Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.17.8, released on August 6. There is a fairly long list of important fixes this time around, but none with CVE (vulnerability) numbers attached.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc4, announced by Linus on August 6. "The diffstat (and the appended shortlog) tells the story: a lot of small fixes in various areas, mostly drivers. Input layer, infiniband, usb, net, sound, vlb. Some cpufreq and architecture updates. Also some audit rule improvements from Al & Amy." The changes also include a new event notification mechanism within the networking code and a function (netdev_alloc_skb()) for allocating packet buffers in a NUMA-aware fashion. See the long-format changelog for the details.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.18-rc3-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include the return of the CacheFS subsystem, full compact flash support in the libata code, a big x86-64 update, a number of memory management tweaks, vectored asynchronous I/O support, and a "comprehensive system accounting" patch.

---

(Log in to post comments)