Kernel release status

The current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.8.1. Linus announced the availability of the 2.6.8 allegedly stable kernel on August 13. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a true "Friday the 13th" release with a fatal bug in the NFS code, so 2.6.8.1 was rushed out to fix it. This is the first time that the kernel has used a four-entry version number. Changes since -rc4 include the "Khazad" crypto algorithm, some added permissions checking on raw SCSI commands from user space (see below), and the removal of the fcntl() file operations method. For those just tuning in, changes from 2.6.7 include snapshot and mirror support in the device mapper, unbelievable numbers of "sparse" annotations, a bunch of read-copy-update performance improvements, 64-bit SuperH support, some security fixes, a reworked symbolic link lookup mechanism (which will eventually enable raising the maximum link depth), and lots of fixes. The long-format changelog has the details; the 2.6.8.1 changelog is also out there for the curious.

No patches have been added to Linus's BitKeeper repository since the 2.6.8.1 release.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.8.1-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include kprobes ("Generally we prefer to not merge infrastructure into the kernel unless it has in-kernel users. kprobes is exceptional, in that its applications are all custom-written to solve a particular problem."), the removal of the single-array scheduler patch, a waitid() system call implementation, and lots of fixes.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.28-pre1, which was released by Marcelo on August 15. Additions include a big serial ATA update, the Khazad crypto algorithm, some networking updates, and a handful of fixes.

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