The Linux kernel has various debugging tools. One is the kernel function tracer, which traces function calls, looking for bad memory allocations and other problems.

Green Hu posted a patch to support the NDS32 architecture. He described the current status as, "It is able to boot to shell and passes most LTP-2017 testsuites in nds32 AE3XX platform." Arnd Bergmann approved the patch, but Linus Torvalds wanted a little more of a description—an overview of the "uses, quirks, reasons for existing" for this chip, to include in the changelog. Arnd replied:

These days, Intel's name is Mud in various circles because of the Spectre/Meltdown CPU flaws and other similar hardware issues that seem to be emerging as well. But, there was a recent discussion between some Intel folks and the kernel folks that was not related to those things. Some thrust-and-parry still was going on between kernel person and company person, but it seemed more to do with trying to get past marketing speak, than at wrestling over what Intel is doing to fix its longstanding hardware flaws.

There's an ongoing series of skirmishes between corporations who want to sell products that users don't fully control and the kernel developers who want users to be the highest authority. Sometimes these skirmishes manifest in the form of security patches intended to lock down the kernel. Do they lock down the kernel against outside attackers? Or do they lock down the kernel against change from anyone at all, including the user who owns the device?

Mickaël Salaün posted a patch to improve communication between landlocked processes. Landlock is a security module that creates an isolated "sandbox" where a process is prevented from interacting with the rest of the system, even if that process itself is compromised by a hostile attacker. The ultimate goal is to allow regular user processes to isolate themselves in this way, reducing the likelihood that they could be an entry point for an attack against the system.

A look at Linux kernel developers' various revision control solutions through the years, Linus Torvalds' decision to use BitKeeper and the controversy that followed, and how Git came to be created.

Dave Hansen from Intel posted a patch and said, "Intel is considering adding a new bit to the IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR (Model-Specific Register) to tell when RSB (Return Stack Buffer) underflow might be happening. Feedback on this would be greatly appreciated before the specification is finalized." He explained that RSB:

Dietmar Eggemann posted a patch from Quentin Perret to take advantage of energy-efficient CPUs on asymmetric multiprocessor (AMP) systems. AMP is distinguished from SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) systems in that an SMP system uses several instances of only one type of CPU, while an AMP system might use CPUs of differing speeds, feature-sets and so on.

The question of the earliest GCC compiler version to support for building the Linux kernel comes up periodically. The ideal would be for Linux to compile under all GCC versions, because you never know what kind of system someone is running. Maybe their company's security team has to approve all software upgrades for their highly sensitive devices, and GCC is low on that list. Maybe they need to save as much space as possible, and recent versions of GCC are too big. There are all sorts of reasons why someone might be stuck with old software.

Arnd Bergmann submitted a patch to remove the Linux ports for a variety of architectures, including blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score and tile. To do this, he worked directly with the former maintainers of each port to make sure the code removal was done right and didn't break anything in the mainline kernel or anywhere else.

Follow along with this step-by-step guide to build your own distribution from source and learn how it installs, loads and runs. When working with Linux, you easily can download any of the most common distributions to install and configure—be it Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or something entirely different. And although you should give several distributions a spin, building your own custom, minimal Linux distribution is also a beneficial and wonderful learning exercise.

The /boot partition sometimes needs a bit of attention. If you enable automatic updates, it will fill up with old kernels that you'll probably never need. It also will stop you from running aptitude to install or remove anything. If you find yourself in this situation, you can use dpkg to get around it. dpkg is the higher-level package manager in Debian-based distributions, and it's very useful when aptitude has broken. To see the status of your partitions, run: df -h:

There's an effort under way to reduce and ultimately remove all system call invocations from within kernel space. Dominik Brodowski was leading this effort, and he posted some patches to remove a lot of instances from the kernel. Among other things, he said, these patches would make it easier to clean up and optimize the syscall entry points, and also easier to clean up the parts of the kernel that still needed to pretend to be in userspace, just so they could keep using syscalls.

Andiry Xu (working with Lu Zhang, Steven Swanson and others) posted patches for a new filesystem called NOVA (NOn-Volatile memory Accelerated). Normal RAM chips are wiped every time you turn off your computer. Non-volatile RAM retains its data across reboots. Their project targeted byte-addressable non-volatile memory chips, such as Intel's 3DXpoint DIMMs.

It's now official: the latest RC1 pull request for the Linux 4.18 will not host the nearly 15-year-old Lustre filesystem. Greg Kroah-Hartman has been growing weary of the team developing its source code not pushing cleaner and fixed code to the staging tree. The removal was committed on June 5, 2018: with the following notes:

Alexei Starovoitov posted some patches to allow the kernel to load regular ELF binaries (aka plain executables) as kernel modules. These modules would be able to run user-mode helper routines instead of being absolutely confined to kernel space.

Imre Palik tried to speed up some of Linux's networking code but was met with stubborn opposition. Essentially, he wanted networking packets to bypass the netfilter code unless absolutely necessary. Netfilter, he said, was designed for flexibility at the expense of speed. According to his tests, bypassing it could speed up the system by as much as 15%.

Igor Stoppa posted a patch to allow kernel memory pools to be made read-only. Memory pools are a standard way to group memory allocations in Linux so their time cost is more predictable. With Igor's patch, once a memory pool was made read-only, it could not be made read-write again. This would secure the data for good and against attackers. Of course, you could free the memory and destroy the pool. But short of that, the data would stay read-only.

Efforts to work around serious hardware flaws in Intel chips are ongoing. Nadav Amit posted a patch to improve compatibility mode with respect to Intel's Meltdown flaw. Compatibility mode is when the system emulates an older CPU in order to provide a runtime environment that supports an older piece of software that relies on the features of that CPU. The thing to be avoided is to emulate massive security holes created by hardware flaws in that older chip as well.

DPDK is a fully open-source project that operates in userspace. It's a multi-vendor and multi-architecture project, and it aims at achieving high I/O performance and reaching high packet processing rates, which are some of the most important features in the networking arena. It was created by Intel in 2010 and moved to the Linux Foundation in April 2017. This move positioned it as one of the most dominant and most important open-source Linux projects.