At that point, 12,321 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline about 5,500 since our summary of the first half of the merge window was written.
Linus Torvalds released 5.16-rc1 and ended the 5.16 merge window on November 14, as expected. A number of memory-management patches are currently in circulation read on for a look at the freeing of page-table pages, kvmalloc() flags, memory clearing, and NUMA "home nodes".
It is thus not surprising that developers continue to try to improve its functionality. The memory-management subsystem remains one of the most complex parts of the kernel, with an ongoing reliance on various heuristics for performance. Some upcoming memory-management patches.All of that makes it much more difficult to correlate the traffic and identify communicating endpoints. The packets are sent to the relay nodes, which independently delay each packet before passing it on to the next relay. The client endpoints in such a mix network send fixed-sized packets at a fixed rate if there is no outbound traffic, a cover packet is sent that is indistinguishable from normal traffic. Loopix is different from Tor in that sacrifices latency in order to make traffic analysis even more difficult. Beresford from the University of Cambridge, used the Loopix mix network to validate their work. The Rollercoaster developers, Daniel Hugenroth, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. To minimize latency, Tor nodes forward packets as quickly as they can, which may help eavesdroppers correlate the traffic. It relies on the difficulty of tracking messages through that path, but a sophisticated and well-placed adversary can do various kinds of traffic analysis to potentially match up traffic between two endpoints, thus drawing conclusions about the participants in the communication. Tor uses multiple relay nodes, each of which only knows its predecessor and the node to pass the message on to. Rollercoaster is a recently announced mechanism that extends the functionality of mix networks in order to more efficiently communicate among groups. Tor is perhaps the best-known mix network, but there are others that make different tradeoffs to increase the security of their users. Mix networks are meant to hide that metadata by routing packets through various intermediate nodes to try to thwart the traffic analysis used by nation-state-level adversaries to identify "opponents" of various kinds.