I'm back from Italy, and I noticed that because the Google Search Appliance is built on open source code that Google have provided their patches to it. I decided to have a look at what patches they are using on top of the 2.4.26 Linux kernel:
- Some code to disable the console blanking (not sure why)
- Added lm_sensors and i2c (hardware monitoring)
- Added Artop 867X chip-based IDE driver
- Added Squashfs, compressed read-only filesystem
- Added num_physpages iocotl (number of physical pages available to kernel)
- Allow non-root port 80/443 binding
- Allow any user to call mlock() to lock memory from getting swapped out.
- Added oprofile, a system-wide profiler
So no great surprises, but interesting nevertheless...
Not the epoll patches?
Matts on 2006-09-30T11:41:32
Strange ommission. Or was epoll already in by then?
I wonder why
mapopa on 2006-09-30T19:11:45
this one "Allow non-root port 80/443 binding" is a great way to let non-root users to bind on 1024 port numbers
I wonder why is not used by other distros? (think of apache/ssh/sendmail using by default non root users for binding)
Re:I wonder why
Aristotle on 2006-09-30T23:23:21
You do not need kernel patches for that. See FirewallNotes, under “Run non-root processes on ports below 1024.”
