Kernel release status
Mucho merges with the 'A-Team' (Alan, Al, Alexey, Andrew, Anton, Arjan, Arnaldo and Art), but the 'M-Team' (Maksim, Marcel, Martin's and Mike) is a close runner up." There's a bunch of patches from Alan Cox, more disk management reworking, more memory management work, some SCSI work, a big ALSA update, an ISDN update, some kbuild work, a big S390 update, and numerous other fixes. The long-format changelog has all the details.
Linus's BitKeeper repository, which is destined to become 2.5.42, currently contains some driver model work (with an emphasis on IDE devices), another s390 update, the large block device patch (see below), the beginning of the "asynchronous I/O for networking" merge, the return of IDE tagged command queueing support, indexed directories for the ext3 filesystem, a number of NUMA and discontiguous memory enhancements, long lists of small patches via Dave Jones and Alan Cox, and quite a few other fixes and updates.
The current development prepatch from Alan Cox is 2.5.41-ac2. Since 2.5.41 came out, the -ac patches have been mostly concerned with compilation fixes and other small updates.
The latest 2.5 status summary from Guillaume Boissiere is dated October 9.
The current stable kernel is 2.4.19. Marcelo released 2.4.20-pre10 on October 8. The lists of
patches applied are getting smaller, suggesting that there just might be a
release candidate before too long.