Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.5.45, announced by Linus on October 30, just in time to make your editor go back and rewrite this section. Linus has been busy, having merged over 500 patches since returning from his Caribbean cruise. The most significant changes include another set of block layer fixes, an ia-64 update, many fixes from the -ac series, the device mapper (LVM2) code, the new cryptographic API (see below), the beginnings of an IPSec implementation, an ISDN update, Roman Zippel's new kernel configuration system, the sys_epoll patch (see below), much device model work, and many other fixes and updates. The long-format changelog is longer than usual, and has all the details.

There are many open issues, still, that need to be resolved before the feature freeze. For varying perspectives on what remains to be merged, see Guillaume Boissiere's 2.5 status summary for October 30, Rob Landley's merge candidate list, or Rusty Russell's Remarkably Unreliable 2.6 list.

For a view of what's in the kernel now, see Dave Jones's post-Halloween document which serves as a sort of preliminary release notes for people interested in testing the new kernel.

The current stable kernel is still 2.4.19, but the next stable release got a little closer with the announcement of the first 2.4.20 release candidate on October 29..

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