See also: last week's Kernel page.

Kernel development

With Linus on vacation, folks looking for something new to compile and boot will have to go to the "ac" series. It's off to a quick start, currently at 2.2.5ac2; this release contains the usual large file array support (still hopefully to appear in the official kernel one of these days) and a fairly long list of fixes.

On the retro side, 2.0.37pre9 is out. Unless problems come up, this will become the true 2.0.37 release.

For a graphical depiction of the Linux kernel version history have a look at this page put together by Larry McVoy.

Aegis for kernel development? BitKeeper is the up and coming configuration management system which is expected to be at least tried for the Linux kernel development process. But now Peter Miller has stepped forward with a lengthy article on why the aegis system should be considered. The message has drawn very little response, it's not clear why. Aegis is a powerful system that might well be worth a look.

A couple of patch announcements for this week:

• The indefatigable Richard Gooch has put out version 96 of devfs.
• Ulrich Windl has released new versions of his PPSkit patches, bringing better timekeeping to both the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels.

Richard Stallman dropped another GNU/Linux bomb this week with this linux-kernel posting. Ironically, this message was posted on the Linux kernel list, where, even by Stallman's reasoning, the simple, unqualified term "Linux" is appropriate. As one would expect, much discussion resulted from this post; also predictable is that little of it was very interesting. However, Tim Smith posted a final solution to the problem that's worth thinking about...

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

For other kernel news, see: LinuxHQ Kernel traffic

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