Kernel release status

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.3, which was released on February 17. Only a handful of patches have gone in since the last release candidate. Overall, 2.6.3 includes a great deal of internal cleanup work, the removal of the USB scanner driver (in favor of the user-space libusb solution), the new generic DMA pool mechanism, "context mount" support for SELinux, a big ALSA update, a fix for the new mremap() vulnerability, and quite a few architecture updates. See the long-format changelog for the details.

During the last week, we also saw 2.6.3-rc3 (changelog) and 2.6.3-rc4 (changelog).

The current kernel tree from Andrew Morton is 2.6.3-mm1. Recent additions to the -mm tree include some more scheduler improvements, a new CPU hotplug implementation, journaled quotas for the ext3 filesystem, and numerous fixes.

2.6.3-mm1 also contains the new device mapper crypto target code. This target allows the creation of encrypted filesystems by way of the device mapper (LVM) subsystem. If things work out, this approach is likely to replace the (buggy) cryptoloop driver; if you have an interest in encrypted filesystems, testing out this patch might be a good idea.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.25, released by Marcelo on February 18. Among other things, this release includes the mremap() vulnerability fix. Marcelo has had a busy week, having previously released 2.4.25-rc2, -rc3, and -rc4.

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