Kernel release status

The current 2.6 release is 2.6.4-rc1, which was announced by Linus on February 27. This large patch contains support for Intel's "ia32e" architecture, a new syscalls.h include file with prototypes for the various sys_* functions, various network driver fixes, a UTF-8 tty mode, dynamic PTY allocation (allowing up to a million PTY devices), sysfs support for SCSI tapes and bluetooth devices, the "large number of groups" patch (covered in the October 2 Kernel Page), the generic kernel thread code (January 7 Kernel Page), an HFS filesystem rewrite, and a massive number of other fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains a number of parallel port fixes, various architecture updates, the reversion of a patch which had removed threads from /proc (and broke gdb), an XFS update, a FireWire update (including one which notes that IEEE1394 support is no longer experimental), and numerous fixes.

The current kernel tree from Andrew Morton is 2.6.4-rc1-mm2. Recent additions to the -mm tree include more scheduler tweaks, some big NFS updates, the POSIX message queues patch, a 4K stack option for the x86 architecture, some VM optimizations, the removal of some old network device API functions (see below), and numerous other fixes and updates.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.25. Marcelo has released no 2.4.26 prepatches since 2.4.26-pre1 on February 25.

---

(Log in to post comments)