Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.19-rc1, released on October 4, several milliseconds after last week's Kernel Page was published. For a summary of changes, see this article and this one from the last two weeks. Highlights include the parallel ATA driver set, labeled networking for IPsec and CIPSO security, a few new architectures, lots of new drivers, the GFS2 cluster filesystem, eCryptfs, and large numbers of internal changes.

The long-format changelog has the details - but, since we're talking about almost 5000 patches from over 600 contributors, it's best to have a lot of time on one's hands. The short-form changelog is somewhat more compact, but still lengthy.

At this point in the process, patches going into the mainline repository are supposed to be confined to fixes. Many of them are, but Linus has merged a few other significant changes, including, as predicted, the interrupt handler prototype change, which has caused changes throughout the tree. There is a new epoll_pwait() system call which takes an additional signal mask parameter, and the venerable (but long-unused) <linux/config.h> include file has been removed at last.

Also merged is the developmental ext4 filesystem, which includes a number of enhancements, including support for extents and 48-bit block numbers. See the ext4 documentation file if you are interested in playing with ext4 (and have good backups).

The current -mm tree is 2.6.19-rc1-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include the addition of ext4 (which promptly moved on into the mainline), continued work on the swap token mechanism, a generic log2() implementation, and the dynamic tick patch.

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