Linux Weather Forecast

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.