Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.21-rc1, released on February 20. "There's a lot of changes, as is usual for an -rc1 thing, but at least so far it would seem that 2.6.20 has been a good base, and I don't think we have anything *really* scary here." Significant changes include the long-awaited dynamic tick patch, better high-resolution timer support, the VMI virtualization interface (now built on top of paravirt_ops), the ALSA "system on chip" layer, lots of new drivers, and more. See the short-form changelog for details, or the full changelog for lots of details.

As of this writing, a few hundred patches have found their way into the mainline git repository since -rc1 was released. Most of them are in the Video4Linux subsystem, adding ASUS P7131 remote control support, BTTV cropping support, a big update to the pvrusb2 WinTV driver, a new MSI Mega Sky 580 driver, and quite a bit more.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.20-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include Xen DomU support, lguest, Blackfin architecture support, more workqueue changes, POSIX listio completion support for asynchronous I/O, utrace (a new tracing mechanism meant to replace ptrace()), and the kernel markers patch.

Stable kernel updates: 2.6.20.1, 2.6.19.4, and 2.6.18.7 were all released on February 20 with a single patch: a fix for the NFS ACL denial of service vulnerability. Larger updates for 2.6.18 and 2.6.19 (probably the last stable updates for both of those kernels) are currently in the works, with a likely release around the 23rd or 24th.

2.6.16.41 was released on February 18 with about a dozen fixes.

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