Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.5.54, which was released by Linus on New Years Day. This release 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, a partial lm_sensors merge (see below), and more loadable module fixes. As usual, the details can be found in the long-format changelog.

Linus's (pre-2.5.55) BitKeeper tree includes a number of big architecture updates (PowerPC, ARM, x86-64), some kbuild work, a knfsd update, more module fixes, another set of driver model patches, some device mapper updates, a number of video4linux tweaks, and numerous other fixes and updates.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20. Marcelo continued the 2.4.21 process with 2.4.21-pre3, released on January 6. This prepatch includes fixes for some (potential) security bugs, a number of USB driver updates, some IPv6 tweaks, and a number of otheir fixes and updates.

Alan Cox has released 2.4.21-pre3-ac1, which adds another set of fixes and updates. This patch no longer includes the reverse mapping virtual memory code. (Update: 2.4.21-pre3-ac2 came out, with an important bug fix, just as the Weekly Edition was being published).

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