2.6.12

• Released June 17, 2005 changelog

• Pageout throttling: With silly pageout testcases it is possible to place huge amounts of memory under I/O. With a large request queue (CFQ uses 8192 requests) it is possible to place _all_ memory under I/O at the same time. This means that all memory is pinned and unreclaimable and the VM gets upset and goes oom. This patch limits the amount of memory which is under pageout writeout to be a little more than the amount of memory at which balance_dirty_pages() callers will synchronously throttle. This means that heavy pageout activity can starve heavy writeback activity completely, but heavy writeback activity will not cause starvation of pageout (commit)

• Address space randomization: With these patches applied, each process's stack will begin at a random location, and the beginning of the memory area used for mmap() (which is where shared libraries go, among other things) will be randomized as well (LWN article) (commit) - (commit) - (commit) - (commit) - (commit) - (commit) - (commit) - (commit)

• Cpusets (LWN article) (commit)

• "resource limits": RLIMIT_NICE and RLIMIT_RTPRIO added to allow non-root tasks to raise nice and rt priorities. Defaults to traditional behavior (LWN article) (commit)

• Multilevel security implementation for SELinux

• Seccomp security mechanism (commit)

• Support for Cyrix MediaGX (aka GEODE) CPUs. Linux and GCC treat this chip as a 586TSC with some extended instructions and alignment reqirements (commit)

• I/O barrier support for serial ATA drives
• Block I/O barrier rewrite (enables full barrier support on serial ATA drives)

• Annotate /proc/$PID/maps with [heap]/[stack]/[vdso] markers (commit)

• SuperHyway bus support

• Device mapper multipath support (LWN article)

• Hot-pluggable parallel ports (commit)

• Updated FAT attributes: This updates the FAT attributes as well as corrects the handling of VFAT ctime (commit)

• Handle MS_SYNCHRONOUS flag in FAT: FAT filesystem has been ignoring the "sync" mount option for ages. This patches fixes this, but (obviously) degrades performance unless you mount your FAT filesystem as asynchronous ("async mount option) (commit)

• Add timing information to printk messages (commit)

• Allow admin to enable only some of the Magic-Sysrq functions (commit)

• Loglevel boot option (commit)

• Remove IPV6 "experimental" status

• PKT_SCHED: Extended Matches API commit

• PKT_SCHED: Simple comparison ematch (cmp) commit

• PKT_SCHED: Multi byte comparison ematch (nbyte) commit

• PKT_SCHED: u32 hasing key ematch commit

• PKT_SCHED: Metadata ematch (meta) commit

• PKT_SCHED: Basic classifier commit

• IPV6: match TCP port selection behavior with ipv4 commit

• JFS: allow iocharset=none mount option commit

• CRYPTO: Add Tiger digest algorithms. commit

• CIFS: Add support for updating Windows NT times/dates (part 1) commit

• kbuild: Introdude KBUILD_NOCMDDEP commit

• Drivers & architectures

  • ALSA: AC'97 Audio support for Intel ICH7 commit

  • ALSA: Add support for Chaintech 9CJS commit

  • ALSA: Enable HP jack sense for FSC Scenic-W commit

  • ALSA: Add Intel HDA driver commit

  • ALSA: Novation and MOTU USB MIDI support commit

  • ALSA: MPU-401 PnP support commit

  • ALSA: add 96Khz support and setting sample rate for direct SPDIF output commit

  • ALSA: add STAC9708 output bias mixer control commit

  • ALSA: Added support for Terratec PHASE 22 commit

  • ALSA: Add support for Audigy2LS on MSI motherboard commit

  • ALSA: Enables SPDIF output on the Audigy2 Value commit

  • ALSA: Added ICE1724 - ESI Juli@ code (not complete) + AK4114 code + AK4358 commit

  • mv643xx: Add support for PHYs/boards that don't support autonegotiation. commit

  • Adds a disable_irm option to ieee1394.ko which disables all Isochronous Resource Manager functionality, useful to work around certain problems, e.g. iPod detection. commit

  • SCSI: Add device io statistics commit

  • ACPI: Add ACPI-based memory hot plug driver. commit

  • input: This patch adds support to uinput for Linux's force feedback interface. With these changes, it's possible to write drivers for force feedback joysticks and similar devices in userspace. It also adds a way to set the physical path of devices created via uinput commit

  • input: Add support for Logitech MX300 mouse in PS/2 mode. commit

  • input: Add support for the Logitech MX1000 mouse in PS/2 mode. commit

  • input: Add support for Sharp Zaurus SL-C7cc Corgi keyboards. commit

  • input: Add support for Sharp SL-C7xx touchscreen (Corgi). commit

  • input: New driver for ICS MicroClock MK712 TouchScreens. commit

  • input: HP HIL support (from PARISC Linux tree). commit

  • input: This patch adds support for a Wacom new tablet, Intuos3, and its associated tools. commit

  • input: Add a new ID to the Logitech ForceFeedback joystick driver. commit

  • input: Add support for serial ELO touchscreens, including Elo IntelliTouch, AccuTouch and SecureTouch. commit

  • mv643xx: Add ethtool support to the mv643xx ethernet driver. Initially, we add statistics and link status reporting. commit

  • AGPGART: Drop the Intel-mch AGP driver. commit

  • input: Add support for less usual ALPS touchpads commit

  • input: Add more PnP IDs to i8042 PnP probe table commit

  • input: Add MicroTouch (3M) serial touchscreen driver commit

  • input: Add the option to use cooked coordinates in MicroTouch USB touchscreen driver. commit