Corbet's blog

Sharp-eyed observers may have noticed a slightly unusual patch which was merged into the mainline kernel on March 17. It’s a new mascot for the kernel; among other things, this image is shown at boot time for a number of configurations. For many a year, the mascot has been Tux the penguin. For 2.6.29, though, Tux will be taking a break while “Tuz” steps in.

On January 10, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.29-rc1 prepatch and closed the merge window for the 2.6.29 release. At some 8800 changesets (so far), 2.6.29 looks to be a large development cycle. That said, this kernel cycle will have a relatively small list of exciting new features for most people - but the items on that list are big ones.

The 2.6.28-rc8 kernel prepatch is out. That means that the final 2.6.28 release must be getting close. I once heard Linus say that he would never hold a kernel release past -rc9 regardless of the situation; there comes a point where you have to send it out into the world and get on with development. In this case, though, 2.6.28 appears to be stabilizing nicely. The list of regressions is getting fairly short. So this kernel will truly be ready to go soon.

Linus Torvalds released 2.6.28-rc1 and closed the merge window on October 23. So we can now see what will be in the 2.6.28 kernel. Once again, it looks like an active development cycle with a lot of new stuff for Linux users.

The agenda for the 2008 kernel summit has been posted. The summit is an annual, invitation-only event which is typically attended by 70-80 developers. It is a rare opportunity to bring part of the kernel community together for focused discussions on topics which affect the kernel as a whole.

On July 28, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.27-rc1 prepatch and closed the merge window for 2.6.27. That means we now know what will be in this kernel, which will probably be released sometime in October. Recent cycles have featured a lot of internal cleanup and relatively few new features, but 2.6.27 will reverse that trend somewhat. Linux users will see a lot of new things here.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.26 kernel on July 13 - somewhat later than most people had expected. At a full three months, this development cycle took longer than some others; that is especially surprising given that the number of patches merged and new features added is somewhat less than we have seen in recent development cycles. Still, at over 10,000 changesets, this is not a small release.

I fell a little behind on the weather forecast pages, sorry for that. I plead that I was vacationing with the in-laws and would have gotten into serious trouble had I gone too near a keyboard. Anyway, things are caught up now.

On May 3, Linus announced the release of the 2.6.26-rc1 prepatch and the closure of the merge window for this development cycle. So now we know what will be in 2.6.26, which, I predict, will be released sometime around the beginning of July.

The 2.6.25 kernel has been released at last by Linus Torvalds. The plan had been to get it out a week or so ago, but a couple of stubborn problems prevented that. A marathon debugging session by Ingo Molnar turned up the last show-stopper on April 15, and the final kernel came out shortly thereafter.

When I predicted that the release would be “around tax day in the US” I came pretty close. Maybe I should do this sort of stuff for a living.