Current kernel release status

[Posted July 24, 2002 by corbet]

The current development kernel is 2.5.28, released on July 24. It contains major changes to the interrupt handling subsystem (see below), large m68k and PPC64 updates, Russell King's long-awaited new serial driver, numerous filesystem and block device changes from Alexander Viro, and more. Those wanting the details can see the long format changelog.

2.5.27 was announced by Linus on July 20 (the long format changelog is also available). The truly significant changes in this release included Rik van Riel's reverse-mapping VM and the beginning of the Linux Security Module merge. The LSM patch includes hooks mostly relating to process control; the rest should find their way in with later releases. This kernel also contains a lot of USB and RAID changes, some NFS tweaks, and various other fixes and updates.

2.5.27 also included Martin Dalecki's IDE 99 and IDE 100 patches which, for some reason, were not posted to the public list. Unfortunately, IDE 99 contains a bug which can lead to system lockups and file corruption; thus 2.5.27 gave some users more than they had bargained for. The discussion of the 2.5 IDE problems continues on linux-kernel; the latest development is that IDE hacker Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz, who, until recently, has been one of Martin Dalecki's defenders, has stated his intention to create his own IDE subsystem, based on the 2.4 implementation.

The current prepatch from Dave Jones is 2.5.27-dj1. "Mostly resyncing with the various trees that have sprouted in the last week, and applying obvious stuff that didn't take much thinking."

Guillaume Boissiere's latest 2.5 status summary is dated July 23. Guillaume has also posted a 2.5 TODO list with the best available guesses as to what will happen between now and the Halloween feature freeze.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.18. Marcelo posted the third 2.4.19 release candidate on July 19. It is, he says, the last release candidate unless something really serious comes up.

Alan Cox's current prepatch is 2.4.19-rc3-ac2; in addition to numerous fixes it includes the new disk quota code from 2.5.