Kernel release status

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.2, which was announced by Linus on February 3. Very few changes have been made since the last release candidate. For those of you just tuning in, the major changes since 2.6.1 include a bunch of block device hotplug work, many big driver updates, sysfs support for many new types of devices, a big XFS update, some sleep_on() removal work, and lots of fixes; see the long-format changelog for the details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains, as of this writing, a fair number of patches. One of them, is a VFS fix by Stephen Tweedie which addresses a problem (triggered, but not caused, by SELinux) that delayed the first Fedora Core 2 test release. Other patches which have been merged include some architecture updates, some dead code removal, a RAID update, the deprecation of the raw block device driver, the readX_relaxed() functions for reading from PCI space without ordering requirements, a large set of gcc-3.5 fixes, some network driver updates, and various other fixes.

The current patch set from Andrew Morton is 2.6.2-rc3-mm1. Recent additions to the -mm tree include the CPU hotplug patch, the "large number of groups" patch, a new variant on snprintf() (see below), and lots of fixes. Note that the large groups patch breaks the intermezzo filesystem, which appears to be unmaintained under 2.6 for now.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.24. Marcelo released 2.4.25-pre8 on January 29; it contains a fair amount of new stuff: a big USB update (including the new gadget code), CIFS work from 2.6, some SCSI driver updates, various architecture updates, and more. This is, says Marcelo, probably the last prepatch (before the release candidates start).

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