Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.23-rc9, released on October 1. This -rc release was unexpected, but there were enough fixes added since -rc8 that Linus felt one more cycle was called for. The final 2.6.23 release should happen almost any time.

There have been about a dozen patches added to the mainline repository since -rc9.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.23-rc8-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include delayed allocation support for ext4 and a number of fixes. Andrew notes that -mm now has almost 32MB of patches relative to the mainline - an indication of what is to come once the 2.6.24 merge window opens.

Looking forward: it appears that the 2.6.24 cycle will begin with the i386/x86_64 merger. More information about 2.6.24 can be found in Andrew Morton's 2.6.24 merge plans document. It looks like 2.6.24 will include a bunch of memory management work, more anti-fragmentation patches, per-device write throttling, the LSM non-modules patch, file-based capabilities, more memory layout randomization, control groups (formerly containers), PID namespaces, kernel markers, and much more. Remember that this list covers only patches to be merged by Andrew; the bulk of the code going into 2.6.24 will get there directly from the subsystem maintainers.

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