Kernel 2.6.14 released

Linux Geek, the new kernel 2.6.14 is released. Not only it was kernel bug fix but also couple of new stuffs were added as well.

2.6.14

• Released October 27, 2005 changelog [kernel.org]

• Numa-aware slab allocator: It creates slabs on multiple nodes and manages slabs in such a way that locality of allocations is optimized. Each node has its own list of partial, free and full slabs. All object allocations for a node occur from node specific slab lists (commit - benchmarks) [kernel.org]

• Lazy page table copies in fork() for VMAs without anonymous pages (the ones with anonymous pages are still copied): Defer copying of ptes until fault time when it is possible to reconstruct the pte from backing store, speeding up fork() greatly specially for processes using lots of shared memory (commit) [kernel.org]

• Add /proc/$PID/smaps: This file will shows how much memory is resident in each mapping. Useful for people who want to perform memory consumption analysis (commit) [kernel.org]

• Add /proc/$PID/numa_maps: This file will show on which nodes pages reside (commit) [kernel.org]

• Lock-free file descriptor look-up (commit) [kernel.org] - (commit) [kernel.org]

• Four-level page table support for the ppc64 architecture: extends the usable user address range to 44 bits (16T). (commit) [kernel.org]

• Support hotplug cpu on 32-bit SMP powermacs: When a cpu is off-lined, it is put into sleep mode with interrupts disabled. It can be on-lined again by asserting its soft-reset pin, which is connected to a GPIO pin (commit) [kernel.org]

• Add TASK_NONINTERACTIVE task state bit to the cpu scheduler: It can be used by blocking points to mark the task's wait as "non-interactive". This does not mean the task will be considered a CPU-hog - the wait will simply not have an effect on the waiting task's priority - positive or negative alike (commit) [kernel.org]

• PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) support: RFC 2637 [ietf.org]. Used to implement VPN products (notably, Microsoft in all the Windows versions). Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] (commit) [kernel.org]

• DCCP: "Datagram Congestion Control Protocol". Datagram protocol (like UDP), but with a congestion control mechanism. (LWN article) [lwn.net] Currently a RFC draft [icir.org]

So i guessed, i will have to update my Acer Linux notebook from Kernel 2.6.13 to 2.6.14 and see what i have got. Keep u folks posted on my success later.