The end of the 4.12 merge window [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
May 14, 2017

Linus Torvalds released the 4.12-rc1 prepatch and closed the merge window on May 13 — a move that may have surprised maintainers who were waiting until the last day to get their final pull requests in. Let that be a lesson to all: one should not expect to have pull requests honored on Mother's Day. Below is a summary of the changes merged since the May 10 merge-window summary.

In the end, 12,920 non-merge changesets found their way into the mainline during the merge window; about 1,000 since the previous summary was written. As expected, that was enough to make the 4.12 merge window the second-busiest ever. The most significant changes found in that last 1,000 changesets include:

The TEE framework has been merged; this mechanism allows the kernel to support trusted execution environments on processors (such as ARM CPUs with TrustZone) with that capability.
Support for parallel NFS (pNFS) on top of object storage devices has been removed; that support is unused and has been unmaintained for some time.
The building of the old Open Sound System audio drivers has been disabled for the 4.12 release. In the absence of screaming, those drivers will likely be removed in the relatively near future. They are poorly maintained and nearly (if not completely) unused, but the driving motivation behind this change at the moment is the desire to eliminate the many set_fs() calls found in those drivers.
New hardware support includes: Mediatek MT6797 clocks, HiSilicon Hi655x clocks, Allwinner PRCM clock controllers, Motorola CPCAP PMIC realtime clocks, STMicroelectronics STM32 Quad SPI controllers, Broadcom BCM2835 and BCM470xx thermal sensors, Dialog Semiconductor DA9062/DA9061 thermal sensors, Powers AXP20X battery power supplies, and PlayStation 1/2 joypads via SPI interfaces.
There is a new set of macros that allow the marking of boot-time and module parameters that modify hardware behavior. Numerous drivers have been patched to make use of these macros. The intent is to disallow a user from changing these parameters on systems where UEFI secure boot is in use, but that mechanism has not yet been merged.
Synchronous read-copy-update grace periods may now be used anywhere in the kernel's boot process; see this article for the details.

The time to test and stabilize the 4.12 kernel has begun; if all goes according to the usual schedule, the final release can be expected in early July.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Releases/4.12

to post comments

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 14, 2017 22:22 UTC (Sun) by fratti (subscriber, #105722) [Link] (2 responses)

>and PlayStation 1/2 joypads via SPI interfaces

Neat, I guess. How would a PlayStation controller be connected to SPI though? Do the original pins map to SPI somehow?

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 14, 2017 22:48 UTC (Sun) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, see the commit message and the driver itself.

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 16, 2017 4:34 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It looks like this driver only supports the DualShock v1 protocol right now. The PS2 pad is backwards-compatible with that, but IIRC in native mode also has pressure-sensitive front buttons and the sticks report 10-bit values instead of 8.
(Checking Wikipedia confirms my memory isn't as bad as I thought...)

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 15, 2017 13:02 UTC (Mon) by kokada (subscriber, #92849) [Link] (4 responses)

> The building of the old Open Sound System audio drivers has been disabled for the 4.12 release. In the absence of screaming, those drivers will likely be removed in the relatively near future. They are poorly maintained and nearly (if not completely) unused, but the driving motivation behind this change at the moment is the desire to eliminate the many set_fs() calls found in those drivers.

Neat, I think most people still using OSS will probably use 4Front version instead of the abandoned kernel one. Remembering that OSS is actually in version 4, while the kernel implements the version 3.

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 16, 2017 7:33 UTC (Tue) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link] (3 responses)

> most people still using OSS will probably use 4Front version instead of the abandoned kernel one. Remembering that OSS is actually in version 4, while the kernel implements the version 3.

In the kernel, new hardware support went into ALSA. New development in the 4Front version ceased a long time ago because nobody wanted to pay for it. Increasing the API version of 4Front's OSS implementation does not change the fact that it does not support any modern USB devices, HDMI audio, MIDI, or anything embedded.

Nowadays, 4Front OSS users are those that have the opinion that “the sound of OSS has more depth where ALSA sound is flat.”

OSS is primarily relevant as an interface used by old software; and that interface can also be used on top of ALSA.

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 16, 2017 10:42 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

Nowadays, 4Front OSS users are those that have the opinion that “the sound of OSS has more depth where ALSA sound is flat.”

Especially if you use those $1000/ft speaker cables!

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 16, 2017 12:06 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

And those "directional" Ethernet cables for streaming from your NAS.

The end of the 4.12 merge window

Posted May 27, 2017 3:41 UTC (Sat) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

> And those "directional" Ethernet cables for streaming from your NAS.

Some of my "friends" are audiophiles, and I have listened to gushing about Oxygen-Free-Copper, and $150 power cords with balanced wires, optimised to 220V, etc.

Thank you for the pointer to Directional Ethernet. But what about this, a technology that Rockwell developed, which was buried by "Big Them"? https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w