Kernel release status

The current development kernel remains 2.5.68; Linus has made no releases since April 19. His BitKeeper repository is full of new patches, however, including a FireWire update, some IDE cleanups, more devfs cleanups, a rework of the driver core class code, some new libfs helpers which make it easier to create in-kernel virtual filesystems, a big tty layer cleanup, a change to the interrupt handler prototype (see last week's LWN Kernel Page), runtime barrier instruction patching (which allows optimal performance on different processors without the need to ship multiple kernels), more preparation for an expanded dev_t type, some swapoff improvements, a new set of memory allocation flags (also covered last week), and numerous other fixes and updates.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20; Marcelo has promised a second 2.4.21 release candidate shortly, but it had not been sent out as of this writing.

The current 2.4 prepatch from Alan Cox is 2.4.20-rc1-ac3; it includes a merge of the XFS filesystem, the current ACPI code, and the usual collection of fixes and updates.

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