Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.5.52, which was released by Linus on December 15. It consists mostly of fixes and updates, of course, but there's also a bunch of changes from Andrew Morton's "-mm" tree (including the long-term fix for the ext3 data=journal corruption bug), XFS and JFS updates, more module fixes, and a kconfig update. See the long-format changelog for the gory details.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20; Marcelo released the second 2.4.21 prepatch on December 18. This large patch is mostly made up of ia-64 updates, but it also includes some NFS fixes, a couple of ext3 fixes, a bunch of stuff from the "-ac" tree, a new megaraid driver, and various other fixes and updates.

For those using very stable kernels: Alan Cox has announced the first 2.2.24 release candidate. It contains a handful of bug fixes, including one for a new denial of service vulnerability caused when somebody runs mmap() on a /proc/pid/mem file.

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Kernel release status

Posted Dec 19, 2002 4:42 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (2 responses)

Please don't refer to 2.2.x kernels as "very stable". The point of maintaining them is not stability of the kernel per se, but rather the overall stability of the system on which it's running.

In other words, the kernel may not include the most stable drivers for the new hardware (e.g. USB) or the most bullet-proof filesystem (e.g. reiserfs). However, the risk of malfunction of the user-space software running on top of a 2.2.x kernel is significantly less if you don't jump to 2.4.x kernels to fix the latest security issues, but rather go for the latest 2.2.x.

Kernel release status

Posted Dec 19, 2002 19:42 UTC (Thu) by dsime (guest, #5764) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmmm,
I think that you have slipped a cog here.
The "stability" of the kernel releases refers to the rate of flux of the kernel NOT the likelihood, of the system it is on, to crash.

The "development" kernel is in constant flux and is considered NOT stable.
The "stable" branch gets bug fixes and some back-porting from development and changes every month or two.
and I believe that the next older branch, currently 2.2, is called "Very Stable" because it only changes once or twice a year.

Kernel release status

Posted Dec 19, 2002 20:50 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

So, then the 1.0.9 kernel is even more stable, since it have been the last on the 1.0.x branch for 8 years? Strange, it didn't work with my UMC 486 CPU back then, so I had to run unstable 1.1.x kernels.

Let's not mislead Linux newbies who may be reading LWN. Installing 2.2.x kernel, no matter how new, is probably not the smartest idea if you've got the latest 2-way Xeon with PCI 66/64, Fibre Channel and Firewire.

I believe that at some point the word "stable" changes the meaning and applies to the probability of a software failure after upgrading a system already running an older version of the kernel, as opposed to the probability of a software failure on a new system.

Where that point lies is a big question, but I believe that 2.2.x is already beyond that point.