Minutes for November 15, 2002 LSE Con. Call

I. Hanna Linder - epoll

epoll stands for event poll. It was written by Davide Libenzi
originally last year. Linus didn't like the interface being in
/dev so I proposed a system call interface instead. Since this
is not Davide's paid full time work we were expecting to have
to make the code changes internally. However, Davide spent his
weekends and evenings working on it and had it done much
quicker than I would have.

You may remember a long thread in October between a few
people on lkml. Most people stopped reading it but the gist
of the complaints had to do with the way Davide had chosen
to do registration of events of interest and notification
of events. 

To summarize the way it works epoll does not have to
linearly search all fd's looking for events instead it
uses a callback mechanism to notify when events are ready.
This is especially useful in cases such as web hosting 
where only a few connections are active so you only are
notified of the active sockets.

I am working on a 2.4 backport.


II. Rick Lindsley -

Currently there is no easy way to get the disk statistics
out. Everything Rick needs is now in 2.5.47 and he expects to 
be done porting the tools (iostat, sar) in a few days.  
Then Rick is committed to getting the 2.4 disk statistics in 
based on Marcelo's input of what he wants to see (which he is 
still waiting to receive). The carrier grade people need to 
have this.

Rick is currently working with some people from OSTL on a 
sysfs potential bug.  Stay tuned for more info about it on
the 2.5 bug tracker database.

III. Martin Bligh - 2.5 bugtracker

It was launched 1.5 days ago, OSDL is hosting it and IBM 
does some administration. The goal is to help stabilize 2.5
as quickly as possible. The address is bugme.osdl.org (with
a cname from bugzilla.kernel.org if you prefer). You can
search without an account. Creating a new account is simple 
enough. Currently there are 300 people signed up and about 60 
bugs. If you log bugs against -mm or -ac trees dont put the
networking guys in as owner use mbligh@aracnet.com
instead because they aren't as interested in supporting those 
non mainline tress right now.

We have quite a few maintainers signed up already to maintain 
their own areas.  If there are unmaintained areas in a week
or two please volunteer to maintain them.  For now the biggest
help is to feed bugs into the database.

When submitting bugs make sure to run oops thru ksymoops or 
turn on kksymoops to do it for you automatically.


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minutes compiled by Hanna Linder (hannal@us.ibm.com)