Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current ultra-stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.11.4, which was released on March 15; it contains two security fixes. Previously, 2.6.11.3 was released on March 12 with a larger set of fixes. The form of the 2.6.11.x patches has changed slightly: they now apply directly to the 2.6.11 root, rather than to the previous .x release.

There still have been no 2.6.12 prepatches, though it looks like one should appear soon.

When that prepatch shows up, it will include over 2000 patches currently sitting in Linus's BitKeeper repository. These include a driver for the "trusted computing" TPM chip (see the Trusted Computing Group site for more information on TPM), SuperHyway bus support, a new multi-level security implementation for SELinux, a user-mode Linux update, support for hot-pluggable parallel ports, the "cpuset" patch (see cpusets.txt for information on cpusets), a new nVidia framebuffer driver, the device mapper multipath patches, a big set of input driver patches, an ALSA update, an IPv6 update (including a patch removing the "experimental" designation for IPv6), a rearrangement of the net_device structure (which will break binary-only drivers), a 21,000-line DVB whitespace cleanup patch, a rework of the page table access functions (which is still causing some trouble on ia-64), a patch enabling an administrator to enable a subset of the "magic SysRq" functions, numerous driver updates, the address space randomization patches, a new packet classifier mechanism for the networking layer, a new workqueue API function, a Tiger digest algorithm implementation, the restoration of the Philips webcam driver, some software suspend improvements, some readahead improvements, a big block I/O barrier rewrite (which enables full barrier support on serial ATA drives), a set of patches to shrink the kernel for embedded use, a generic sort() function, high-resolution POSIX CPU clock support (not the full high-resolution timers patch), a USB API change (usb_control_msg() and usb_bulk_msg() now take a timeout in milliseconds rather than in jiffies), and lots of fixes.

Also to be found in BitKeeper is an (almost) direct merge of the first three 2.6.11.x releases.

The current -mm patch is 2.6.11-mm4. Recent changes to -mm include a big CFQ I/O scheduler update, a new and smaller relayfs patch, a set of sparse memory support patches, a performance counter API update, a reiser4 update, and various fixes.

The current 2.4 prepatch remains 2.4.30-pre3; there have been no 2.4 prepatches since March 9.

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Kernel release status

Posted Mar 18, 2005 12:36 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

The weekly kernel page has a lot to do with why I'm an LWN subscriber, but
having been so since shortly after subscriptions became available, and
having been an LWN reader some months before that (thanks to it being
featured in as an RSS feed option for KNewsTicker =8^), one thing I've
increasingly missed as time has passed and the number of weekly kernel
pages I've read has increased.

I'd find a regular "Whatever happened to??" feature incredibly interesting
and useful. I'd be a summary of what has happened to features reviewed in
past weekly kernel pages, and would either be a quarterly?? roundup
covering most of the kernel page for that week, featuring updates on all
the stories from the quarter two past and a year past (so the March/April
one would feature stuff from the Oct-Dec 2004 and Jan-March 2003
quarters), or a shorter blurb similar in length to the Weekly Kernel
Release Status update, again featuring updates from one quarter and one
year back, but mainly against the parallel week, plus perhaps one
additional selected update based not on time but on other factors.

Each update would link to the original article for the background
discussion, and then give status, "still in -mm", "dropped from mainline
consideration due to replacement by X" (with X linked), "adopted into
mainline for kernel Y essentially as described", "adopted into mainline
for kernel Y but with significant changes" (preferably with a link to a
deeper summary), "still being actively developed with significant changes
since then", "put on the back burner for now as it is waiting for feature
Z" (again, Z linked, preferably), etc.

The problem is that I read about all these interesting features, and while
I see some of them eventually ending up in the kernel (often with links to
previous LWN coverage =8^), others pretty much disappear and I never
really know what happened to them.

Specifically, of course, I have a couple features in mind, but other
readers will naturally find the resolution on other features more
interesting to them. The followups that I'd find most interesting right
now, however, would be on reiser4 (which featured in several LWN articles
last spring and early summer but with only passing mention since then),
and on the CDBurner SCSI permissions security thing, which last I read on
LWN, some year ago or so, had some hopefully temporary regression in
functionality due to security issues while the safety of each of the SCSI
bus commands was reviewed and a more generally secure solution sought. I
gather that the situation has somewhat stabilized since then in both
cases, but lack the clarity of understanding that often comes from an LWN
article on the subject. Both of these seem ripe for a status update, and
I'm sure there are many more that I've simply not noticed because they
don't lie so directly in my line of practical interest and "grok level".

Duncan