Kernel release status

[Posted February 12, 2003 by corbet]

The current development kernel is 2.5.60, which was released by Linus on February 10. This release was mostly an exercise in catching up with the pile of patches that accumulated while Linus was traveling; it includes ia32 lost timer tick detection and compensation, self-unplugging block I/O request queues, an ACPI update, various architecture updates, a SCSI command queue rework, Linux Security Module networking hooks, a big user-mode Linux update, a number of kbuild changes, 64-bit jiffies support, and a great many other fixes and updates. The long-format changelog has the details.

Linus's (pre-2.5.61) BitKeeper tree includes a big x86-64 update, some fixups for signal problems in 2.5.60, some kbuild work, and another set of AGP patches.

Dave Jones has released 2.5.60-dj2, which adds some driver fixes and a number of 2.4 fixes to the 2.5.60 kernel.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20; Marcelo has not released any 2.4.21 prepatches since January 29.

The current patch from Alan Cox is 2.4.21-pre4-ac4. It contains another set of IDE fixes and a few other repairs.

2.4.21-pre4-ac4 fixes CompactFlash hang in PCI-PCMCIA bridges

Posted Feb 13, 2003 4:03 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Upgrading from 2.4.20 to 2.4.21-pre4-ac4 fixed hang when reading CompactFlash cards through a PCI-PCMCIA bridge. Apparently the new IDE driver can deal properly with a PCI IRQ already allocated for the device by another driver.

Kernel release status

Posted Feb 13, 2003 16:34 UTC (Thu) by blaz (guest, #3591) [Link]

Yes the ide work now being put into 2.4.20-preX-acX is essential. Ide stuff in 2.4.19 and 2.4.20 broke some apsects of ide dma on our older intel bx board servers. We're talking hard lockups that required reboots. Not nice.

When I complained to Hedrick I got this back from him:

QUOTE
The "-acX" trees have the corrected driver work from myself and reviewed
by Alan. The last stable tree was 2.4.18 before people pushed stuff that
was not validated.
UNQUOTE

Hopefully all this will be cleared up in 2.4.21, as the last 2.4.20-preX-acX I tried fixed the ide but broke some aspects of memory management leading to process oops. But at least the whole PC didn't lock up.