Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.5.70, which was released on May 26.

Patches continue to accumulate in Linus's BitKeeper tree; among the almost 900 patches there can be found a fair amount of driver model work (see below), some extensive PCI bus cleanups (dealing with potential race conditions there), the big IDE changeover to taskfile I/O, a new /proc/kallsyms file, support for per-CPU variables in modules, a change the kmalloc_percpu() interface, an Atmel at76c50x wireless driver, a long-sought fix for hanging TCP sessions, an improved slab allocator which performs better in busy, multi-processor situations, some kbuild tweaks, an ALSA update, a set of hash function changes to deal with algorithmic complexity attacks, a FAT filesystem rework (if you have been waiting to be able to create FAT partitions greater than 128GB, this patch is for you), a v850 subarchitecture merge, a RAID update, the removal of the long-deprecated callout TTY device (/dev/cua) support, and several other fixes and updates.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.20. Marcelo released 2.4.21-rc8 on June 10, saying "If nothing really bad happens in 2 days, this becomes final."

There is already a certain amount of disagreement over 2.4.22. In particular, a number of people would like to see an ACPI merge in the release - the current ACPI code has been languishing outside of the official kernel for over a year. Marcelo's response is that 2.4.22 is supposed to come very quickly (within two months) and ACPI is too big, so it will have to wait for 2.4.23. There has been some predictable grumbling over this decision; a lot of people are waiting for a real ACPI merge. Marcelo appears to be uninclined to change his mind, however.

to post comments

Kernel release status

Posted Jun 12, 2003 18:53 UTC (Thu) by nick.leroy (guest, #109) [Link] (1 responses)

Doesn't it seem that Marcelo gets flamed when it's too long between
releases, but now gets flamed for not adding a feature that would delay
it? I personally applaud him for (hopefully) getting 2.4.22 out
(relatively) quickly.

-Nick

Kernel release status

Posted Jun 12, 2003 20:16 UTC (Thu) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link]

On the other hand, the more cynical among us have the opinion "It's going to take him 6 months to release a new kernel anyway, we might as well get something in it." (Hint: 2.4.21 was supposed to be "soon" after 2.4.20, 2.4.20 "soon" after 2.4.19... I'll believe 2.4.22 when I see it.)