2.6.29

Comprehensive review of the new Linux 2.6.29 release...

Measuring performance for the last six kernel releases...

New logo, new drivers, but not a lot of radical change in this new kernel release..."The most obvious change is the (temporary) change of logo to Tuz, the Tasmanian Devil. But there's a number of driver updates and some m68k header updates (fixing headers_install after the merge of non-MMU/MMU) that end up being pretty noticeable in the diffs.

The new -rc release includes an Atom workaround..."This -rc isn't any more interesting than most, although I have to say that personally, it was interesting to see that we have actually been hitting a Atom CPU errata, and it took some effort from people to hunt it down. That was interesting, if only because it's a pretty rare occurrence.

More analysis of the 2.6.29 kernel..."If we are to believe the statements made by Linus Torvalds when presenting the seventh release candidate of 2.6.29, and assuming release candidates come weekly, it will be at least another week or two before Linux kernel 2.6.29 becomes available. The Kernel Log will, therefore, continue its report about the new features scheduled for 2.6.29 with what's new in terms of file systems.

A new stable prepatch is out... "The bulk of the patch is a couple of new drivers (ATL1c network driver and firewire FireDTV DVB receiver). That's due to the whole "new drivers can't regress" thing, although obviously if you compile them in, they may give you problems whether you have the hardware or not, as we found with the FireDTV driver ;)"But apart from the new drivers, it should all be just small fixes. The shortlog (appended) tells the story.... [more]

After Linux.conf.au, the kernel developers are back to work..."It's out there, and while it's a bit larger than I'd wish for, that size is pretty understandable considering that it's closer to two weeks than one in between -rc2 and -rc3 (due to LCA, obviously).

MIPS merges and driver updates highlight this release...It's out there now, or at least in the process of mirroring out.

And they're off again... "The merge window is over, and while it is quite possible that I missed a few merge requests in the crazy week that is behind us, apart from those we should now have most of the bulk of 2.6.29 merged up. And now it's just a small matter of making sure it's all stable and ready to go.