"Based on the new guidelines posted by the SFLC on 'Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers', specifically section 5, we are introducing a new tag for use with patches which deal with files licensed under permissive licenses (BSD, ISC) on Linux wireless in our larger GPL project, the Linux kernel," explained Luis Rodriguez in an email titled, "new 'Changes-licensed-under' tag introduced for Linux-wireless". The web pages linked in the email appear to be an official response by the SFLC regarding the recent BSD vs. GPL licensing controversy surrounding the Atheros wireless device driver. Luis continued:

"Although some developers have a practice of implying their patches for a permissive licensed file abides by the respective permissive license of the file being patched, and although some changes are obviously not copyrightable, we would like to 'err on the side of caution', take the advice from SFLC, and introduce Changes-licensed-under in order to help the BSD family reap benefits of our contributions to permissive licensed files."

There were only a few brief replies to Luis' email. Stephen Hemminger suggested a simpler solution, "no, please don't [go] down this legal rat hole. It would cause bullshit like people submitting dual licensed patches to the scheduler or GPL only patches to the ath5k or ACPI code. Instead, add a section to Documentation/SubmittingPatches that clearly states that all changes to a file are licensed under the same license as the original file." Krzysztof Halasa pointed out that this was already the case, quoting a line from the Developer's Certificate of Origin contained in the SubmittingPatches file which says, "the contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file".

A potential bug reported against the Completely Fair Scheduler suggested that it was causing a network slowdown, measured with the 'Iperf' bandwidth performance benchmarking tool. The performance hit was quickly tracked to the previously discussed changes in how CFS handles sched_yield(). When it was suggested that this was a bug in the new process scheduler, Ingo explained:

"I had a quick look at the source code, and the reason for that weird yield usage was that there's a locking bug in iperf's 'Reporter thread' abstraction and apparently instead of fixing the bug it was worked around via a horrible yield() based user-space lock."

He then submit a small patch to fix the bug and remove the call to sched_yield() resulting in, "iperf uses _much_ less CPU time. On my Core2Duo test system, before the patch it used up 100% CPU time to saturate 1 gigabit of network traffic to another box. With the patch applied it now uses 9% of CPU time." He added playfully, "sched_yield() is almost always the symptom of broken locking or other bug. In that sense CFS does the right thing by exposing such bugs =B-)" Stephen Hemminger pointed out that a similar patch had been submitted to the Iperf project last month as it caused an identical problem with FreeBSD's scheduler.

In the ongoing effort to reduce the power consumption of the linux kernel [story] and take better advantage of the tickless kernel patch [story], Stephen Hemminger posted a patch to make it possible to unload the keyboard blink driver, "the blink driver wakes up every jiffy which wastes power unnecessarily. Using a notifier gives same effect. Also add ability to unload module." The blink driver was only recently merged, described as a "simple driver that blinks the keyboard LEDs when loaded. Useful for checking that the kernel is still alive or for crashdumping."

Linus Torvalds reviewed the driver and retorted, "I really get the feeling this thing should be removed entirely. Wasting power is the _least_ of its problems." When it was pointed out that the driver is only a debugging tool, Linus listed his complaints, "it has been a total disaster from beginning to end. It wastes power. It hangs machines when it tries to blink," going on to add, "its main problem is that PEOPLE SHOULD NOT USE IT, but it sounds cool, so people end up configuring the damn thing even though they shouldn't." Ultimately, Linus removed the driver before the 2.6.22 release [story] noting, "we could have just disabled it, but there's work on a new one that isn't as fundamentally broken, so there really doesn't seem to be any point in keeping it around."