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Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:42:16 -0700
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@onstor.com>
To: dl-cougar
Subject: kernel update
Message-ID: <20070723154216.6ee872e5@ripper.onstor.net>
Organization: Onstor
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Things have actually moved a bit recently in the Linux kernel, so I
thought I would just lay out a little roadmap information for the team.


Two important bugs have been fixed recently-ish, and an important
feature "discovered" and enabled, and a task completed.

The serial port lockup bug has finally been found and fixed.  This was
where the serial port (console) would, about half the time, stop
responding when the system went to multiuser mode.  It would work fine
prior to going to multiuser mode.

SEGFAULTs or illegal instruction exceptions plaguing userspace
programs. Bash when running complicated shell scripts like configure
would often die mysteriously with an illegal instruction exception.
This was fixed by enabling bobcat to use a work around for icache fill
errata in the RM9000 processor line.  This WAR was enabled a month or
so ago, but it was mistakenly reported that the problem persisted.

While looking into the above issued, I discovered that our processor
has a 256KB L2 cache called an scache.  Nobody told me!  That is now
enabled and being used, which should help our performance quite a bit.

Max has implemented the relay networking changes to the kernel,
checking that piece off the list.

Remaining tasks:

* TI pcmcia controller
* Running with CF as root filesystem
* kernel crash dump implementation
* Dropping to PROM from console with keystroke

