Kernel release status

[Posted March 17, 2004 by corbet]

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.5-rc1, which was announced by Linus on March 15. This prepatch includes the incorporation of the netpoll interface (see below), some virtual memory performance improvements, the new "kref" reference counting mechanism (see below), a big ALSA update, a new Prism54 wireless driver, an NFS update, a DMA API change (see below yet again), and many fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.

2.6.4 was released on March 10; very few fixes went in after the last release candidate. Changes since 2.6.3 include support for the Intel "ia32e" architecture, a UTF-8 tty mode, dynamic PTY allocation, sysfs support for SCSI tapes and bluetooth devices, support for large numbers of groups, a generic kernel thread infrastructure, an HFS filesystem rewrite, an R128 DRI driver security fix, the groundwork for the hotplug CPU code, and many, many fixes. The the long-format changelog has the details.

Patches in Linus's BitKeeper repository include several architecture updates, a set of fixes to make the Intermezzo filesystem work again, an IDE update, asynchronous I/O support for reiserfs, and lots of fixes.

The current tree from Andrew Morton is 2.6.5-rc1-mm1. Recent additions to the -mm tree include a plug-and-play subsystem update, a patch to enable 4K kernel stacks on the x86, the per-address-space block queue unplugging code (discussed here last week), an NFS update, a bunch of page cache work ("It seems to work OK here, but I suggest people not rush out and convert all of the corporate finance department's servers to 2.6.4-mm1."), and many fixes.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.25; Marcelo released two 2.4.26 prepatches over the last week. 2.4.26-pre3 included a fair number of architecture and networking fixes; 2.4.26-pre4 (released March 16) is a much smaller patch with just a few fixes.