For those of you who are not yet aware, Linux kernel 2.6.24 is finally out.
OpenVZ is (and has been, for the past few years) a good contributor to the mainline kernel. But in this release we are really doing better than before: 215 patches written by OpenVZ people submitted to the 2.6.24 kernel during the period of its development (i.e. last 3½ months). This is about 2% of all the patches that were merged into 2.6.24.
Most of that patches are for PID namespaces, preliminary support for net namespaces (i.e. network stack virtualization for containers), and various bugfixes.
PID namespace is now almost complete and quite usable, although it's marked as "experimental" for now. For the technical description of the feature, see this lwn.net article.
Net namespace is a work-in-progress, and there are already a lot of patches stacked in Dave Miller's net-2.6.25 tree for future inclusion into the 2.6.25 mainline kernel. The feature is expected to be complete and usable by 2.6.25 kernel release, with IPv6 support coming a bit later.
Jon Corbet of LWN.net also wrote about the 2.6.24 kernel statistics (back when it was still at a RC stage) here. Note that OpenVZ's Pavel Emelyanov is number 5 in "Most active developers" (by changeset) list, with 146 patches contributed.
OpenVZ is (and has been, for the past few years) a good contributor to the mainline kernel. But in this release we are really doing better than before: 215 patches written by OpenVZ people submitted to the 2.6.24 kernel during the period of its development (i.e. last 3½ months). This is about 2% of all the patches that were merged into 2.6.24.
Most of that patches are for PID namespaces, preliminary support for net namespaces (i.e. network stack virtualization for containers), and various bugfixes.
PID namespace is now almost complete and quite usable, although it's marked as "experimental" for now. For the technical description of the feature, see this lwn.net article.
Net namespace is a work-in-progress, and there are already a lot of patches stacked in Dave Miller's net-2.6.25 tree for future inclusion into the 2.6.25 mainline kernel. The feature is expected to be complete and usable by 2.6.25 kernel release, with IPv6 support coming a bit later.
Jon Corbet of LWN.net also wrote about the 2.6.24 kernel statistics (back when it was still at a RC stage) here. Note that OpenVZ's Pavel Emelyanov is number 5 in "Most active developers" (by changeset) list, with 146 patches contributed.


Comments
Thanks for the info.
1) How big is the OpenVZ patch for the 2.6.24 kernel now... has it been significantly reduced in size because some of the functionality has been moved into 2.6.24?
2) Would you say that the patches that made it into 2.6.24 were actual pieces of OpenVZ or were they mostly new code needed to meet the changes/compromises that mainline wanted?
3) Are the OpenVZ userspace programs going to need any updates to use the 2.6.24 kernel?
4) If you had to guess and put a percentage value on it, how much of the OpenVZ functionality has made it into 2.6.24?