Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.8-rc4, which was announced by Linus on August 9. There was, he says, just a little too much new stuff in there for him to have been comfortable putting it out directly as 2.6.8. That new stuff includes a replaced 586-optimized AES implementation, a new internal infrastructure for handling file positioning and seekability (see below), a sysctl API change, and some architecture updates. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains a big Prism54 driver update and various fixes. Things are stabilizing for an official 2.6.8 release which may have happened by the time you read this.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.8-rc4-mm1. Recent additions to -mm include a mechanism for gathering CPU scheduler statistics, the "mlock as user" patch (covered briefly last week), some asynchronous I/O fixes, version 17 of the wireless extensions API, some read-copy-update enhancements, resident set size ulimit support (see below), in-kernel cryptographic keyring management, a number of architecture updates, and lots of fixes. The staircase scheduler has been dropped from -mm for now ("it used up its time slice") in favor of a simpler patch which simply disables the use of the expired array. The quest for the best way to improve the scheduler continues.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.27, released by Marcelo on August 7. 2.4.27 contains fixes for a handful of security problems, some new crypto algorithms, a big serial ATA update, TCP Vegas and BIC backports from 2.6, and vast numbers of fixes.

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