Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 release is 2.6.16.6 2.6.16.7 2.6.16.8 2.6.16.9, announced on April 19; it contains a fix for an information leak vulnerability on some AMD processors. Of the prior releases, 2.6.16.6 contains a fairly long list of fixes, while 2.6.16.7 and 2.6.16.8 are single-patch security fixes.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.17-rc2, announced by Linus on April 18. There's a lot of fixes in this release, but it also contains a simplified form of the scheduler starvation avoidance patch, some tweaks to the memory overcommit algorithm, the removal of the obsolete blkmtd and qlogicfc drivers, the removal of the unmaintained Sangoma WAN drivers, the splice() and tee() system calls, and pollable sysfs attributes. See the long-format changelog for the details.

For the record, it is worth noting that the prototypes for the splice() methods in the file_operations structure have changed again. This week's version:

    ssize_t (*splice_write)(struct pipe_inode_info *pipe, struct file *out, 
                            loff_t *offset, size_t len, unsigned int flags);
    ssize_t (*splice_read)(struct file *in, loff_t *offset, 
                           struct pipe_inode_info *pipe, size_t len, 
			   unsigned int flags);

The offset parameter, describing where in the stream I/O should start, is new.

A few dozen patches (all fixes) have been merged into the mainline after the -rc2 release.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.17-rc1-mm3. Recent changes to -mm include an ACPI dock driver, i2c virtual adapter support, a number of memory management tweaks, a trusted platform module (TPM) driver update, and a new version of the zlib library.

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