Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.13.1, which was released on September 9. It includes about ten patches, including fixes for two known security issues.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.14-rc1 released by Linus on September 12. Here is the announcement from Linus. According to the revised development process, this release should contain all of the major patches that will go into 2.6.14; everything from now on should be a bug fix. So it looks like 2.6.14 will include the ipw2100 and ipw2200 wireless drivers, the HostAP system (which allows a Linux system with suitable hardware to function as a wireless access point), version 19 of the wireless extensions API, relayfs, a large InfiniBand update, an abstraction layer for ethernet PHY devices, four-level page table support for the ppc64 architecture, a big netfilter update, a DCCP implementation, the filesystems in user space patch, and v9fs.

Other changes of note include the "sparsemem extreme" patches (preparing for hotplug memory), a NUMA-aware slab allocator, kzalloc(), a number of swap file improvements, some kernel build system improvements, some klist API changes, a serial ATA update (with a Marvell driver supporting PIO mode only), ongoing work to shrink the sk_buff structure, and some block subsystem enhancements.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.13-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include some token-based swapping tweaks, some memory hotplug work, a PCMCIA update, and the usual pile of fixes. The -mm tree has shrunk considerably as patches have flowed into the mainline.

Your editor is out of town this week, so the Kernel Page will be a bit thinner than usual. Everything should be back to normal next week.

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