Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.5.53, which was released by Linus on December 23. It contains a bunch of device mapper fixes, an SCTP update, some memory management fixes, an ia-64 merge, some USB updates, a new aic7xxx driver, the new x86 "sysenter" system call mechanism (discussed in the December 19 LWN Kernel Page), and many other fixes and updates. The long-format changelog has the details.

Linus's pre-2.5.54 BitKeeper repository contains a large number of patches, most of which are the sorts of fixes that one would expect during a feature freeze. There is also a new bit of compiler trickery to issue warnings when deprecated functions are called, a number of kbuild fixes, a new dev_printk() function for standardized device error reporting, the removal of the much disliked hugetlb system calls (in favor of hugetlbfs), a new "kmalloc for each CPU" API, and more loadable module fixes.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20. Marcelo has not released any 2.4.21 prepatches since December 18.

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