Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.14.5, released on December 26. It contains the usual set of fixes, mostly in the networking and SCSI subsystems.

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.15, announced by Linus on January 2. The changelog entry for the release says "Hey, it's fifteen years today since I bought the machine that got Linux started. January 2nd is a good date." This release contains a fair number of fixes since -rc7, but no big changes. The 2.6.15 series as a whole has added a big set of 802.11 improvements, hotplug memory support, much-improved NTFS support, much-improved CIFS support, the open-iSCSI initiator, shared subtrees, a new, IPv6-capable netfilter connection tracking implementation, and much more. The long-format changelog has the details. See also LWN's Kernel Page coverage of features as they were added (here and here) and the KernelNewbies Linux Changes Wiki.

The floodgates have not yet opened for the 2.6.16 development cycle, so there is no pile of pending patches in the mainline git repository as of this writing. There have also been no -mm kernel releases since December 14.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.33-pre1; Marcelo launched the 2.4.33 cycle on December 29. This prepatch includes some security fixes, some networking work, and, it is said, the last ever big SATA update for 2.4.

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Kernel release status

Posted Jan 5, 2006 1:58 UTC (Thu) by clintonroy (subscriber, #6660) [Link]

It seems that 2.6.15 will allow SMART stuff to work with libata supported SATA disks, yay.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=90...

Kernel release status

Posted Jan 5, 2006 11:44 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

Well, yes. But there was an extremely large gotcha on 2.6.14 with ata passthru patches: Using *any* captive mode test in some (all?) chipsets (ICH5R known bad) would cause severe pain, as the kernel ended up disabling the IRQ line.

So, if you like to smartctl -d ata -C -t anything /dev/sdx, you better test that in single user mode, and everything either mounted RO or unmounted, and with proper access to a reset button for the box :)

Kernel release status

Posted Jan 5, 2006 7:52 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

no updates in the -git tree. Linus just waited until LWN was published to update his public tree.

as of 11:30 pacific he had added over 6000 objects to his git tree
1256 files changed, 87750 insertions(+), 44642 deletions(-)
plus 74 new files, 14 files deleted, and 5 files renamed