KernelNewbies:

Linux 4.0 has been released on Sun, 12 Apr 2015.

Summary: This release adds support for live patching the kernel code, aimed primarily at fixing security updates without rebooting; DAX, a way to avoid using the kernel cache when filesystems run on systems with persistent memory storage; kasan, a dynamic memory error detector that allows to find use-after-free and out-of-bounds bugs; lazytime, an alternative to relatime, which causes access, modified and changed time updates to only be made in the cache and written to the disk opportunistically; allow overlayfs to have multiple lower layers, support of Parallel NFS server architecture; and dm-crypt CPU scalability improvements. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements.

Contents

  1. Prominent features
    1. Arbitrary version change
    2. Live patching
    3. DAX - Direct Access, for persistent memory storage
    4. kasan, kernel address sanitizer
    5. "lazytime" option for better update of file timestamps
    6. Multiple lower layers in overlayfs
    7. Support Parallel NFS server, default to NFS v4.2
    8. dm-crypt scalability improvements
  2. Drivers and architectures
  3. File systems
  4. Block
  5. Core (various)
  6. Memory management
  7. Virtualization
  8. Cryptography
  9. Security
  10. Tracing & perf
  11. Networking
  12. List of merges
  13. Other news sites

1. Prominent features

1.1. Arbitrary version change

This release increases the version to 4.0. This switch from 3.x to 4.0 version numbers is, however, entirely meaningless and it should not be associated to any important changes in the kernel. This release could have been 3.20, but Linus Torvalds just got tired of the old number, made a poll, and changed it. Yes, it is frivolous. The less you think about it, the better.

1.2. Live patching

This release introduces "livepatch", a feature for live patching the kernel code, aimed primarily at systems who want to get security updates without needing to reboot. This feature has been born as result of merging kgraft and kpatch, two attempts by SuSE and Red Hat that where started to replace the now propietary ksplice. It's relatively simple and minimalistic, as it's making use of existing kernel infrastructure (namely ftrace) as much as possible. It's also self-contained and it doesn't hook itself in any other kernel subsystems.

In this release livepatch is not feature complete, yet it provides a basic infrastructure for function "live patching" (i.e. code redirection), including API for kernel modules containing the actual patches, and API/ABI for userspace to be able to operate on the patches (look up what patches are applied, enable/disable them, etc). Most CVEs should be safe to apply this way. Only the x86 architecture is supported in this release, others will follow.

For more details see the merge commit

Sample live patching module: commit

Code commit

1.3. DAX - Direct Access, for persistent memory storage

Before being read by programs, files are usually first copied from the disk to the kernel caches, kept in RAM. But the possible advent of persistent non-volatile memory that would be also be used as disk changes radically the way the kernel deals with this process: the kernel cache would become unnecesary overhead.

Linux has had, in fact, support for this kind of setups since 2.6.13. But the code wasn't maintaned and only supported ext2. In this release, Linux adds DAX (Direct Access, the X is for eXciting). DAX removes the extra copy incurred by the buffer by performing reads and writes directly to the persistent-memory storage device. For file mappings, the storage device is mapped directly into userspace. Support for ext4 has been added.

Recommended LWN article: Supporting filesystems in persistent memory

Code: commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit

1.4. kasan, kernel address sanitizer

Kernel Address sanitizer (KASan) is a dynamic memory error detector. It provides fast and comprehensive solution for finding use-after-free and out-of-bounds bugs. Linux already has the kmemcheck feature, but unlike kmemcheck, KASan uses compile-time instrumentation, which makes it significantly faster than kmemcheck.

The main idea of KASAN is to use shadow memory to record whether each byte of memory is safe to access or not, and use compiler's instrumentation to check the shadow memory on each memory access. Address sanitizer uses 1/8 of the memory addressable in kernel for shadow memory and uses direct mapping with a scale and offset to translate a memory address to its corresponding shadow address.

Code: commit, commit, commit, commit, commit

1.5. "lazytime" option for better update of file timestamps

Unix filesystems keep track of information about files, such as the last time a file was accessed or modified. Keeping track of this information is very expensive, specially the time when a file was accessed ("atime"), which encourages many people to disable it with the mount option "noatime". To alleviate this problem, the "relatime" mount option was added, the atime is only updated if the previous value is earlier than the modification time, or if the file was last accessed more than 24 hours ago. This behaviour, however, breaks some programs that rely on accurate access time tracking to work, and it's also against the POSIX standard.

In this release, Linux adds another alternative: "lazytime". Lazytime causes access, modified and changed time updates to only be made in the cache. The times will only be written to the disk if the inode needs to be updated anyway for some non-time related change, if fsync(), syncfs() or sync() are called, or just before an undeleted inode is evicted from memory. This is POSIX compliant, while at the same time improving the performance.

Recommended LWN article: Introducing lazytime

Code: commit, commit, commit

1.6. Multiple lower layers in overlayfs

In overlayfs, multiple lower layers can now be given using the the colon (":") as a separator character between the directory names. For example:

The specified lower directories will be stacked beginning from the rightmost one and going left. In the above example lower1 will be the top, lower2 the middle and lower3 the bottom layer. "upperdir=" and "workdir=" may be omitted, in that case the overlay will be read-only.

Code: commit, commit

1.7. Support Parallel NFS server, default to NFS v4.2

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is a part of the NFS v4.1 standard that allows compute clients to access storage devices directly and in parallel. The pNFS architecture eliminates the scalability and performance issues associated with NFS servers deployed today. This is achieved by the separation of data and metadata, and moving the metadata server out of the data path.

This release adds support for pNFS server, and drivers for the block layout with XFS support to use XFS filesystems as a block layout target, and the flexfiles layout.

Also, in this release the NFS server defaults to NFS v4.2.

Code: commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit

1.8. dm-crypt scalability improvements

This release significantly increases the dm-crypt CPU scalability performance thanks to changes that enable effective use of an unbound workqueue across all available CPUs. A large battery of tests were performed to validate these changes, summary of results is available here

Merge: commit

2. Drivers and architectures

3. File systems

4. Block

5. Core (various)

6. Memory management

7. Virtualization

8. Cryptography

9. Security

10. Tracing & perf

11. Networking

12. List of merges

13. Other news sites

KernelNewbies: Linux_4.0 (last edited 2017-12-30 01:30:21 by localhost)