Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc6, released by Linus on September 3. It is possibly the final prepatch before the 2.6.18 final release. There are a lot of fixes; one of those is the removal of much of the SMP alternatives work, which was causing build problems with some compilers. See the long-format changelog for the details.

A handful of additional fixes have gone into the mainline git repository since the -rc6 release.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.18-rc5-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include some enhancements to the no-MMU architecture support, a number of NFS server improvements, a steady trickle of reiser4 fixes, and a set of patches allowing a kernel to be built with no block device support (though those don't quite work yet).

On the 2.4 front, Willy Tarreau has released 2.4.33.3 with a small set of important fixes, and 2.4.34-pre2 with a larger set of fixes. The current plan is that the gcc 4.x support discussed here a couple of weeks ago will be merged into 2.4.34-pre3.

Other notes: a number of developers have been having difficulties posting patches to lists hosted on vger.kernel.org recently. The list maintainers have begun using bogofilter in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam getting through to the list - and, presumably, to reduce the amount of time they put into manually maintaining filter patterns. To date, bogofilter appears to believe that quite a few patches are spam. On the other hand, a substantial amount of distinctly non-technical mail involving nontraditional approaches to family quality time and members of the animal kingdom has been sailing through without a hitch. One can only assume that the training process will eventually iron out these little problems.

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