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Latest LWN Articles About Linux Kernel
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LWN ☛ Managing encrypted filesystems with dirlock
As with a mobile phone, a portable gaming device like the Steam Deck can contain lots of personal information that the owner would like to keep secret—especially given that such devices can do far more than gaming. Alberto Garcia worked with his colleagues at Igalia and people at Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform, to come up with a new tool to manage encrypted filesystems for SteamOS, which is a Linux distribution optimized for gaming. Garcia gave a talk about that tool, dirlock, at Open Source Summit Europe, which was held in Amsterdam in late August. In the talk, he looked at the design process for the encrypted-files feature, the alternatives considered, and why they made the choices they did.
Over a long career at Igalia, he has worked on many different projects, including GNOME, the Maemo and MeeGo mobile-Linux platforms, and more recently on QEMU. He is also a Debian developer; ""I've been using Debian basically all of my life, but I'm also contributing to the project and I've been an active developer for many years"". At the moment, he is working on SteamOS.
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LWN ☛ Development statistics for 6.17
The 6.17 development cycle ended on September 28 with the release of the 6.17 kernel. This cycle brought in 13,089 non-merge changesets, a slowdown from its predecessor but still within the normal bounds for recent kernels. The time has come for a look at where those changes came from, with a bit of a side trip into bug statistics.
Work on 6.17 was contributed by 2,038 developers, of whom 298 made their first kernel contribution during this cycle.
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LWN ☛ The phaseout of the mmap() file operation
The file_operations structure in the kernel is a set of function pointers implementing, as the name would suggest, operations on files. A subsystem that manages objects which can be represented by a file descriptor will provide a file_operations structure providing implementations of the various operations that a user of the file descriptor may want to carry out. The mmap() method, in particular, is invoked when user space calls the mmap() system call to map the object behind a file descriptor into its address space. That method, though, is currently on its way out in a multi-release process that started in 6.17.
The file_operations structure was introduced in the 0.95 release in March 1992; at that point it supported the basic read() and write() operations and not much else. Support for mmap() first appeared in 0.98.2 later that year, though it took a while before it actually worked as expected.