From LWN.

Linus has announced the 2.6.17 kernel. Some of the highlights from the 2.6.17 development cycle include:

• SPARC “Niagara” architecture support
• an H.323 netfilter connection tracking helper
• lightweight robust futexes
• on-the-fly RAID5 array resizing
• user-space software suspend
• splice(), vmsplice(), tee(), and sync_file_range() system calls (Interesting system calls!)

After several months, the 2.6.18 stable kernel is out at Sep 20, 2006. You can read LWN 2.6 kernel API changes page for information on internal programming interface changes, or the long-format changelog for thousands of patches’ worth of detail.

Besides, Andrew Morton has posted his patch queue with numerous comments about merge plans into the mainline kernel. Among his comments he noted that he would not yet be merging the Reiser4 filesystem:

reiser4. I was planning on merging this, but the batch_write/writev problemight wreck things, and I don’t think the patches arising from my recent partial review have come through yet. So it’s looking more like 2.6.20.

The upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (short for RHEL5) will use 2.6.18 or 2.6.19. You can read the “Kernel Notes” section in RHEL 5 Beta 1 Announcement.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Since openssl-0.9.8c, dev-libs/openssl has provided USE flag of sse2 to gain more performance on all ssl-enabled applications.

If you, however, remerge openssl with this new flag, it will break ABI (#147758) and cause openssh can not work regularly.

It’s recommended to remerge openssh and all other ssl-enabled applications after upgrading from previous 0.9.8 versions. If you are having problems with ssh segfaults, you are affected and will need to remerge the affected packages.

Here is my upgrading steps from openssl 0.9.7. You can use 0.9.8 instead of 0.9.7 to remerge all ssl-enabled applications.

1. Remerge all packages that are linked against OpenSSL 0.9.7 by using revdep-rebuild from app-portage/gentoolkit:

   # revdep-rebuild –library libssl.so.0.9.7
   # revdep-rebuild –library libcrypto.so.0.9.7

2. After this, you can delete /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.7 and /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7

Popularity: 31% [?]

FreeBSD: Improved sendfile Facility, from KernelTrap.

The sendfile() facility allows a regular file to be sent out to a stream socket.

The system call was first implemented in FreeBSD 3.0. This provides many performance benefits for various server appliances.

Andre Opperman has implemented an improved sendfile() facility for FreeBSD that has so far shown 45% less CPU usage without TCP segmentation offload and 83% less CPU usage with TCP segmentation offload.

This is a great improvement over the previous implementation.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Debian Forced to Stop using the name ‘Firefox’, from digg.

The Mozilla Foundation has asked Debian Linux to either use both the ‘Firefox’ name and the Artwork or get rid of both.

Because the Artwork has non-free Copyright License, it seems Debian (and most likely, many other Linux Distros) has no choice but to change the name of the application to something else.

IceWeasel is the number one choice so far!

This is why Ubuntu and Debian both use the “globe logo” only, and my builds MUST choose another branding artwork by JairoB.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Cool picture of all the new Vista Icons.

Besides, here is a tutorial from MSDN on how Microsoft makes their Windows XP icons.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Elevate through ShellExecute, from Vista Compatibility Team Blog.

We often get the question how to elevate a process through ShellExecute. From the docs it is not immediately clear. The trick is passing in “runas” in the lpVerb.

Here is a snippet to run notepad elevated.

#include “stdafx.h”
#include “windows.h”
#include “shellapi.h”

    shExecInfo.fMask = NULL;
    shExecInfo.hwnd = NULL;
    shExecInfo.lpVerb = L”runas“;
    shExecInfo.lpFile = L”notepad.exe”;
    shExecInfo.lpParameters = NULL;
    shExecInfo.lpDirectory = NULL;
    shExecInfo.nShow = SW_MAXIMIZE;
    shExecInfo.hInstApp = NULL;

    return 0;
}

Here is some screenshot:

Popularity: 49% [?]

Google testing Sun’s OpenSolaris, sources say, from digg.

Google is experimenting with the open-source version of Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris operating system as a possible long-term prelude to replacing its massive global network of Linux servers, according to sources.

With dozens of data centers worldwide estimated to house hundreds of thousands of Intel servers, this would be huge for Solaris.

Google runs a stripped-down version of Red Hat Linux specially modified by its engineers. But another source, a Solaris systems administrator who recently interviewed for a job at Google, said he was told the company plans to create and test its own modified version of OpenSolaris.

Google officials declined to comment.

Dtrace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace
Zones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers
ZFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Popularity: 27% [?]