2.6.0 is out - now what?

Linus and Andrew have, at long last, released the 2.6.0 kernel. What happens now?

If you are a potential user of the new kernel, and you have not worked with 2.5-series development kernels thus far, there are some resources to check out:

• Dave Jones's Post-Halloween document, which has been updated to 2.6.0. Here you'll find an extensive description of what has changed, what issues remain, and what tools you may have to update to run this kernel.

• Joe Pranevich's Wonderful World of Linux 2.6 continues his tradition of documenting the features available in the new stable kernel.

• Andrew Morton's notes on what to expect from 2.6.0 are also worth a read.

If you are a developer looking to update out-of-tree code to the new kernel (and there seem to be quite a few people answering to that description out there), we humbly recommend the LWN.net Driver Porting Series. It answers a number of questions which have been posted to linux-kernel recently.

Where do things go from here? As Linus pointed out in the 2.6.0 announcement, Andrew Morton is now the maintainer for 2.6. This is the first time that Linus has passed off responsibility for the stable series before moving on to the new development tree. So the most likely place to look for patches likely to go into 2.6.1 (and subsequent kernels) is Andrew's -mm tree, currently at 2.6.0-mm1. That tree contains an impressive 384 patches, some of which are significant. There are also quite a few patches in the hands of their respective developers which will surface as soon as it appears they might go in.

Looking at all of these patches can be a little discouraging; it is easy to envision a 2.6.x kernel which, after a big patching frenzy, is rather less stable than 2.6.0. Certainly things have worked that way with some previous stable kernel releases. There is cause for optimism, however. Andrew has a strong interest in keeping the stable kernel truly stable, and many of the patches in -mm have been there for quite some time. Not all of the -mm patches will go into 2.6, but those which do will have already been put through their paces by users of the -mm tree.

The question of more interest to many developers is: when will the 2.7 tree open up? The stabilization period between 1.0 and 1.1 was all of 34 days. With 1.2, however, things began to stretch out; it took 97 days before 1.3 started. Developers waited 113 days for 2.1 and 105 days for 2.3. The delay between 2.4.0 and 2.5.0 was the most stressful of all for kernel hackers; it took a full 323 days. There is reason to hope that the wait for 2.7 will not be anywhere near as long; 2.6.0 is in better shape than 2.4.0 was. But it would be surprising if the stabilization period were shorter than it has been for other 2.x releases. So we can expect to wait at least three months, putting the beginning of 2.7 sometime in March, 2004 or thereafter. But that, of course, is just a guess.

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