"Alan Jenkins has been doing some great work on the Linux Kernel Module (LKM) module loader and tools over the past few years. I have had the privilege to work with him a number of times in my capacity as maintainer of some of those tools, and am always impressed by his work. The latest patches add support for a binary searchable kernel symbol index, generated during the kernel compilation and used by the running kernel for more expediently resolving symbols needed by modules. With this work, the kernel takes even less time to boot on modern netbook systems like his.
"KVM para-virtualisation improvements:
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) enables users to exploit modern hardware virtualisation features available on Intel-compatible systems. The (optional) para-virtualisation features go a stage further by allowing virtualisation-aware guests’ operating systems running under KVM to take advantage of improved performance optimisations. For example, a recent modification to KVM allows for para-virtualised guests experiencing a page fault (due to memory being temporarily in on disk swap space) to suspend only the faulting guest OS process and not the entire guest. The guest is then free to continue running other processes while the host machine running KVM completes the faulting in of the necessary data."
