The latest 2.5 status update is available for your enjoyment at
http://kernelnewbies.org/status/
All the desktop users that care about interactive feel may want to give a
whirl to 2.5.4 that adds an option (disabled by default) to preempt the
kernel, courtesy of Robert Love based on original work by MontaVista.
I have not heard from a few projects in the list below in quite a while,
so please let me know if you can spot anything out of date or incorrect.
Cheers!
-- Guillaume
-------------------------------------------------
Kernel 2.5 status - February 13th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.4)
Features:
o Merged New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar)
o Merged Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer (Jens Axboe)
o Merged New kernel device structure (kdev_t) (Linus Torvalds, etc.)
o Merged Initial support for USB 2.0 (David Brownell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, etc.)
o Merged Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups (Al Viro, Manfred Spraul)
o Merged IDE layer update (Andre Hedrick)
o Merged New driver API for Wireless Extensions (1/2) (Jean Tourrilhes)
o Merged Generic ACL (Access Control List) support (Nathan Scott)
o Merged Support reiserfs external journal (Reiserfs team)
o Merged New driver model & unified device tree (Patrick Mochel)
* Merged PnP BIOS driver (Alan Cox, Thomas Hood, Dave Jones, etc.)
o Merged Add preempt kernel option (Robert Love)
o Pending Finalize new device naming convention (Linus Torvalds)
o in -dj Porting all input devices over to input API (Vojtech Pavlik, James Simmons)
o in -ac 32bit UID quota support (?)
o Ready Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o Ready HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update (Krzysztof Halasa)
o Ready Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) (ALSA team)
o Ready Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team)
o Ready New kernel config system: CML2 (Eric Raymond)
o Ready Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM) (JFS team)
o Ready Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty Russell, Ardrea
Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o <1 month New kernel build system (kbuild 2.5) (Keith Owens)
o Beta Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling (Erik Mouw, Dave Jones, Russell King,
Arjan van de Ven)
o Beta Serial driver restructure (Russell King)
o Beta New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe)
o Beta NAPI Network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim, Robert Olsson, Alexey
Kuznetsov)
o Beta Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
o Beta New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o Beta Add resheduling points to remove latency (Andrew Morton)
o Beta Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)
o Beta Better event logging for enterprise systems (evlog team)
o Beta Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team)
o Beta Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
o Beta Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)
o Beta EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) (EVMS team)
o Beta LVM (Logical Volume Manager) v2.0 (LVM team)
o Beta Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman)
o Beta First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman)
o Beta Dynamic Probes (Suparna Bhattacharya, dprobes team)
* Beta Video for Linux (V4L) redesign (Gerd Knorr)
o Alpha Better support of high-end NUMA machines (NUMA team)
o Alpha Add Asynchronous IO (aio) support (Ben LaHaise)
o Alpha Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse, David Hinds)
o Alpha Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Alpha More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist, from Procom
donated code)
o Alpha Full compliance with IPv6 (Alexey Kuznetzov, Jun Murai, Yoshifuji
Hideaki, USAGI team)
o Alpha UMSDOS (Unix under MS-DOS) Rewrite (Al Viro)
o Alpha Scalable CPU bitmaps (Russ Weight)
o Alpha Scalable Statistics Counter (Ravikiran Thirumalai)
o Alpha Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (Matt Robinson, LKCD team)
* Alpha Add support for NFS v4 (NFS v4 team)
o Started Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o Started Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
o Started More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, from Procom
donated code)
o Started Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) (Alan Cox, Robert Love, Neil Brown, etc.)
o Started Change all drivers to new driver model (All maintainers)
o Started Reiserfs v4 (Reiserfs team)
o Started Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface (ISDN4Linux team)
o Draft #2 New lightweight library (klibc) (Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o Draft #3 Replace initrd by initramfs (H. Peter Anvin, Al Viro)
o Planning Add thrashing control (Rik van Riel)
o Planning Remove all hardwired drivers from kernel (Alan Cox, etc.)
o Planning Generic parameter/command line interface (Keith Owens)
o Planning New mount API (Al Viro)
o Planning New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Dave Jones)
Cleanups:
o Merged Break Configure.help into multiple files (Linus Torvalds)
* Merged Untangle include file dependancies (Dave Jones, Roman Zippel)
o Merged Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o Ready Switch to ->get_super() for file_system_type (Al Viro)
o Ready ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes (Al Viro)
o Ready Remove dcache_lock (Maneesh Soni, IBM team)
o Beta file.h and INIT_TASK (Benjamin LaHaise)
o Beta Proper UFS fixes, ext2 and locking cleanups (Al Viro)
o Beta Lifting limitations on mount(2) (Al Viro)
o Started Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h (Daniel Phillips, Jeff Garzik)
o Started Killing kdev_t for block devices (Al Viro)
o Started Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Dave Jones, Randy Dunlap)
o Started Reorder x86 initialization (Dave Jones, Randy Dunlap)
Have some free time and want to help? Check out the Kernel Janitor TO DO list for a
list of source code cleanups you can work on. A great place to start learning more
about kernel internals!