Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.5.72, which was released by Linus on June 16. This relatively small patch contains an x86-64 merge, a partial reversion of the IDE taskfile switchover, a PA-RISC update, and various fixes and cleanups. The long-format changelog has the details.

Linus had released the 2.5.71 ("sticky turtle") kernel only two days before. This long-awaited patch included a fair amount of driver model work, 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, numerous architecture updates, and several other fixes and updates. As always, the long-format changelog has the gory details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains an extensive ext3 and JBD rework (see below), an OProfile update, some NFS server fixes, and a few other fixes and updates.

With the 2.5.72 announcement, Linus announced that he is taking a leave of absence from Transmeta to go work at the Open Source Development Lab. "Transmeta has always been very good at letting me spend even an inordinate amount of time on Linux, but as a result I've been feeling a little guilty at just how little 'real work' I got done lately. To fix that, I'll instead be working at OSDL, finally actually doing Linux as my main job."

The current stable kernel is 2.4.21, released, at last, on June 13. There were no changes since -rc8.

No 2.4.22 prepatches have come out yet. Marcelo's plan, at this point, is to have 2.4.22 contain an updated aic7xx driver and the current ACPI tree (both items that people had wanted in 2.4.21), along with some interactivity and memory management fixes.

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