Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.6.32-rc3, released by Linus on October 4. Note that there was no -rc2; that version was skipped to avoid confusion resulting from the fat-fingering of the version number in -rc1.

[O]ne thing that might be worth mention (despite being fairly small) is that there's been some IO latency tweaking in the block layer (CFQ scheduler). I'm hoping that ends up being one of those noticeable things, where people might actually notice better responsiveness. Give it a try.

One other user-visible change: by default, VFAT filesystems are now mounted with shortname=mixed instead of shortname=lower, preventing the downcasing of filenames when filesystems are copied. Also notable is that Btrfs is finally able to handle full-disk situations; we'll have to find something else to give Chris Mason grief about. The short-form changelog is in the announcement, or see the full changelog for all the details.

The current stable kernel is 2.6.31.3, released on October 7. It contains a single fix for a TTY problem that was affecting a number of users.

Previously, 2.6.31.2 was released on October 5. This is a large stable release; from the review announcement:

This release is big. Yeah, really big. There are a number of areas that needed some rework in order to get things back to working order. Like the tty layer. Hopefully everyone can now use their usb to serial devices again without oopsing the kernel. Xen and KVM also have reasonably big fixes, as does the ath5k and iwlwifi drivers. One might say that the patches for the iwlwifi drivers are a bit "bigger" than normal -stable material, but the wifi maintainer wants them, so he can handle the fallout. XHCI (the USB 3.0 controller) also has a big update here, to get it into workable shape to coincide with the release of the USB 3.0 developer kit. Without it, it wouldn't be really useful. And there's a whole raft of other important fixes as well, not to make light of them. A huge system speedup for large boxes is also in here, for those who like running benchmarks.

So expect more than the usual amount of change for a stable update.

2.6.27.36 and 2.6.30.9 were also released on October 5; they contain a somewhat smaller set of fixes. "This is the last release of the 2.6.30-stable series. Everyone should now move to the 2.6.31 kernel tree. If there are any issues preventing people from doing this, please let me know!"

(Log in to post comments)