Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.9-rc2, announced by Linus on September 13. There is a lot of new stuff in this release, including some infrastructure for catching illegal use of I/O memory addresses (see below), the NETIF_F_LLTX interface feature flag (discussed in last week's Kernel Page), the removal of the ancient, unused "busmouse" driver, infrastructure for cluster-wide file locking, a number of DRM subsystem cleanups, the out-of-line spinlock patch, AMD dual-core support, more filesystem conversions to the new symbolic link resolution code (which will eventually allow an increase in the maximum link depth), a new waitid() system call implementing the POSIX call by the same name, a "fake NUMA" mode for x86-64 testing, a small-footprint tmpfs implementation, the base KProbes patch, a set of IDE updates, support for scheduler profiling (seeing where context switches come from), automatic TCP window scaling calculation, a kobject change (it uses kref now), a USB gadget interface update with "On The Go" support, a big ALSA update, the removal of the Philips webcam driver, numerous network driver updates, some random number generator fixes, a fix for the audio CD writing memory leak, some VFS interface improvements, executable support in hugetlb mappings, the Whirlpool digest algorithm, some virtual memory tweaks, a number of asynchronous I/O fixes and improvements, a User-mode Linux update, the "flex mmap" user-space memory layout (covered here last June), a number of scheduler tweaks, the removal of the very last suser() call, and lots of fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains the "string" I/O memory access functions, support for more than eight partitions on BSD-labeled disks, some User-mode Linux cleanups, a tunable "max sectors" limit for block I/O requests (a latency reduction feature), a new prctl() option allowing programs to change their name, some shared memory scalability improvements, and a change in TCP ICMP source quench behavior (such messages are simply ignored now).

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.9-rc1-mm5. Recent additions to -mm include some software suspend improvements, the return of a functioning lockmeter patch, some ext3 reservation improvements, some scheduler tweaks, a completely reworked "completely fair queueing" I/O scheduler, and implementations of atomic_inc_return() for various architectures.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.28-pre3, which was released by Marcelo on September 11. This patch is mainly "a bunch of scattered fixes"; there is also the Whirlpool digest algorithm, and an XFS update.

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