Kernel release status

[Posted October 18, 2006 by corbet]

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.18.1, released on October 16. It contains a rather long list of fixes for problems which have been encountered in 2.6.18.

The stable team has also released 2.6.17.14 with a smaller set of fixes. This will probably be the final 2.6.17.x release.

Adrian Bunk has released 2.6.16.30-rc1 with several new fixes.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.19-rc2, released by Linus on October 13. There's a bunch of fixes here, but also the big interrupt handler prototype change and the initial merge of the developmental ext4 filesystem with a few enhancements. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Around 250 post-rc2 patches - almost all fixes - have gone into the mainline git repository as of this writing.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.19-rc2-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include generic backlight device support, some changes to how per-CPU data works on i386, and a FUSE update. There is also a new round_jiffies() function which rounds a time value up to the next whole second. The idea is to cause recurring timers to go off at the same time, reducing the number of timer interrupts needed.