Blog Archive

Linus has released the 2.6.33-rc1 prepatch, closing the merge window for this development cycle. This kernel has a few features which will shake things up, with dynamic tracing being near the top as far as I am concerned. But, perhaps, the most interesting addition is one that almost nobody expected: a reverse-engineered driver for NVIDIA graphics chipsets called “Nouveau.”

So I’ve just returned from Tokyo, where I attended the 2009 Kernel Summit and the first ever Japan Linux Symposium. My body clock is expected sometime later this week. It was a tiring but rewarding week, and not just because the sushi was so good.

The Kernel Summit went well. There are not a whole lot of earthshaking decisions to report from there; the real news seems to be that the process is working quite well despite the record pace of change and no serious changes are required.

So I am hitting the road next week. It should be no surprise that LinuxCon and the Linux Plumbers Conference are coming up. I have a talk (the well-travelled Kernel Report) and the kernel developers’ panel, both on Monday; I fully expect to be tired by the end. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff happening at LinuxCon, which is being held for the first time ever. I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out.

After a development cycle lasting exactly three months (June 9 to September 9), Linus Torvalds has released the 2.6.31 kernel. This cycle saw the inclusion of almost 11,000 different changes from over 1100 individual developers representing some 200 companies; a minimum of 16% of the changes came form developers representing only themselves. In other words, over the last three months, Linux kernel developers were putting 118 changes into the kernel every day. That is a lot of work.

Sharp-eyed observers may have noticed a slightly unusual patch which was merged into the mainline kernel on March 17. It’s a new mascot for the kernel; among other things, this image is shown at boot time for a number of configurations. For many a year, the mascot has been Tux the penguin. For 2.6.29, though, Tux will be taking a break while “Tuz” steps in.

On January 10, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.29-rc1 prepatch and closed the merge window for the 2.6.29 release. At some 8800 changesets (so far), 2.6.29 looks to be a large development cycle. That said, this kernel cycle will have a relatively small list of exciting new features for most people - but the items on that list are big ones.