Kernel release status

[Posted January 21, 2009 by corbet]

The current 2.6 development kernel is 2.6.29-rc2, released by Linus just before heading out the door to travel to linux.conf.au. "But despite being small, that's probably more important and noticeable to most people: the first slew of regression fixes. We had non-working 3D acceleration on many machines (no compiz! What shall we do without those wobbly windows!) that should be fixed, and a ton of other irritating issues like that." See the short-form changelog for details, or the full changelog for lots of details.

As of this writing, no changeset have been merged into the mainline repository since 2.6.29-rc2. Linus may be a bit busy with his new barbershop career (he agreed to shave Bdale Garbee's beard in response to a challenge at the linux.conf.au "penguin dinner" charity auction) to merge patches for a little while yet.

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.28.1, released with a long list of fixes on January 18.

For 2.6.27 users, 2.6.27.12 was also released on the 18th. Previously, 2.6.27.11 was released on January 14. Greg Kroah-Hartman says that he plans to maintain 2.6.27 as a relatively long-term release, and Adrian Bunk plans to pick it up thereafter, so fixes should be available for this kernel for quite some time.