2.4.36.4 Released; Users Encouraged To Upgrade

Willy Tarreau has released 2.4.36.4, which includes some important security fixes. Alexander Viro had identified and fixed an SMP problem as well as a dnotify race condition.

UBIFS Official Tree Inclusion

Artem Bityutskiy made a formal request to have UBIFS, a relatively new Flash filesystem, merged into the mainline tree during the next merge window.

Artem asked Stephen Rothwell to include his git tree in the Linux-Next tree, aiming for submission to Linus Torvalds at the next opportunity.

Stephen had no objection to this. In general, Stephen's requirements for inclusion in Linux-Next are that code be reviewed and tested as well as can be managed and that the submitter intends to have the code accepted in the next merge window. Because Artem had done all that, Stephen was happy to include Artem's tree.

Andrew Morton also approved, although he hadn't looked at any of the code himself.

Andrew knew that Christoph Hellwig had made a number of technical suggestions and wanted to know the status of Artem's work in response to that. Artem said that he and the other UBIFS developers were actively addressing Christoph's concerns.

Regarding Christoph's suggestions, Artem did say that NFS support would probably not happen in the near future, but that some ideas were already percolating as to how to fix that in the long term. None of this seemed to pose a significant obstacle, and it looks as though UBIFS will be merged (or at least will go to Linus for consideration) for the 2.6.27 release.

Purging OSS

The final PCI OSS driver has been removed from the Linux tree. In the old days, Muli Ben-Yehuda had resisted taking out the Trident 4DWave/SIS 7018 PCI Audio Core, but he's moved on to other projects and no longer has the hardware to maintain the driver. With his permission, and given that an ALSA driver that supports the same hardware exists, Adrian Bunk submitted the patch to remove it.