Kernel release status

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.6-rc2, which was announced by Linus on April 20. This patch is more concerned with fixes than new stuff, but it still includes some VFS work, message queues for the x86_64 and s390 architectures, a network packet timestamping optimization, various architecture updates, some of Hugh Dickins's reverse mapping VM patches (see last week's Kernel Page), and a device mapper update. See the long-format changelog for the details.

Prior to that, 2.6.6-rc1 was released (without announcement) on April 15. A huge number of patches were merged for -rc1; these include POSIX message queues, laptop mode, 4KB kernel stacks on i386, non-executable stack support, the lightweight auditing framework, the "completely fair queueing" I/O scheduler, and a bunch of virtual memory work; see last week's Kernel Page for a more complete list. The long-format changelog (all 280KB worth) has the details.

Linus's BitKeeper tree contains some SELinux fixes, support for generic filesystem snapshotting (taken from XFS), a fix for the ext3 data disclosure vulnerability, and a small number of other fixes.

The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.6-rc2-mm1. Recent additions to -mm include a single-threaded workqueue option, an input driver update, the full set of Hugh Dickins's VM patches (including the anonmm reverse mapping scheme), ext3 block reservation (see below), ongoing scheduler work, and lots of fixes.

The current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.26. No 2.4.27 prepatches have yet been released. Marcelo has indicated, however, that an updated serial ATA driver will be merged in 2.4.27; it will, he says, be the last new feature to go into 2.4.

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