Direct from Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Thursday, May 28th, 
I'm Jon Masters with a summary of today's LKML traffic.

In today's issue: ARM devicetree support, ftrace, per-BDI flusher threads, and
trusted boot technology.

Flattened device tree. Since the original ARM fdt patches were posted on
Wednesday, a heated argument has taken place concerning the relative merits
of using OpenFirmware-esque device trees, especially on embedded platforms.
The idea behind fdt is that a single kernel (image) can support many different
devices without all kinds of device-specific hacks, since the required
information can be passed using a generic device tree structure supplied by the
firmware. This, in turn is generated by the system vendor as a BLOB that the
firmware keeps care of (take, for example, an example of how Xilinx have now
modified their EDK tools to generate these BLOBs automatically). In many ways,
it superceeds bootinfo (bdinfo) and similar structures that previously existed
in the kernel. Your author is obviously one of those strongly in favor of it.

Ftrace. Steven Rostedt posted an updated ftrace tree. This version expands
existing support for kernel command line function filtering using the
"ftrace=function" format string on the command line to trace functions on
bootup with the addition of "ftrace_notrace" and "ftrace_filter" to add
filtering of those functions, akin to the regular filtering available using
debugfs interfaces on booted systems. That should help reduce noise. Also
on the subject of ftrace, Wu Zhangjin posted mips-specific ftrace support.

Per-BDI writeback flusher threads. Jens Axboe posted version 9 of his patch
implementing per-bdi writeback flusher threads. Since the previous release,
he has fixed an on-stack allocation caused hang (remember, allocating anything
more than the most insignificant memory on the fixed size kernel stack is bad)
that Ted T'so had reported (complete with very length compressed dmesg log),
gotten rid of explicit wait queues, and added a sync_supers thread that makes
sure dirty superblocks get written.

Trusted Boot Technology. James Morris posted a link to some slides from the
InvisibleThings folks on the new Intel TXT support. He says that this should
help people understand some of the benefits and pitfalls of this technology at
the high level.

In today's announcements: The Montreal Linux Power Management mini-summit. A
reminder that a mini-summit will take place concurrent with the Montreal Linux
Symposium (that's OLS on the road this year). A limit of 20 participents has
been set and so interested parties should email lenb@kernel.org asap.

The latest kernel release remains 2.6.30-rc7, which was released by Linus over
the US Memorial Day Weekend (on Saturday evening). An rc8 release is
anticipated at any moment now.

Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for May 28th. Since Wednesday, the
pxa tree gained a build failure so the version from Monday was used, the
timers tree gained a conflict against the sched tree, and the omap tree gained
a conflict against the arm tree. The linux-next tree still fails to build in an
allyesconfig configuration for powerpc. The total subtree count remains 141.

Finally today, Alan Cox likes to live dangerously. In an 8250 serial patch, he
added an "Impact" line, and in refering to Linus' recent slamming of the idea,
wrote "ok I just put this here to wind up Linus".

That's a summary of today's LKML traffic. For further information visit kernel.org. I'm Jon Masters.