Kernel release status

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.2. The most recent 2.6.3 prepatch is 2.6.3-rc2, which was released on February 9. This prepatch is large, with many changes merged; the big ones include more network driver cleanup work, a USB update (including the removal of the USB scanner code), the new DMA pool abstraction (covered in last week's LWN Kernel Page), an ACPI update, an NFS update, and more. See the long-format changelog for the details.

The removal of the USB scanner code has concerned some readers. It was removed because it is broken and unmaintained, and because the accepted way of driving USB scanners in 2.6 is via the user-space libusb library.

2.6.3-rc1 was released on February 6. This one contained a lot of network driver cleanups, a number of gcc-3.5 fixes, various architecture updates, a big ALSA update, and more; once again, the long-format changelog has the details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains some architecture updates, a filesystem scalability improvement, some CPU frequency control updates, and a few other fixes.

The current tree from Andrew Morton, as of this writing, is 2.6.3-rc1-mm1. Recent additions include a lot of fixes, some performance improvements, but little in the way of new features.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.24; the first 2.4.25 release candidate was announced on February 5.

The current stone-age kernel is 2.0.40, which was released by David Weinehall on February 8. It contains some security fixes, so if you have any systems still running 2.0 you may want to consider upgrading.

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