Current release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.5.29, which was released on July 26. It includes another set of IDE patches, a new LDM (Windows dynamic disks) driver, a number of driverfs changes, lots of fixups for the new serial driver, and, of course, lots of fixes for things that broke in the big 2.5.28 IRQ handling changes (see the July 25 LWN Kernel Page). The long format changelog is also available.

Linus's BitKeeper tree (for 2.5.30) contains quite a few patches at this point. There is a change to the fork() code which allows things to be done to the child process (i.e. migration to another CPU) before it starts running. Also included is a big pile of IDE updates, more IRQ fixes, some direct I/O changes from Andrew Morton ("This code is wickedly quick"), the "strict overcommit" patch which prevents surprise "out of memory" conditions, some serial driver fixes, and an ARM update. This patch also removes the "khttpd" in-kernel web server.

There is no current prepatch from Dave Jones; this posting explains why. In short: he has been busy, the current development kernels are too unstable to make patches against, and he has been getting going with BitKeeper.

The current 2.5 status summary from Guillaume Boissiere came out on July 31.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.18; Marcelo tried to catch us by releasing the fourth 2.4.19 release candidate just before this page went to "press," but we've learned to watch out for that kind of manouver. -rc4 contains a relatively small set of fixes for the few remaining problems that have come up; with luck, this one will turn into the real 2.4.19.

The latest prepatch from Alan Cox is 2.4.19-rc3-ac5.