Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 release is 2.6.15.1, announced on January 14. This one contains a dozen or so patches for kernel crashes and security problems.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.16-rc1, announced by Linus on January 17. The details of what's in this release can be found in last week's summary and this week's update (see below). In brief: 2.6.16 will include the OCFS2 filesystem, the swap migration patches, various new drivers, the mutex changeover, high-resolution timers, a transparent inter-process communication (TIPC) protocol implementation, a big netfilter update, a new batch-level scheduler class, and more. See the short log file for an overview (note that "short" is relative) or the long-format log for the details.

Linus's post-rc1 git repository contains a pile of network driver updates and a few other fixes. The 2.6.16 merge window has closed, so one would not expect to see a whole lot of new features going in at this point. There will apparently be one exception, however: Andrew Morton intends to merge the openat() series of system calls, along with the pselect() and ppoll() implementation. These new system call were covered here last December.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.16-rc1-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include a bunch of reiser3 work ("Please test with caution, but please test."), several more semaphore-to-mutex conversion patches, multi-column oops stack backtraces for i386, and a new software suspend API intended to help move some of the image save/restore work to user space.

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