The 5.18 kernel has been released
Linus has released the 5.18 kernel.
"No unexpected nasty
surprises this last week, so here we go with the 5.18 release right on
schedule." Some of the headline changes in this release include the DAMOS
memory-management interface, a number of random-number-generator improvements,
the Intel software-defined silicon driver, strict memcpy() bounds checking, a
switch to the C11 standard, and more. Also, the Reiserfs filesystem has been
deprecated and the last vestiges of a.out support have been removed.
See the
LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 5.18
page for more details.
LWN is now on Mastodon
For readers who want to follow our article stream on
Mastodon, LWN now (finally) has a presence in the Fosstodon community; you can
find us at @LWN@fosstodon.org.
[$] Preserving guest memory across kexec
The final session in the memory-management track at the
2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) was run
remotely by James Gowans and David Woodhouse. It was titled "user-space control
of memory mappings", with a subtitle of "letting guest memory and state survive
kexec". Some options were discussed, but the real work is clearly yet to be
done.
[$] Fixing a race in hugetlbfs
As the memory-management track at the 2022 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) neared its conclusion,
Mike Kravetz ran a session remotely to talk about page sharing with hugetlbfs,
which is a special filesystem that provides access to huge pages. (See this
article series for lots of information about hugetlbfs). Hugetlbfs can help to
reduce page-table overhead when pages are shared between large numbers of
processes, but there is a problem that he is trying to find a solution
for.
[$] get_user_pages() and COW, 2022 edition
The numerous correctness problems with the kernel's
get_user_pages() functionality have been a fixture at the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) for some years. The 2022
event did not break that tradition. The first-day discussion on page pinning
was covered here.
On the final day, in the memory-management track, David
Hildenbrand led a session on the current status of get_user_pages() and its
interaction with copy-on-write (COW) memory.
