The development kernel seems to be well on its way to stabilizing, with
hundreds of small fixes making their way to the BK tree in the past
month.
Here is a snapshot of the latest status as of May 6th. It is also
available at http://www.kernelnewbies.org/status/
Let me know if anything is missing or inaccurate.
Cheers,
-- Guillaume
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Linux Kernel 2.5 Status - May 6th, 2003
(Latest kernel release is 2.5.69)
Items in bold have changed since the last update.
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+ O(1) 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 Extended Attribute 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 2.5.5 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)
o 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 in 2.5.9 Smarter IRQ balancing (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.11 Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver (Anton Altaparmakov)
o in 2.5.11 Fast walk dcache (Hanna Linder)
o in 2.5.11+ Rewrite of the framebuffer layer (James Simmons)
o in 2.5.12+ Rewrite of the buffer layer (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.14 Support for IDE TCQ (Tagged Command Queueing) (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.14 Bluetooth support (no longer experimental!) (Maxim Krasnyansky, Bluetooth team)
o in 2.5.17 New quota system supporting plugins (Jan Kara)
o in 2.5.17+ Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface (Kai Germaschewski, ISDN4Linux team)
o in 2.5.18 Software suspend (to disk & RAM) (Pavel Machek)
o in 2.5.23 More complete IEEE 802.2 stack (Arnaldo, Jay Schullist, from Procom donated code)
o in 2.5.23+ Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.25 Faster internal kernel clock frequency (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.26 Direct pagecache <-> BIO disk I/O (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.27+ New VM with reverse mappings (Rik van Riel)
o in 2.5.28+ Serial driver restructure (Russell King)
o in 2.5.28 Remove the "Big IRQ lock" (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.29+ Thread-Local Storage (TLS) support (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.29+ Add Linux Security Module (LSM) (LSM team)
o in 2.5.29+ Strict address space accounting (Alan Cox)
o in 2.5.31+ Disk description cleanups (Al Viro)
o in 2.5.31 Support insane number of processes (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.32 New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.32+ Porting all input devices over to input API (Vojtech Pavlik, James Simmons)
o in 2.5.32+ Asynchronous IO (aio) support (Ben LaHaise)
o in 2.5.32+ Improved POSIX threading support (Ingo Molnar, Ulrich Drepper)
o in 2.5.33 SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) (lksctp team)
o in 2.5.33 TCP segmentation offload (Alexey Kuznetsov)
o in 2.5.34 discontigmem support (ia32) (Pat Gaughen, Martin Bligh, Jack Steiner, Tony Luck)
o in 2.5.34 POSIX threading support for signals (Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.35 Add User-Mode Linux (UML) (Jeff Dike)
o in 2.5.35 Serial ATA support (Andre Hedrick)
o in 2.5.36 Add XFS (A journaling filesystem from SGI) (XFS team)
o in 2.5.36 Hugepage support (Rohit Seth)
o in 2.5.37 Remove the global tasklist (Ingo Molnar, William Lee Irwin)
o in 2.5.37 Ethernet bridge tables support (Bart De Schuymer)
o in 2.5.39 New IO scheduler (Jens Axboe)
o in 2.5.40 Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling (Dominik Brodowski, Erik Mouw, Dave Jones, Russell King, Arjan van de Ven)
o in 2.5.40 NUMA topology support (Matt Dobson)
o in 2.5.40 Parallelizing page replacement (Andrew Morton, Momchil Velikov, Dave Hansen, William Lee Irwin)
o in 2.5.42 Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer (Alan Cox)
o in 2.5.42 Remove the 2TB block device limit (Peter Chubb)
o in 2.5.42 Add new CIFS (Common Internet File System) (Steve French)
o in 2.5.42 ext2/ext3 large directory support: HTree index (Daniel Phillips, Christopher Li, Andrew Morton, Ted Ts'o)
o in 2.5.43 Add support for NFS v4 (NFS v4 team, Trond Myklebust, Neil Brown)
o in 2.5.43 Read-Copy Update (RCU) Mutual Exclusion (Dipankar Sarma, Rusty Russell, Andrea Arcangeli, LSE Team)
o in 2.5.43 Add OProfile, a low-overhead profiler (John Levon)
o in 2.5.43 Andrew File System (AFS) support (David Howells)
o in 2.5.44 x86 BIOS Enhanced Disk Device (EDD) polling (Matt Domsch)
o in 2.5.44 Plug'N Play Layer Rewrite (Adam Belay)
o in 2.5.44+ New sysfs filesystem (formerly known as driverfs) (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.45 Device mapper for Logical Volume Manager (LVM2) (Alasdair Kergon, Patrick Caulfield, Joe Thornber)
o in 2.5.45 Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) layer (LinuxTV team)
o in 2.5.45 IPsec support (Alexey Kuznetsov, Dave Miller, USAGI team)
o in 2.5.45 CryptoAPI (James Morris)
o in 2.5.45 New Linux configuration system: kconfig (Roman Zippel)
o in 2.5.46 Extended Attributes and ACLs for ext2/ext3 (Ted Ts'o)
o in 2.5.46 Replace initrd by initramfs (H. Peter Anvin, Al Viro, Jeff Garzik)
o in 2.5.46 MMU-less processor support (ucLinux) (Greg Ungerer)
o in 2.5.46 Per-cpu hot & cold page lists (Andrew Morton, Martin Bligh)
o in 2.5.46+ Better I/O performance with epoll (Davide Libenzi)
o in 2.5.47 Zerocopy NFS (Hirokazu Takahashi)
o in 2.5.48 In-kernel module loader (Rusty Russell)
o in 2.5.51 Compatibility syscall layer (Stephen Rothwell)
o in 2.5.51+ Rewrite of the console layer (James Simmons)
o in 2.5.53 "sysenter" support (Linus Torvalds, etc.)
o in 2.5.54 Support for AGP 3.0 (Dave Jones)
o in 2.5.54+ Add drivers for hardware health monitoring (lm_sensors team)
o in 2.5.57 Remove long-held locks for low scheduling latency (Andrew Morton, etc.)
o in 2.5.59 NUMA aware scheduler extensions (Erich Focht, Michael Hohnbaum, Martin Bligh)
o in 2.5.60 64-bit jiffies (Tim Schmielau)
o in 2.5.60 New modversions implementation (Kai Germaschewski)
o in 2.5.63 POSIX timers (George Anzinger)
o in 2.5.65 Desktop Interactivity Improvements (Linus Torvalds, Ingo Molnar)
o in 2.5.69 New interrupt handling API (Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, etc.)
o in -mm Anticipatory Scheduler (Nick Piggin, Andrew Morton)
o in -mm 64-bit dev_t (Andries Brouwer, Al Viro)
o in -mm Complete Fair Queueing (CFQ) disk scheduler (Jens Axboe, Andrea Arcangeli)
o in -mm Kexec, syscall to load kernel from kernel (Eric Biederman)
o in -ac Switch the IDE I/O layers to taskfile (Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz, Alan Cox)
o in -osdl Build option for Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) (Karim Yaghmour)
o before 2.6.0 Support insane number of groups (Tim Hockin)
o before 2.6.0 Worldclass support for IPv6 (Alexey Kuznetsov, Dave Miller, Jun Murai, Yoshifuji Hideaki, USAGI team)
o before 2.6.0 Reiserfs v4 (Reiserfs team)
o before 2.6.0 Fix device naming issues (Patrick Mochel, Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o before 2.6.0 Change all drivers to new driver model (All maintainers)
o before 2.6.0 USB gadget support (David Brownell, Stuart Lynne, Greg Kroah-Hartman)
o before 2.6.0 Improved AppleTalk stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o before 2.6.0 ext2/ext3 online resize support (Andreas Dilger)
o before 2.6.0 UDF Write support for CD-R/RW (packet writing) (Jens Axboe, Peter Osterlund)
o post 2.6.0 Unified boot/parameter support (Rusty Russell)
o post 2.6.0 SCSI multipath IO (with NUMA support) (Patrick Mansfield, Mike Anderson)
o post 2.6.0 Basic NUMA API (Matt Dobson)
o post 2.6.0 Remove waitqueue heads from kernel structures (William Lee Irwin)
o post 2.6.0 NUMA aware slab allocator (Manfred Spraul, Martin Bligh)
o post 2.6.0 Better event logging for enterprise systems (Larry Kessler, evlog team)
o post 2.6.0 Page table reclamation (William Lee Irwin, Rik Van Riel)
o post 2.6.0 UMSDOS (Unix under MS-DOS) Rewrite (Al Viro)
o post 2.6.0 Overhaul PCMCIA support (David Woodhouse, David Hinds)
o post 2.6.0 InfiniBand support (InfiniBand team)
o post 2.6.0 Per-mountpoint read-only, union-mounts, unionfs (Al Viro)
o post 2.6.0 More complete NetBEUI stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, from Procom donated code)
o post 2.6.0 New mount API (Al Viro)
o post 2.6.0 Add thrashing control (Rik van Riel)
o post 2.6.0 Remove all hardwired drivers from kernel (Alan Cox, etc.)
o post 2.6.0 New lightweight library (klibc) (H. Peter Anvin)
o post 2.6.0 Scalable Statistics Counter (Ravikiran Thirumalai)
o post 2.6.0 SCSI and FibreChannel Hotswap Support (Steven Dake)
o post 2.6.0 Page table sharing (Daniel Phillips, Dave McCracken)
o post 2.6.0 Kernel Probes (kprobes) (Vamsi Krishna, kprobes team)
o post 2.6.0 Object-based rmap (Dave McCraken)
o post 2.6.0 Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (Matt Robinson, LKCD team)
Cleanups:
Merged
o in 2.5.3 Break Configure.help into multiple files (Linus Torvalds)
o in 2.5.3 Untangle sched.h & fs.h include 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 in 2.5.18+ ->getattr() ->setattr() ->permission() changes (Al Viro)
o in 2.5.21 Split up x86 setup.c into managable pieces (Patrick Mochel)
o in 2.5.23+ Major MD tool (RAID 5) cleanup (Neil Brown)
o in 2.5.30 Remove khttpd (Christoph Hellwig)
o in 2.5.31 Rework datalink protocols to not use cli/sti (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o in 2.5.31 Remove incomplete SPX network stack (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o in 2.5.43 Remove kiobufs (Andrew Morton)
o in 2.5.46 Reorder x86 initialization (Dave Jones)
o in 2.5.62 Avoid dcache_lock while path walking (Maneesh Soni, IBM team)
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!