Kernel release status [LWN.net]

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.8-rc3, which was announced by Linus on August 3. Most of the additions this time around are relatively small fixes; they include some kbuild work, a great many "sparse" annotations, the removal of the (non-functional) "fastroute" networking option, some crypto-API work (including an x86-optimized AES implementation which may be yanked out due to licensing concerns), and several architecture updates. The long-format changelog has all the details.

Linus's BitKeeper repository contains no patches after 2.6.8-rc3 as of this writing.

The current patch set from Andrew Morton is 2.6.8-rc2-mm2. Recent additions to -mm include some read-copy-update work (to address more latency issues), performance improvements for O_SYNC disk I/O, the staircase CPU scheduler (see below), token-based thrashing control (see below again), a change to /dev/mem allowing architectures block accesses to kernel memory, a new vprintk() function, and large numbers of fixes and updates.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.27-rc5, released by Marcelo on August 3. This one contains a fix for a new security issue (which could allow unprivileged processes to read kernel memory), takes out DVD-RW support for now (they will try again in 2.4.28), and adds a few fixes.