The latest kernel status is available at: http://kernelnewbies.org/status/
Of note since last week is the integration of the radix-tree pagecache
in 2.5.8 and the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) getting ready for inclusion.
Comments or questions, drop me a line!
Cheers,
-- Guillaume
---------------------------------------------------
Kernel 2.5 status - April 17th, 2002
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.8)
Features:
Merged
o in 2.5.1+ Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.2 Initial support for USB 2.0 (David Brownell,
Greg Kroah-Hartman, etc.)
o in 2.5.2 Per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups (Al Viro, Manfred
Spraul)
o in 2.5.2+ New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.2+ New kernel device structure (kdev_t) (Linus Torvalds,
etc.)
o in 2.5.3 IDE layer update (Andre Hedrick)
o in 2.5.3 Support reiserfs external journal (Reiserfs team)
o in 2.5.3 Generic ACL (Access Control List) support (Nathan Scott)
o in 2.5.3 PnP BIOS driver (Alan Cox, Thomas
Hood, Dave Jones, etc.)
o in 2.5.3+ New driver model & unified device tree (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.4 Add preempt kernel option (Robert Love,
MontaVista team)
o in 2.5.4 Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading (NGPT team)
o in 2.5.4+ Porting all input devices over to input API (Vojtech Pavlik,
James Simmons)
o in 2.5.5 Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) (ALSA team)
o in 2.5.5 Pagetables in highmem support (Ingo Molnar, Arjan
van de Ven)
o in 2.5.5 New architecture: AMD 64-bit (x86-64) (Andi Kleen, x86-64
Linux team)
o in 2.5.5 New architecture: PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64) (Anton Blanchard,
ppc64 team)
o in 2.5.6 Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM) (JFS team)
o in 2.5.6 per_cpu infrastructure (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.6 HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update (Krzysztof Halasa)
o in 2.5.6 smbfs Unicode and large file support (Urban Widmark)
o in 2.5.7 New driver API for Wireless Extensions (Jean Tourrilhes)
o in 2.5.7 Video for Linux (V4L) redesign (Gerd Knorr)
o in 2.5.7 Futexes (Fast Lightweight Userspace Semaphores) (Rusty Russell, etc.)
o in 2.5.7+ NAPI network interrupt mitigation (Jamal Hadi Salim,
Robert Olsson, Alexey Kuznetsov)
o in 2.5.7+ ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) (Andy Grover, ACPI
team)
* in 2.5.8 Syscall interface for CPU task affinity (Robert Love)
o in 2.5.8 Radix-tree pagecache (Momchil Velikov,
Christoph Hellwig)
o Pending Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o in -ac Strict address space accounting (Alan Cox)
o in -ac PCMCIA Zoom video support (Alan Cox)
o in -ac More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay
Schullist, from Procom donated code)
o Ready Better event logging for enterprise systems (Larry Kessler,
evlog team)
o Ready New quota system supporting plugins (Jan Kara)
o Ready Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Ready New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o Ready Linux booting ELF images (Eric Biederman)
o Ready First pass at LinuxBIOS support (Eric Biederman)
o Ready Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)
o Beta 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 Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
o Beta Fix long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton,
Robert Love, etc.)
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 Dynamic Probes (Suparna
Bhattacharya, dprobes team)
o Beta Scalable CPU bitmasks (Russ Weight)
o Beta Page table sharing (Daniel Phillips)
o Beta Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
o Beta ext2/ext3 online resize support (Andreas Dilger)
o Beta Fast walk dcache (Hanna Linder)
o Beta Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o Beta UDF Write support for CD-R/RW (packet writing) (Jens Axboe, Peter
Osterlund)
o Beta Add hardware sensors drivers (lm_sensors team)
o Beta New kernel config system: CML2 (Eric Raymond)
o Beta Read-Copy Update Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma,
Rusty Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
* Beta USB device (not host) support (Stuart Lynne, Greg
Kroah-Hartman)
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 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 Statistics Counter (Ravikiran
Thirumalai)
o Alpha Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (Matt Robinson, LKCD
team)
o Alpha Add support for NFS v4 (NFS v4 team)
o Alpha ext2/ext3 large directory support: HTree index (Daniel Phillips,
Christopher Li, Ted Ts'o)
o Alpha Delayed disk block allocation (Andrew Morton)
o Alpha Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer (Alan Cox)
o Alpha New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Patrick Mochel)
o Alpha Remove use of the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) (Alan Cox, Robert
Love, Neil Brown, Dave Hansen, etc.)
o Alpha Zerocopy NFS (Hirokazu Takahashi)
o Started More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de
Melo, from Procom donated code)
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 Implement new device naming convention (Device naming team)
Cleanups:
Merged
o in 2.5.3 Break Configure.help into multiple files (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.3 Untangle include file dependancies (Dave Jones, Roman
Zippel)
o in 2.5.4 Per network protocol slabcache & sock.h (Arnaldo Carvalho de
Melo)
o in 2.5.4 Per filesystem slabcache & fs.h (Daniel Phillips,
Jeff Garzik, Al Viro)
o in 2.5.6 Killing kdev_t for block devices (Al Viro)
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 Alpha Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Patrick Mochel)
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!