Kernel release status

Patches continue to accumulate in Linus's BitKeeper tree; among the almost 900 patches there can be found a fair amount of driver model work (see below), some extensive PCI bus cleanups (dealing with potential race conditions there), the big IDE changeover to taskfile I/O, a new /proc/kallsyms file, support for per-CPU variables in modules, a change the kmalloc_percpu() interface, an Atmel at76c50x wireless driver, a long-sought fix for hanging TCP sessions, an improved slab allocator which performs better in busy, multi-processor situations, some kbuild tweaks, an ALSA update, a set of hash function changes to deal with algorithmic complexity attacks, a FAT filesystem rework (if you have been waiting to be able to create FAT partitions greater than 128GB, this patch is for you), a v850 subarchitecture merge, a RAID update, the removal of the long-deprecated callout TTY device (/dev/cua) support, and several other fixes and updates.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20. Marcelo released 2.4.21-rc8 on June 10, saying "If nothing really bad happens in 2 days, this becomes final."

There is already a certain amount of disagreement over 2.4.22. In particular, a number of people would like to see an ACPI merge in the release - the current ACPI code has been languishing outside of the official kernel for over a year. Marcelo's response is that 2.4.22 is supposed to come very quickly (within two months) and ACPI is too big, so it will have to wait for 2.4.23. There has been some predictable grumbling over this decision; a lot of people are waiting for a real ACPI merge. Marcelo appears to be uninclined to change his mind, however.