With the attached patch you can persuade your VMware Workstation to work on the newest Linux kernel 2.6.29. There are no guarantees, but it works for me(tm).

Unpack tar's from /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source into some directory (except vmppuser.tar), patch the source (patch -p1), run make in every subdirectory, copy resulting kernel modules to /lib/modules/2.6.29/misc and run depmod -a. Then you can run /etc/init.d/vmware start and check that all modules loaded correctly. That should be it.

Referencing the post Nvidia Linux driver 100.14.11 and Linux kernel 2.6.23. Here I have reported the patches for older versions of Nvidia drivers. The procedure to follow is the same described in the above document.

Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler, merged in the 2.6.23-rc1 release, if you drive your Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I guess that's what we get for running binary drivers.

Ingo Molnar has announced the first release of his "lock dependency correctness validator" kernel debugging feature.

From the announcement:

The lock validator "observes" and maps all locking rules as they occur dynamically (as triggered by the kernel's natural use of spinlocks, rwlocks, mutexes and rwsems).
Whenever the lock validator subsystem detects a new locking scenario, it validates this new rule against the existing set of rules. If this new rule is consistent with the existing set of rules then the new rule is added transparently and the kernel continues as normal. If the new rule could create a deadlock scenario then this condition is printed out.

One of the more interesting patches for the linux kernel lately has been Wu Fengguang's adaptive readahead patchset, currently at version 12. Talking about its performance benefits Wu says: "besides file servers and desktops, it is recently found to benefit postgresql databases a lot.".

So I decided to do a simple benchmark to see what difference would adaptive readahead make in my case. The idea was to test a very simple database query (random select) to the PostgreSQL database and see how it performs through time (while the memory is being primed with data from disk).

This patch, courtesy Rick Lindsley, resolves long standing problem with disk statistics counters in 2.4 kernels.

Because of the bug in kernel, the counters would occasionally incorrectly report negative values. The patch has been tested against 2.4.24, but will probably apply on other versions, too. Thanks Rick!