Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.14.2, released on November 10. 2.6.14.2 contains about a dozen fixes, including one for the zero-length datagram bug. It does not contain a fix for the file lease denial of service bug yet, however.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.15-rc1, announced by Linus on November 11. Says Linus:

It's hard to go through in any great detail, because even the shortlog is actually almost five thousand lines and about 200kB in size, and would thus run afoul of the mailing list limits so I can't include it here. The same is true of the diffstat, only even more so. The unidiff is about a million lines in size, just the diffstat is 300+kB.

The changes are really pretty much all over the place, with over four thousand commits merged in the two weeks since 2.6.14...

The changes in 2.6.15 have been listed in detail here last week and the week before. Significant changes merged since last week's article, but before 2.6.15-rc1, include a new, simpler, type-safe netlink API, a new netfilter connection tracking implementation (which understands IPv6 and will eventually replace the current code), the removal of some SCSI subsystem typedefs (Scsi_Device, Scsi_Pointer, and Scsi_Host_Template), the removal of the owner field from struct pci_driver, and a new "platform driver" interface.

For those who are just tuning in: some of the more significant changes in 2.6.15 will include device model changes, basic hotplug memory support, a reworked NTFS implementation with improved write behavior, a big CIFS update, a number of block improvements (and a reorganization of the block layer into its own top-level directory), the Open-iSCSI initiator, InfiniBand SCSI RDMA, RapidIO support, a number of scheduler tweaks, the shared subtrees patch, four-level page tables for the ia-64 architecture, and much more. See the short log for a long list of changes, or the long-format changelog for the details.

2.6.15-rc1 marks the closing of the window for new features, so Linus's git repository contains mostly fixes. It does, however, also include a generic cmpxchg implementation for i386, new Omnikey Cardman 4000 and 4040 drivers, and a new DMA32 zone for the x86-64 architecture.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.14-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include some relayfs enhancements, some scheduler tweaks, and various fixes.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.32, released by Marcelo on November 16. 2.4 is in deep maintenance mode, so there's not a whole lot of new features in 2.4.32.

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Finally: [NETFILTER]: Add nf_conntrack subsystem.

Posted Nov 21, 2005 21:42 UTC (Mon) by ernest (subscriber, #2355) [Link]

[NETFILTER]: Add nf_conntrack subsystem.

Not many people noticed this important patch inclusion. Up to now ipv6 had
no stateful firewall capability, With this patch that is finally possible.

By itself this is quite a big change in the netfilter achitecture eventually
supposed to replace the current connection tracking subsystem currently only usable with ipv4. The new system can be used for many more network protocols,
of which, I think, IPv6 is the most important.

Many people have been waiting for that one.

Ernest.