Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.5; there have been no 2.6.6 prepatches yet. Linus's BitKeeper repository is overflowing with patches for 2.6.6, however, including much of the material from 2.6.5-mc4, the last "merge candidate" tree from Andrew Morton. A great deal of new stuff is going into 2.6.6; see the separate article below for more information.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.5-mm5; recent additions to -mm include more CPU scheduler work, some of Hugh Dickins's "prepare for object-based reverse mapping" patches (see below), a new memory binding API for NUMA systems, and lots of fixes.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.26, which was released on April 14. Among other things, this release includes the fix for the iso9660 filesystem buffer overflow vulnerability. Overall, changes in 2.4.26 include the "forcedeth" nVidia Ethernet driver, a big bonding network driver rework, a lot of XFS work, various architecture updates (including Intel "IA32e" support), TCP Westwood support, an ACPI update, and lots of fixes.

Users of x86_64 systems may want to note that, as of 2.4.26, no more development will be done for that architecture in 2.4.

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PCMCIA

Posted Apr 15, 2004 5:36 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Actually, 2.6.6-rc1 has just been released. Among other things, it includes a fix for interrupt routing on PCMCIA bridges with TI and ENE chips. Be warned that 2.6.6-rc1 includes other PCMCIA related patches that seriously change the internals of the PCMCIA subsystem, including resource management. If you want 2.6.6 to work with your PCMCIA hardware, test 2.6.6-rc1 and report results to the maintainers.

End of 2.4 for x86-64

Posted Apr 16, 2004 4:05 UTC (Fri) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

Bugger! We're stuck with 2.4 for our Opterons. We're required to keep AFS working, and the AFS maintainers aren't very interested in 2.6. The AFS stuff on 2.6 is read-only. I can only hope that we don't need any of the stuff that will be 2.6 only.

-Paul Komarek

End of 2.4 for x86-64

Posted Apr 20, 2004 15:32 UTC (Tue) by riel (subscriber, #3142) [Link]

The distributions (in particular RHEL and SLES) will be maintaining 2.4 kernels for Opteron for another few years. Not having further development in the mainline kernel is certainly an inconvenience, but shouldn't be a disaster for users.