Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.12-rc1, released (without an announcement) by Linus on March 18. This huge patch contains, among many other things, 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, the "cpuset" patch (see cpusets.txt for information on cpusets), a new nVidia framebuffer driver, the device mapper multipath patches, an IPv6 update (including a patch removing the "experimental" designation for IPv6), 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 Tiger digest algorithm implementation, the restoration of the Philips webcam driver, some software suspend 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, and high-resolution POSIX CPU clock support (not the full high-resolution timers patch). The details can be found in the long-format changelog.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains some architecture updates, some networking fixes, and an IPv4 multipath implementation. Linus is out of the office this week, so patches are not being merged for a little bit. Andrew Morton, meanwhile, is encouraging developers to work on shortening his list of 140 2.6.12-rc1 bugs.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.12-rc1-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include ACPI-based PCI bridge hotplug support, the pluggable TCP congestion avoidance modules patch (see below), and some kernel timer improvements.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.30-rc1, released by Marcelo on March 18.