Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 2.6.0-test6, which was finally released by Linus on September 27. The most significant change in this kernel, perhaps, is the long-awaited expansion of dev_t to 32 bits (as covered in last week's LWN Kernel Page). Other patches which have been merged include a device mapper update, some NFS updates, a big I2C update, Con Kolivas's and Ingo Molnar's scheduler interactivity patches, a Coda filesystem update, some initramfs tweaks, improvements in random driver locking, the removal of some ext3 debugging hooks, direct I/O support for reiserfs, some CPU frequency work, numerous power management patches, an Intel SpeedStep-SMI driver, a substantial amount of janitorial work, and lots of fixes. The long-format changelog has the details.

Note that 2.6.0-test6 changed the semantics of /proc slightly as part of an effort to get thread information represented properly. That change may be reverted in a future release.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains, as of this writing, a janitorial effort to move EXPORT_SYMBOL calls out of ksyms.c to the places where the exported symbols are actually defined, some IDE driver updates, and lots of fixes.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.22. Marcelo released 2.4.23-pre6 on October 1; it fixes a number of ACPI problems, adds SCTP support, and includes the usual pile of fixes and updates.

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