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Kernel: Latest From Phoronix and From LWN (Outside the Week-Long Paywall Now)

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 29th of April 2021 02:04:16 AM Filed under
Linux

  • AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Brings Minor Improvements But No Vulkan Ray-Tracing Yet - Phoronix

    AMD engineers today published AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 as their latest open-source public code drop of their official Linux Vulkan driver. 

    While this month AMD published a new Radeon Software packaged driver build with Vulkan ray-tracing support for Linux systems, that driver is binary-only. Now as their first AMDVLK update since that milestone, unfortunately, the ray-tracing support hasn't made it into this open-source driver yet. 

  • Linux 5.13 Graphics Drivers Are Exciting From Intel Alder Lake S Bring-Up To AMD FreeSync HDMI - Phoronix

    The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver changes have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 kernel merge window and it brings with it many changes, especially for these open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers. 

  • Rust heads into the kernel?

    In a lengthy message to the linux-kernel mailing list, Miguel Ojeda "introduced" the Rust for Linux project. It was likely not the first time that most kernel developers had heard of the effort; there was an extensive discussion of the project at the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, for example. It has also been raised before on the list. Now, the project is looking for feedback from the kernel community about its plans, thus the RFC posting on April 14.

  • Btrfs on zoned block devices

    Zoned block devices have some unfamiliar characteristics that result from compromises made in the name of higher storage density. They are divided into zones, some or all of which do not support random access for write operations. Instead, these "sequential" zones can only be written in order, from the first block to the last. This constraint poses a new challenge for filesystems, which are normally designed with the assumption that storage blocks can be written in any order. It is thus not surprising that zoned-device support in mainstream filesystems in Linux has been slow in coming; that is changing, though, with the addition of support for zoned block devices to Btrfs in Linux 5.12.

    The only way to overwrite data in a zoned drive's sequential zone is to reset the write pointer to the beginning of the zone, which immediately erases the entire content of that zone. On the other hand, random read access is fully supported. Many zoned devices also provide some "conventional" zones that support random read and write operations. Zoned devices were first seen in the form of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives; the kernel has low-level support for these devices. Zoned devices using flash storage also exist; they trade flexibility for reduced hardware complexity. These devices were added to the NVMe standard in the form of the Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) command set, which has been supported in Linux since the 5.9 release.

    Work has been going on for a number of years to support zoned drives in Linux filesystems. Copy-on-write filesystems should be easier to adapt, as they are designed to avoid overwriting data blocks. Among the existing Linux filesystems, F2FS already supports zoned devices, and allows normal operations on such devices (but requires that the drive provide at least one conventional zone). In addition, zonefs, a special filesystem for zoned devices, was included in the 5.6 kernel. Using zonefs requires applications designed for this purpose, as the filesystem does not support the creation of normal files. Some types of applications do fit the model well, however, for example those with log-structured data.

  • Running code within another process's address space

    One of the key resources that defines a process is its address space — the set of mappings that determines what any specific memory address means within that process. An address space is normally private to the process it belongs to, but there are situations where one process needs to make changes to another process's memory; an interactive debugger would be one case in point. The ptrace() system call makes such changes possible, but it is slow and not always easy to use, so there has been a longstanding quest for better alternatives. One possibility, process_vm_exec() from Andrei Vagin, was recently posted for review.

    In truth, alternatives to ptrace() already exist for some tasks. The cross-memory attach system calls were merged for 3.2 in 2011 as process_vm_readv() and process_vm_writev(). As their names would suggest, they allow one process to read from and write to another process's memory. Those system calls satisfy many needs, but fall short when even more invasive access is needed to another process's address space. Sometimes, it seems, there is no alternative to running code within the target address space.

    Vagin's patch set gives a couple of examples of where this access would be useful. User-mode kernels, such as User-mode Linux and gVisor, have to be able to intercept system calls made by a sandboxed process and, possibly, run them in the address space of that process. The Checkpoint/Restore in User space project needs to reach deeply within a process to extract all of the information needed to checkpoint it. Both use cases are currently handled with ptrace() but, once again, better and faster alternatives are wanted.

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