Kernel release status

[Posted September 22, 2004 by corbet]

The current 2.6 prepatch remains 2.6.9-rc2; Linus has released no prepatches since September 13.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains more __iomem annotations (see last week's Kernel Page) and new sparse annotations intended to flush out byte endianness errors, an NTFS update, ethtool support in the loopback driver, m32r architecture support, the "string" I/O memory access functions, support for more than eight partitions on BSD-labeled disks, some User-mode Linux cleanups, a tunable "max sectors" limit for block I/O requests (a latency reduction feature), a new prctl() option allowing programs to change their name, some shared memory scalability improvements, and a change in TCP ICMP source quench behavior (such messages are simply ignored now).

The current tree from Andrew Morton is 2.6.9-rc2-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include the inclusion of a number of Ingo Molnar's latency reduction patches, a rework of tty locking, a number of User-mode Linux updates, and various fixes.

The current 2.4 prepatch is still 2.4.28-pre3; Marcelo has released no prepatches since September 11.

Better

Posted Sep 23, 2004 2:56 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

2.6.9-rc2-mm1 seems to fix lots of bugs that were in 2.6.9-rc1-mm3. Aside from non-specific stability improvements (knock wood), it fixes usb-storage (so I can see my camera again) and doesn't crash when I strace simple programs.

Better

Posted Sep 23, 2004 15:34 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow, is 2.6.x really still that unstable? I've had a lot of issues with 2.6.6, but not many since. I know a few people who have pulled their hair out on 2.6.8.

So when are we gonna see a stable realease of the stable kernel?

Better

Posted Sep 24, 2004 5:06 UTC (Fri) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

Andrew Mortons patches (to which the original poster refered) are not stable kernel releases.

Stable 2.6

Posted Sep 24, 2004 17:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think anyone is even working on a stable 2.6 kernel. Linus announced at OLS the death of the even-release-means-stable system. He intends for non-stabilizing changes to go into the 2.6 series indefinitely. For there to be a stable 2.6-based kernel, someone else, e.g. a Linux distributor, needs to make a branch that takes only stabilizing changes.

BTW, stable means two different things in this context. One is that a particular release works reliably -- e.g. doesn't crash at random times. The other is that the series doesn't change much from one release to another. I don't think either of these applies to 2.6.

Stable 2.6

Posted Sep 26, 2004 4:18 UTC (Sun) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

The developement cycle is just more compressed; Andrews kernel patches
constitute a sort of low grade fever developement kernel, and what he
feeds to Linus and what Linus applies to mainline constitute what I
guess is the stablest baseline release. If you want a kernel that only
has security and concervative bugfixes, you definitely want a vendor
kernel.
Based upon personal observation of the kernel mailing list, lug lists,
personal and anecdotal evidence from friends, however, the 2.6 series
has been one of the most quickly and consistantly stable bases of all
the 'stable' series in terms of reliability.
The experiment of a rolling developement model seems to be working quite
well. There are so many other parties doing the other aspect of stable
that it doesnt really seem to make sense to burden the devs with that role.