Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.5.68, which was released by Linus on April 19. This is a large patch which has been a while in coming; it includes the usual big pile of fixes along with a bunch of devfs tweaking (read Linus's note if you use devfs), a new h8300 architecture, some NFS performance tuning, some changes to the workqueue interface, the merging of s390 and s390x into a single architecture (along with a bunch of other s390 work), the generation of hotplug events from kobject registration, a new __user attribute to mark user-space pointers (to help static analysis tools find bugs), a small change to the semantics of msync(MS_ASYNC) (it no longer actually starts any I/O), some reverse-mapping VM speedups, a new requirement that gcc version 2.95 (or later) be used to compile the kernel, a big pile of small fixes from Alan Cox, an NFSv4 update, and a big IA-64 update. The details can be found in the long-format changelog.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains a change to the interrupt handler prototype (see below), a patch for runtime barrier instruction patching (which allows optimal performance on different processors without the need to ship multiple kernels), more devfs cleanups, more preparation for an expanded dev_t type, some swapoff improvements, a new set of memory allocation flags (described below), and numerous other fixes and updates.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20. The 2.4.21 release got a little closer with the announcement of the first release candidate. 2.4.21-rc1 adds a relatively small number of fixes to -pre7, and includes a plea for extensive testing.

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