Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.10-rc2, announced by Linus on November 14. Patches merged since -rc1 include fixes for the ELF loader security problems, Anubis block cypher support, an ALSA update, a number of networking updates, kprobes support for the x86-64 architecture, a frame buffer device update, a set of user-mode Linux patches, an NTFS update, version 2.0 of the USB gadget serial driver, some kernel build tweaks (the preferred name for kernel makefiles is now Kbuild), the ext3 block reservation and online resizing patches, sysfs backing store, locking behavior annotations for the "sparse" utility, a reworking of spin lock initialization, the un-exporting of add_timer_on(), sys_lseek(), and a number of other kernel functions, an x86 signal delivery optimization, an IDE update, I/O space write barrier support, a frame buffer driver update, more scheduler tweaks, some big kernel lock preemption patches, a large number of architecture updates, and lots of fixes. See the long-format changelog (600KB) for the details.

Linus has noted that now would be a good time to calm down and stick to bug fixes until 2.6.10 comes out. His BitKeeper repository shows that he is sticking to that; it contains mostly fixes. There is also a memory technology device (and JFFS2) update, a frame buffer device update, some user-mode Linux patches, some page allocator tuning, and a few architecture updates.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.10-rc2-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include some kmap_atomic() changes (see below), the ability to disable a subset of "magic sysrq" features, some SELinux scalability work, enhanced I/O and memory usage accounting data collection, and an updated reiser4 filesystem.

The 2.4.28 kernel has been released; Marcelo announced its availability on November 17. The biggest change since 2.4.27, for many people, will be the serial ATA and networking improvements, but many other fixes have gone in as well.

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