Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.24-rc7, released by Linus on January 6. It contains a fair number of fixes and an implementation of /proc/slabinfo for the SLUB allocator (which was discussed in last week's Kernel Page). About the long release cycle, he says "I'll be charitable and claim it's because it's all stabilizing, and not because we've all been in a drunken stupor over the holidays." The short-form changelog can be found in the release announcement; see the long-format changelog for all the details.

The mainline git repository contains, as of this writing, a few dozen post-rc7 patches.

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.23.13, released on January 9. This update is only of interest to people using the w83627ehf hardware monitoring driver, but they should be very interested: "I have had a private report that this bug might have caused permanent hardware damage. There is no definitive proof at this point, but unfortunately due to the lack of documentation I really can't rule it out."

For older kernels: 2.6.16.58-rc1 was released on January 6 with about a dozen fixes, a few of which are security-related.

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