Kernel release status
The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.24-rc5, released by Linus on
December 10. He says:
Things _have_ slowed down, although
I'd obviously be lying if I said we've got all the regressions handled and
under control. They are being worked on, and the list is shrinking, but at
a guess, we're definitely not going to have a final 2.6.24 out before xmas
unless santa puts some more elves to work on those regressions.
The list of fixes is still fairly long; there is also a significant FireWire stack update. The short-form changelog is included in Linus's announcement; see the long-format changelog for all the details.
A handful of patches have found their way into the mainline git repository since the -rc5 release.