on rechecking the current stable kernel code, I found some places where jiffies
were compared in a way that seems to break when they wrap. For these,
I made up patches to use the macros "time_before()" or "time_after()"
that are supposed to handle wraparound correctly.

Attached is a patch against the 2.4.19 linux kernel. It adds an entry
for another version of the JMTek USBDrive (driverless), and also updates
my email address.

into home.transmeta.com:/home/torvalds/v2.5/linux

into home.transmeta.com:/home/torvalds/v2.5/linux

into home.transmeta.com:/home/torvalds/v2.5/linux

into home.transmeta.com:/home/torvalds/v2.5/linux

Some various small cleanups, optimizations, and fixes.

o Make fifo_batch=32 as default, from testing this appears a good
  default value. We still get good throughput, and latency is good.

o Reintroduce the merge_cleanup logic. We need it for deadline for
  rehashing requests when they have been merged.

o Cleanup last_merge logic. Move it to the new elv_merged_request(),
  this is where it really belongs. Doing it inside the io scheduler core
  can causes false positives, when the queue merge functions reject an
  otherwise good merge

o Have deadline_move_requests() account from last entry on the dispatch
  queue, if it is non-empty. It doesn't really matter what the last
  extracted sector was, if we are not right behind it.

o Clean/optimize deadline_move_requests()

o Account size of a request just a little bit. Streaming transfer isn't
  for free, it's just a lot cheaper than a seek.

o Make deadline_check_fifo() more readable.

From Andrew Morton.

There are a couple of places where we would enable interrupts while
write-holding the tasklist_lock ...  nasty.

into mandrakesoft.com:/home/jgarzik/repo/misc-2.5

into mandrakesoft.com:/home/jgarzik/repo/irda-2.5

into mandrakesoft.com:/home/jgarzik/repo/net-drivers-2.5

into home.transmeta.com:/home/torvalds/v2.5/linux

Had a weird oops from Bill Irwin - the pdflush_list was corrupt.

The only thing I can think of is that something sprayed out a wakeup
when it shouldn't.  So tighten things up against that, and add some
printks to catch it if it happens again.

Well it's a one-liner.  sys_sync() only syncs one queue at a time, and
can be slow if you have a lot of disks.  So poke pdflush, which knows
how to write all the queues in parallel.

[This has four scalps already.  Thomas Molina has agreed
 to track things as they are identified ]

Infrastructure to detect sleep-inside-spinlock bugs.  Really only
useful if compiled with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y.  It prints out a whiny
message and a stack backtrace if someone calls a function which might
sleep from within an atomic region.

This patch generates a storm of output at boot, due to
drivers/ide/ide-probe.c:init_irq() calling lots of things which it
shouldn't under ide_lock.

It'll find other bugs too.

A patch from Ed Tomlinson which improves the way in which the kernel
reclaims slab objects.

The theory is: a cached object's usefulness is measured in terms of the
number of disk seeks which it saves.  Furthermore, we assume that one
dentry or inode saves as many seeks as one pagecache page.

So we reap slab objects at the same rate as we reclaim pages.  For each
1% of reclaimed pagecache we reclaim 1% of slab.  (Actually, we _scan_
1% of slab for each 1% of scanned pages).

Furthermore we assume that one swapout costs twice as many seeks as one
pagecache page, and twice as many seeks as one slab object.  So we
double the pressure on slab when anonymous pages are being considered
for eviction.

The code works nicely, and smoothly.  Possibly it does not shrink slab
hard enough, but that is now very easy to tune up and down.  It is just:

	ratio *= 3;

in shrink_caches().

Slab caches no longer hold onto completely empty pages.  Instead, pages
are freed as soon as they have zero objects.  This is possibly a
performance hit for slabs which have constructors, but it's doubtful.
Most allocations after a batch of frees are satisfied from inside
internally-fragmented pages and by the time slab gets back onto using
the wholly-empty pages they'll be cache-cold.  slab would be better off
going and requesting a new, cache-warm page and reconstructing the
objects therein.  (Once we have the per-cpu hot-page allocator in
place.  It's happening).

As a consequence of the above, kmem_cache_shrink() is now unused.  No
great loss there - the serialising effect of kmem_cache_shrink and its
semaphore in front of page reclaim was measurably bad.

Still todo:

- batch up the shrinking so we don't call into prune_dcache and
  friends at high frequency asking for a tiny number of objects.

- Maybe expose the shrink ratio via a tunable.

- clean up slab.c

- highmem page reclaim in prune_icache: highmem pages can pin
  inodes.

This uses the new wakeup machinery in some hot parts of the VFS and
block layers.

wait_on_buffer(), wait_on_page(), lock_page(), blk_congestion_wait().
Also in get_request_wait(), although the benefit for exclusive wakeups
will be lower.

This is worth a whopping 2% on spwecweb on an 8-way.  Which is faintly
surprising because __wake_up and other wait/wakeup functions are not
apparent in the specweb profiles which I've seen.


The main objective of this is to reduce the CPU cost of the wait/wakeup
operation.  When a task is woken up, its waitqueue is removed from the
waitqueue_head by the waker (ie: immediately), rather than by the woken
process.

This means that a subsequent wakeup does not need to revisit the
just-woken task.  It also means that the just-woken task does not need
to take the waitqueue_head's lock, which may well reside in another
CPU's cache.

I have no decent measurements on the effect of this change - possibly a
20-30% drop in __wake_up cost in Badari's 40-dds-to-40-disks test (it
was the most expensive function), but it's inconclusive.  And no
quantitative testing of which I am aware has been performed by
networking people.

The API is very simple to use (Linus thought it up):

my_func(waitqueue_head_t *wqh)
{
	DEFINE_WAIT(wait);

	prepare_to_wait(wqh, &wait, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
	if (!some_test)
		schedule();
	finish_wait(wqh, &wait);
}

or:

	DEFINE_WAIT(wait);

	while (!some_test_1) {
		prepare_to_wait(wqh, &wait, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
		if (!some_test_2)
			schedule();
		...
	}
	finish_wait(wqh, &wait);

You need to bear in mind that once prepare_to_wait has been performed,
your task could be removed from the waitqueue_head and placed into
TASK_RUNNING at any time.  You don't know whether or not you're still
on the waitqueue_head.

Running prepare_to_wait() when you're already on the waitqueue_head is
fine - it will do the right thing.

Running finish_wait() when you're actually not on the waitqueue_head is
fine.

Running finish_wait() when you've _never_ been on the waitqueue_head is
fine, as ling as the DEFINE_WAIT() macro was used to initialise the
waitqueue.

You don't need to fiddle with current->state.  prepare_to_wait() and
finish_wait() will do that.  finish_wait() will always return in state
TASK_RUNNING.

There are plenty of usage examples in vm-wakeups.patch and
tcp-wakeups.patch.

From David M-T.

When this function successfully merges the new range into an existing
VMA, it forgets to extend the new protection mode into the just-merged
pages.

Patch from Rohit Seth

It fixes the problem which Andrea noted in his initial review of the
hugetlb code:

"In short doing "addr = vma->vm_end" and then checking if vm_end + len
 is below vm_next->vm_start is broken, because there's no guarantee
 that "addr" will be a largepage aligned address.  the LPAGE_ALIGN in
 found_addr should be dropped becaue moving the addr ahead without
 checking that addr+len doesn't then fall into a vma, will generate
 do_munmaps and in turn userspace mem corruption."

 - Remove the const that someone incorrectly stuck in there, it type conflicts.
   Alan has a better plan for fixing this long term, but this fixes the compile
   warning for now.

 - Move the printk of the xquad_portio setup *after* we put something in the variable
   so it actually prints something useful, not 0 ;-)

 - To derive the size of the xquad_portio area, multiply the number of nodes by the
   size of each nodes, not the size of two nodes (and remove define). Doh!

and does the wrong thing for higher HZ values anyway.

into osdl.org:/home/mochel/src/kernel/devel/linux-2.5

into hostme.bitkeeper.com:/ua/repos/l/ldm/linux-2.5

This fixes a number of bugs in the thread-release code:

 - notify parents only if the group leader is a zombie,
   and if it's not a detached thread.

 - do not reparent children to zombie tasks.

 - introduce the TASK_DEAD state for tasks, to serialize the task-release
   path. (to some it might be confusing that tasks are zombies first, then
   dead :-)

 - simplify tasklist_lock usage in release_task().

the effect of the above bugs ranged from unkillable hung zombies to kernel
crashes. None of those happens with the patch applied.

Patch killing off elevator_linus for good. Sniffle.

This introduces the deadline-ioscheduler, making it the default.  2nd
patch coming that deletes elevator_linus in a minute.

This one has read_expire at 500ms, and writes_starved at 2.

Sanity checkthe ESCD size. From 2.4.

These two chipsets are most common on alpha.
- cy82c693: allow the generic IDE setup code to work correctly
  with broken PCI registers layout of this chip. This fixes
  quite a few problems with secondary channel, plus some hacks in
  arch code can go away.
- ALi M5229: enable DMA.

This removes the cmpxchg from the PID allocator and replaces it with a
spinlock.  This spinlock is hit only a couple of times per bootup, so
it's not a performance issue.

Ulrich found another small detail wrt. POSIX requirements for threads -
this time it's the recursion features (read-held lock being write-locked
means an upgrade if the same 'process' is the owner, means a deadlock if a
different 'process').

this requirement even makes some sense - the group of threads who own a
lock really own all rights to the lock as well.

These changes fix this, all testcases pass now.  (inter-process
testcases as well, which are not affected by this patch.)

(SIGURG and SIGIO semantics should also continue to work - there's some
more stuff we can optimize with the new pidhash in this area, but that's
for later.)

The loop device driver was broken in 2.5.38 when it was converted over
to use gendisk.  I discovered this while doing final regression testing
on the ext3 htree code.

The problem is that figure_loop_size() is setting the capacity of the
loop device in kilobytes (because that's what compute_loop_size()
returns), but set_capacity() expects the size in 512 byte sectors.

I've enclosed a patch which fixes the problem, as well as simplifying
the code by eliminating compute_loop_size(), since it is a static
function is only used once by figure_loop_size().

into kleikamp.austin.ibm.com:/home/shaggy/bk/jfs-2.5