Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.5.49, released by Linus on November 22. "Architecture updates, threading improvements, shm fix (the cause of the Oracle problems), networking, scsi, modules, you name it, it's here." Details are in the long-format changelog.

Linus's (pre-2.5.50) BitKeeper tree has a great many patches, the bulk of which come from the -ac and -dj trees. It also has some latency reduction patches from Andrew Morton, real-time swap space accounting, a number of IDE enhancements, an LSM update, and a big ISDN update.

The current prepatch from Alan Cox is 2.5.49-ac1. It consists mostly of compile fixes and other small repairs.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.19. 2.4.20 is getting closer, though; 2.4.20-rc4 was released by Marcelo on November 26.

Alan Cox has released 2.4.20-rc4-ac1, which adds a few fixes to the 2.4.20 release candidate.

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Kernel release status

Posted Nov 28, 2002 17:13 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link] (2 responses)

--Is it too much to ask for a new 2.4.xx stable release already??

--Sheesh. 2.4.19 has been out for MONTHS. Stable releases should IMHO be revved once a month, or at most once every month and a half. Sure, the interesting stuff is being worked on in 2.5, but there's a LOT of stuff that should be backported to 2.4 so the rest of the world can benefit from the devel work!

--From what I've heard, you cannot run 2.5 at ALL unless you are actively helping to develop it. Modules are broken, horribly. IDE is a mess. (Yes I keep up with Linux Kernel, courtesy of Linux Kernel Traffic. ( http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/index.html ) The only good things I see so far is that Hans Reiser has a decent chance of getting Reiserfs v4 into the Linus tree, and that the VirtMem, the process scheduler, and filesystem performance are supposed to improve drastically.

--But I *still* can't run an xfs filesystem without getting outside patches, I can't experience any of the Reiserfs team's recent work on 2.4 kernels, and SCSI is still pretty horrible in 2.4. Plus there's a great big security hole that hasn't been put out yet for "regular Linux user" download - it's still wrapped up in 2.4.20-PRERELEASE!!

--In other words, to quote Ellen Feiss, it's like... A bummer.

--I love Linux and the work the developers are doing - (mostly for free!) But please try to remember the poor end-users that rely on updates to the stable tree!!

Kernel release status

Posted Nov 28, 2002 17:19 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

--BTW, I accidentally left out LWN in my list of Linux Kernel development information. Please pardon my omission.

--LWN does give excellent coverage of the Linux Kernel development process, among other things, and I wish to extend my sincere thanks for their efforts. (Obviously, I'm a subscriber - and if you benefit from this site, YOU should be too!)

Kernel release status

Posted Dec 6, 2002 5:19 UTC (Fri) by turpie (guest, #5219) [Link]

I agree, the long delay in releasing 2.4.20 is pretty bad.
It would have been easy to put out a quick 2.4.20 that
only included that bug-fix, but instead we've seen several
months go by a security hole in the current stable kernel.
Ironically thats the sort of thing we criticize MS for.