Kernel release status

The current 2.6 kernel is still 2.6.7; the first 2.6.8 prepatch has not yet been released.

Patches continue to accumulate in Linus's BitKeeper tree, however; they include the new dma_get_required_mask() API (covered here last week), support for 64-bit Super-H hardware (forward ported from 2.4), x86 no-execute support, asynchronous I/O support for USB gadgets, a reworked symbolic link lookup implementation (see below), a new "CPU mask" implementation, some read-copy-update performance improvements, support for new Apple PowerBooks, more sparse annotations, some netfilter improvements, some kbuild work, a new wait_event_interruptible_exclusive() macro, support for the O_NOATIME flag in the open() call, sysfs knobs for tuning the CFQ I/O scheduler, mirroring and snapshot targets for the device mapper, the removal of the PC9800 subarchitecture, reiserfs data=journal support, preemptible kernel support for the PPC64 architecture, and many fixes and updates.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.7-mm4. Recent additions to -mm include a rearrangement of the x86 user-space memory layout (see below), some preparatory work for software suspend on SMP systems, PCMCIA sysfs support, and lots of fixes.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.27-rc2, which was released by Marcelo on June 26. A relatively large number of patches (for a release candidate) went in; they include a USB gadget driver update, a number of backported fixes for potential security problems, an XFS update, a netfilter update, and various fixes.

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