Dave Chinner, an XFS developer at Red Hat, released a patch last Saturday to help users suffering from XFS metadata corruption. Chinner said: “This patch just fixes the XFS filesystem’s livelock on stripe. I guess in some cases, this problem does not have repeated failures on allocating livelocks, but corrupted mappings returned to writeback code. Thus misleading writeback IO”.

Note: Rune Kleveland, who has been actively dealing with this issue, said that after installing the patch, the hardware has been stable for more than 90 minutes, so I think this patch is effective.

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The kernel.org website has marked the Linux kernel 6.2 series as EOL (end of life), which means it will no longer support bug and security fixes.

In February 2023, Linux kernel 6.2 introduced new features, including Protected Load Balancing (PLB) for the IPv6 stack, a new FineIBT control flow integrity mechanism for x86, support for Intel’s “asynchronous exit notification” mechanism, and more Rust infrastructure.

As a short-lived kernel branch, Linux 6.2 is now end-of-life (EOL), and kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 6.2.16 and urged users to upgrade to the latest Linux 6.3 kernel family as soon as possible.

As a result, GNU/Linux distributions that use the Linux 6.2 kernel family are expected to upgrade to the latest Linux 6.3 kernel family soon. Most rolling distributions, such as Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed, and some of their derivatives, are already using the Linux kernel 6.3 family.

Linux kernel 6.3 was released in April 2023, and new features include a new Intel VPU DRM acceleration driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, Rust code support for x86_64 user-mode Linux, “ZBB” bit manipulation extension support for the RISC-V kernel, and native Steam. bit manipulation extensions for the RISC-V kernel and native Steam Deck controller support.

Note that Linux kernel 6.3 is also not in the LTS (Note: Long Term Support) series and is expected to end its life cycle at the end of July, when it will be urged to upgrade to the new Linux 6.4 series — expected to be available in late June or early July 2023.

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A May 6 patch shows that Linux 6.3 adds support for Meteor Lake-S SPI serial flash memory, as well as a list of Meteor Lake-S PCI IDs in the list of drivers for supported devices.

This news seems to refute previous revelations, following rumors that Intel has canceled its 14th generation Meteor Lake-S desktop series.

That said, current rumors predict that Meteor Lake-S desktop CPUs will include up to Core i5 models and 35-65W TDPs, launching alongside higher-end Arrow Lake-S processors (up to Core i9 and 125W TDP), both of which will support the new 800-series chipset.

▲ Image source SquashBionic

As previously reported, Meteor Lake will be mass-produced using Intel 4 process nodes, with transistor density and performance / Watt claimed to be comparable to TSMC’s N5 and N4 series nodes.

In addition, the 14th generation Meteor Lake mobile processors are expected to be renamed the new Core Ultra series.

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Download it at https://kernel.org/

Torvalds’ 6.3-rc4 announcement to read as follows

All is well with Linux Kernel 6.3-rc4 development. All statistics, including most of diffstat, look normal.

The reason I say "most" is that we fixed a number of xfs bugs last week, which made diffstat look more numerous than usual. Even so, the actual size of the modified code is much smaller than expected.

Normally, more than 50% of the diffstat that drives the program is different from 6.3-rc4, where one-third is driver tweaks, one-third is filesystem tweaks, and one-third is other parts.

The post Linux Kernel 6.3 Release Candidate 4 appeared first on TechGoing.

This driver update introduces the block group allocation class algorithm for Btrfs in Linux 6.3, which avoids fragmentation in block groups by packing files by size.

Btrfs improved reliability for RAID5 and RAID6 in Linux 6.2, and further code cleanup and refactoring was done in Linux 6.3 to enhance support for these two RAID modes.

Performance

send:utimes caches directories and issues commands only when necessary

10x faster

Smaller final generated streams (no redundant utimes commands issued)

Does not affect the compatibility

fiemap: skip backref checks for shared leaves

3x speedup on all shared leaves example filesystems (e.g., on some snapshots)

Detailed optimization of b-tree key lookups to speed up metadata operations (sample test: fs_mark transfers files 10% faster per second)

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According to the material shared by Intel before, the new generation of Meteor Lake will use Intel 4 process and external process, and for the first time introduce the “Tile” design, integrated CPU, SOC, core graphics and IOE chip, but Intel did not confirm whether Meteor Lake is suitable for desktop platforms.

In addition, Intel has introduced a general purpose processing unit (VPU) gas pedal for computer vision (CV) and deep learning (DL) work for the next generation of Meteor Lake processors.

Intel sent out a request last Tuesday, primarily for a drm-misc-next pull on DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge in February, the most important of which is the introduction of a kernel driver for the new Intel VPU accelerator.

In fact, Intel submitted the open-source driver code for the Intel VPU (not to be confused with the Visual Processing Unit or Video Processing Unit) to Linux as early as last summer.

The driver is also available for Linux’s new compute gas pedal “accel” framework/subsystem. The driver is now ready for Linux 6.3, when this “iVPU” will be the first driver in the accelerator subsystem.

In addition to the fully open source Intel VPU driver, Intel has also released its open-source user space VPU driver code. In addition, in order to facilitate developers to use Intel VPU, they also provide compiler and driver support in OpenVINO, so stay tuned.

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By avoiding atomic operations (operations that are not interrupted by the thread scheduling mechanism) by incrementing per CPU counters, modifying per CPU spin locks, reading/writing per CPU ring buffers, etc., RSEQ can significantly optimize performance and thus provide excellent benchmarking results.

Mathieu Desnoyers, who leads much of the work on RSEQ, has recently been working on extending the Restartable Sequences ABI and exposing the NUMA node ID, mm_cid and mm_numa_cid fields.

Desnoyers said in the patch introduction.

"NUMA node ID allows for faster getcpu in libc (2).

The per-memory-map concurrency id (mm_cid) allows ideal scaling (down or up) of user-space per-cpu data structures.

The concurrency ID allocated in the memory map can be tracked by a scheduler. The scheduler determines this based on the number of concurrent threads running, CPU affinity, the number of cpuset and logical cores applied to these threads, and other parameters.

The NUMA-aware concurrency id (mm_numa_cid) is similar to mm_cid, except that it tracks the NUMA node ID associated with each cid.

On NUMA systems, when a NUMA-aware concurrency ID is observed in user space associated with a NUMA node, it guarantees that the NUMA node will never be changed unless a kernel-level NUMA configuration change occurs. This is useful for NUMA-aware per-cpu data structures running in environments where processes belonging to a cpuset or a group of processes are fixed to a group of kernels belonging to a subset of the system's NUMA nodes."

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