What's coming in 2.6.17 [LWN.net]

As of this writing, the process of merging patches into the mainline for 2.6.17 has been underway for a couple of days. Something over 1500 patches have been merged, though the number of user-visible changes is relatively small. Here is what has gone into the kernel so far:

There is a big SPARC update, which, among other things, includes support for the new "Niagara" architecture.
A large number of wireless networking updates, including some 802.11 development work. The ipw2200 driver has seen changes which, among other things, will require users to have version 3.0 of the adapter firmware.
The DCCP code continues to develop; among other things, CCID2 (using TCP-like congestion control) has been added.
A netfilter connection tracking helper for the H.323 protocol.
A big JFS update.
A huge set of video/DVB patches, adding support for a number of new devices and fixing many issues.
A big serial ATA update. The SCSI and ALSA subsystems have also seen large updates.
A number of USB audio drivers have been removed; USB audio hardware is better supported through the ALSA subsystem.
The semaphore-to-mutex conversion process continues in many parts of the tree.
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL_FUTURE() has been merged.
The SLAB_NO_REAP slab cache option, which ostensibly caused the slab not to be cleaned up when the system is under memory pressure, has been removed. The kmem_cache_t typedef is also being phased out in favor of struct kmem_cache.
Reservation of "huge" pages has been tightened up in an effort to avoid out-of-memory situations in some use cases. mprotect() can also now be used on huge pages.

The merge window for 2.6.17 should stay open until around the end of the month, so there is still plenty of time for more patches to find their way in.

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