Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current development kernel is 2.5.34, released by Linus on September 9. People who had trouble with 2.5.33 may want to give this one a try; it has some important per-CPU fixes, and the floppy driver is said to really work this time. Also included is a bunch of block I/O work from Al Viro, memory management work from Andrew Morton, a JFS update, and quite a few other fixes and updates. The long-format changelog is available, as usual. Note that this kernel has a bug which can cause IDE partitions to disappear.

Linus's BitKeeper tree, which may be 2.5.35 by the time you read this, contains a large set of patches including a new sys_exit_group() system call (more thread work by Ingo Molnar), a major merge of IDE code from the 2.4-ac tree (which, according to Alan Cox, works "better than expected," but one should still be careful), yet more VM changes via Andrew Morton (see below), and a number of other fixes and updates.

The current 2.5 status summary from Guillaume Boissiere came out on September 10.

The current stable kernel is 2.4.19. Marcelo released 2.4.20-pre6 on September 10; it adds a number of updates and a couple of bugs which make it fail to compile or boot for a number of users.

Alan Cox's current prepatch is 2.4.20-pre5-ac5, which is given over mostly to new IDE code. "You can now load ide pci drivers at boot time or as modules. Don't try unloading the modules yet"