Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current stable kernel release is 2.6.18, released by Linus on September 19. Do read the announcement; it appears to have some changelog entries which did not come directly from git. There is a vast amount of new stuff in this release, including priority-inheriting futexes, a new generic interrupt handling layer, a new core time subsystem, the kernel locking validator, the SMPnice work, a bunch of virtual memory work, a huge serial ATA update, the removal of devfs, and much more. See the KernelNewbies LinuxChanges page for a much more detailed list, the LWN 2.6 kernel API changes page for information on internal programming interface changes, or the long-format changelog for thousands of patches' worth of detail.

The current -mm release is 2.6.18-rc7-mm1. Says Andrew:

It took maybe ten hours solid work to get this dogpile vaguely compiling and limping to a login prompt on x86, x86_64 and powerpc. I guess it's worth briefly testing if you're keen.

He also notes that this kernel will not run on distributions with an older version of udev due to some driver core changes, a situation which was discussed here back in August. Other changes to -mm include a "probably wrong" change to the kmap() API to make it handle coherency issues, a new GFP_THISNODE memory allocation flag, the removal of the questionable HDAPS driver for unstated reasons (though it is worth noting that one of the last patches into 2.6.18 made it clear that anonymous code contributions cannot be accepted), the SLIM and integrity measurement security modules, and a number of fixes.

For 2.6.16 users: Adrian Bunk released 2.6.16.29 with a number of fixes on September 13.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.34-pre3, released on September 19. The main change this time around is the inclusion of the gcc 4.0 patches.

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