Kernel release status

[Posted April 11, 2007 by corbet]

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.21-rc6, released by Linus on April 5. It contains a fair number of fixes. Says Linus: "We should be getting close to a 2.6.21 release, so please update any regression reports you've done."

A few dozen patches have been merged into the mainline git repository since -rc6 was released. Your editor guesses that one more -rc will be needed before 2.6.21 is done.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.21-rc6-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include a number of tweaks for Sony laptops, an enlarged set of paravirt_ops hooks, a new set of /proc files for learning about process memory, a rework of the NFS file locking code, and the signalfd() patches. Andrew notes that -mm is now a "rather large" 25MB patch against the mainline.

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.20.6, released on April 6; 2.6.20.5 had been released moments earlier. The two patches contain a fair number of fixes, including one for a remotely exploitable crash in the Appletalk code.

For older kernels: 2.6.16.47-rc1 was released on April 11 with about a dozen fixes.