Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.9-rc4, which was released by Linus on October 10. Says Linus:

Ok, trying to make ready for the real 2.6.9 in a week or so, so please give this a beating, and if you have pending patches, please hold on to them for a bit longer, until after the 2.6.9 release. It would be good to have a 2.6.9 that doesn't need a dot-release immediately ;)

Changes in this set include a number of architecture updates, an ACPI update, Linus's kernel management style document, some networking tweaks, and lots of fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains a handful of serious fixes; it looks like very few patches will be accepted until 2.6.9 comes out.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.9-rc4-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include the removal of lockmeter (it was interfering with some of the latency work), a buddy allocator rework, a number of reiserfs error handling improvements, and various architecture updates.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.28-pre4, released by Marcelo on October 8. The number of new patches is small; they include some networking tweaks, a serial ATA update, and various fixes.