Kernel release status
The current stable 2.6 release is 2.6.17.13, released on
September 8, several minutes after the rather abortive 2.6.17.12 release. Quite a few
important fixes have made it into these releases, though none of them have
vulnerability numbers attached.
On the 2.6.16 front, Adrian Bunk has released 2.6.16.29-rc1 and 2.6.18.29-rc2 with another set of fixes.
The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc7, announced by Linus on September 13. "Ok, ok, don't rub it in. I know I thought -rc6 would be
the last one, but I just feel more comfy doing an -rc7, even if most of the
changes are pretty minor.
" Expect the final release before too long.
The current -mm tree is 2.6.18-rc6-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include some USB API changes, a big x86-64 patch (including stack protection support), access control lists for tmpfs, and a patch which may reorder PCI device enumeration on some systems. There are currently 1915 patches in -mm, the largest number ever.