Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.15-rc6, released by Linus on December 18. This one is intended to be the final -rc before 2.6.15 comes out - hopefully by the end of the year. Quite a few fixes have been merged, but no new features are added at this late stage. "But do give it a try, because Santa Claus has his CIA spooks checking y'all out, and naughty people don't get any of the loot." See the long-format changelog for the details.

About 40 post-rc6 patches are currently sitting in the mainline git repository; they are all small fixes.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.15-rc5-mm3. Recent changes to -mm include a Sony laptop ACPI driver, support for an atomic_long_t type, the removal of the swap prefetching patches ("I wasn't able to notice much benefit from it in my testing, and the number of mm/ patches in getting crazy, so we don't have capacity for speculative things at present."), the unshare() system call (see below), a set of MD updates, and the dropping of support for gcc 3.1 and prior.

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.14.4, released on December 14. It contains a relatively large number of patches with a couple of security fixes and various other important repairs.

In an exception to normal policy, the stable team also released 2.6.13.5 on December 15. It contains three patches, one of which is a security fix.

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