooks. Developers removed the old es1371 OSS audio driver since an Alsa equivalent is now available.

As usual, a large number of new drivers have been added; the kernel now, for example, contains the fujitsu-laptop driver for Fujitsu notebooks, which, among other things, regulates backlighting. Two further new features are ixgbe for 10 Gigabit Intel Ethernet chips and sata_fsl for Freescale SATA controllers. e1000e, an extensively updated version of the e1000 driver for Intel network hardware, has also been integrated in the 2.6.24 kernel; the new driver will initially only be used for the network logic in newer Intel southbridges as well as some selected network chips.

2.6.24 is the first version to contain a generic framework (1, 2, 3) for Secure Digital Input Output (SDIO) - small devices like GPS receivers, modems, network adapters or digital cameras use this interface and the suitable SD card slots to connect to the system. A driver for UART/GPS devices and one for MMC over SPI, among others, already use the new framework.

New are also the ivtvfb (IVTV frame buffer) or TCM825x V4L/DVB drivers. In addition, several V4L/DVB drivers were improved; for example to support Dual DVB-T sticks like Pinnacle Dual DVB-T, Terratec Cinergy DT USB XS diversity and Hauppauge Nova TD USB.

Many of the numerous new patches integrated in Linux 2.6.24 offer improved hardware support, extend the functionality of the many drivers or correct driver flaws; find the most important changes not mentioned above in the short descriptions at the end of this article.

Kernel trends

Now that kernel 2.6.24 has been released, the hot first development stage of 2.6.25 has started. Kernel hackers will be likely to continue unifying the x86 source code, which was partly automated with scripts, and will manually merge many of the specific 32-bit and 64-bit source code files. However, the unification process will certainly not be completed in 2.6.25 - it is likely that the work will continue for months and years to come.

Numerous patches for the ptrace infrastructure are ready for integration in 2.6.25 - among them several preparatory patches for changing to the utrace debug and tracing framework. Its programmer has hoped to integrate utrace into the kernel for quite a while, but whether it will finally happen in 2.6.25 is uncertain and seems rather unlikely at present.

After SELinux, SMACK (Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel for Linux) could be the second security framework to make it into the kernel. KVM and the support of container virtualisation should be subject to major improvements as in previous kernel versions; some developers want to integrate support for x86-64 architectures into the Xen-DomU code for x86-32 guests which became part of the kernel with version 2.6.23.

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