2.6.0
announcement:
Changelog
Source tarball
announcement:
Patch"The beaver is out of detox"
- Anon
This should not be a big surprise to anybody on the list any more, since we've been building up to it for a long time now, and for the last few weeks I haven't accepted any patches except for what amounts to fairly obvious one-liners.
Anyway, 2.6.0 is out there now, and the patch from -test11 is a swelte 11kB in size. It's not the totally empty patch I was hoping for, but judging by the bugs I worked on personally, things are looking pretty good.
To give you an example, one of the nastier bugs that we chased for the last five weeks was a bug that could only be reproduced reliably on a 16- or 32-way system, and only when the system had flaky disks. Putting in known-good disks made the problem disappear. Similarly, compiling the kernel with another compiler made the problem disappear.
It turned out to be a really subtle bug wrt SMP ordering and stack allocation, and lots of thanks to Ram Pai for gathering all the information that eventually led to it being fixed. The fix was a one-liner and a big comment - but my point is that the quality of bugs has been pretty high lately, and we feel that we're in pretty good shape.
Andrew has written up some caveats and pointers to information about 2.4.x vs 2.6.x changes, and I'll let him post that. Some known issues were not considered to be release-critical and a number of them have pending fixes in the -mm queue. Generally they just didn't have the kind of verification yet where I was willing to take them in order to make sure a fair 2.6.0 release.
NOTE! I'll continue to keep track of the 2.6 BK tree until we're closer to the time when we literally split it for 2.7.x, because both Andrew and I are pretty comfortable with our respective toolchains. But Andrew is the stable tree maintainer, so everything should be approved by him at this point. Think of the -mm tree as the staging area, and mine as a release tree. We'll work together, but Andrew is boss.
(BK merging will have to go through some approval format, we'll see how that works out exactly).
Linus
Changelog
Source tarball