Kernel release status

[Posted March 9, 2005 by corbet]

The current extra-stable 2.6 release is 2.6.11.2, which was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on March 9.

The current 2.6 release remains 2.6.11; Linus has not yet released any 2.6.12 prepatch. About 1000 patches have been merged into his BitKeeper repository, however; they include numerous driver updates, the address space randomization patches, a new packet classifier mechanism for the networking layer, a new workqueue API function (see below), a new function (set_pte_at()) which is intended to replace set_pte() in the memory management code, a Tiger digest algorithm implementation, the restoration of the Philips webcam driver, some software suspend improvements, some readahead improvements, a big block I/O barrier rewrite (which enables full barrier support on serial ATA drives), a set of patches to shrink the kernel for embedded use, a generic sort() function, high-resolution POSIX CPU clock support (not the full high-resolution timers patch), a USB API change (usb_control_msg() and usb_bulk_msg() now take a timeout in milliseconds rather than in jiffies), and lots of fixes.

The current -mm kernel is 2.6.11-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include a reiser4 update, the Open-iSCSI driver, a new SELinux multi-level security implementation, the return of the real-time rlimit patch (yes, that discussion is going again), and a big set of NFS and FAT filesystem updates.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.30-pre3, released by Marcelo on March 9. It consists of some driver updates and a few fixes.