James Morris has outlined a preview of the security subsystem changes he is currently carrying in his security-testing-next branch of the Linux kernel that he plans to have Linus Torvalds pull into the next kernel development cycle for Linux 2.6.36. The big change in the kernel security world is that AppArmor is being planned for integration into the Linux 2.6.36 kernel.

Your editor recently had cause to dig around in the cpuidle subsystem. It never makes sense to let such work go to only a single purpose when it could be applied toward the creation of a kernel-page article. So, what follows is a multi-level discussion of cpuidle, what it's for, and how it works. Doing nothing, it turns out, is more complicated than one might think.

Last month Linus Torvalds released the final 2.6.34 kernel, following a bumpy few weeks that saw a major virtual memory (the subsystem responsible for memory management in-kernel) glitch, the usual round of regressions, and a power outage that knocked vger.kernel.org…

Shortly after the release of Linux 2.6.29 last Tuesday, the kernel subsystem developers began to prepare the first changes to be merged into the main development branch for Linux 2.6.30.

Devtmpfs, aka 'devfs 2.0' to its detractors, should allow the Linux kernel to start faster and run without udev. Support has been added for ACPI 4.0 and there are two new make targets which generate kernel configurations attuned to the running system. Changes to the power management subsystem increase data throughput and allow better use of runtime power saving features on modern I/O devices.

The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual.

A dispute between Adam Cox and Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list has led to Cox standing down as TTY subsystem maintainer.

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

After a dispute with Linus Torvalds, the long time developer and Linux kernel maintainer Alan Cox has stopped development of the Linux TTY subsystem.