"I really don't want to do this, and I was actually hoping to release 2.6.25 last weekend (which is why -rc9 is a few days late - just me hoping to not do another -rc at all), but I've done an -rc9," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.25-rc9 kernel. "The changes in -rc9 are pretty small (shortlog appended)," he continued, "and 60% of them are m68k updates - mostly defconfigs. And some doc updates. But there's some network driver updates (tg3 and wireless hostap stand out), some late XFS patches and a mvsas driver update (the mvsas driver is new in 2.6.25, so that's not going to regress anything ;). The rest is mostly one-liners, with a few reverts going on." Linus then explained why he was putting out another release candidate:

"The reason for not doing a 2.6.25 is that some people are making noises about slab/page-alloc setup issues, and I wanted something out this week, but didn't feel comfy doing a final release.

"That said, I think I'll have to do 2.6.25 early next week regardless, because we can't just keep holding things back forever. At some point it will have to turn into a 2.6.25.x issue, and the developers with stuff pending for the next version need to be able to start merging."

"No cute April 1st shenanigans, just a regular -rc release that happened to come up today because I was waiting for the input layer oops-fixes to be ready and tested," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel on April 1st. He continued, "the bulk of the fixes are the usual random one-liners. [...] A lot of the one-liners are some sparse cleanups, which is probably unnecessary noise at this point, but when Al sends me a series I just tend to apply it because his patches tend to be rather careful and basically always correct." Linus added:

"The big thing that is actually *noticeable* to most people is that this should fix the two top regressions: we've had some suspend-resume regressions due to the stupid ACPI _PTS ordering issues, and while the cleanups were left, the ordering changes were reverted. So that should fix issues for some people (of course, the people who had it fixed are unhappy, but regressions are worse). The other thing that bit a number of people and is now fixed (and that also probably often showed up as a suspend/resume regression) was some 'struct device' lifetime changes that broke the input layer. Thanks to people who debugged that one."

"So this hopefully continues closing various regressions, and most of the changes are pretty small (ie diffstat shows a lot of oneliners). The biggest patches are the trivial powerpc defconfig updates which show up pretty clearly in the dirstat, ie if it weren't for those, the arch/ updates would hardly show up at all," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc7 Linux kernel. He noted that the ps2esdi driver was removed after being marked broken for years, and a new metronomefb.c driver was added for the E-Ink Metronome controller. Linus continued:

"Apart from those, most of the changes really are fairly small and spread out. The scheduler got some tweaking, the memstick driver got some TLC, and cifs and reiserfs had some fixes. The shortlog has more details, but it boils down to some reverts, some docbook fixes, some sparse annotation fixups, a number of trivial patches, and a healthy sprinkling of small fixups."

In summary, Linus suggested, "give it a good testing, because we're hopefully now well on our way towards that eventual real 2.6.25 release!"

"I lost a day-and-a-half this week due to a disk that decided to get read errors due to an unfortunate power outage, and had to spend too much time regenerating my normal setup," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc6 kernel, "but I don't think I lost any emails, and things seemed to have calmed down a bit, so here's to hoping that -rc6 is starting to look better." He then summarized the changes:

"The dirstat shows the usual pattern of most changes being in drivers and architecture updates, although this time it's a bit skewed by the parisc and powerpc updates (hopefully closing the parisc compile regression among other things), which means that arch is about half, and drivers are just under a third of the patch (it seems to be usually the other way around)."

"It's a few days late, but I was waiting for some updates for some of the most annoying regressions until releasing it, so the end result is hopefully more useful as a result," Linus Torvalds began, announcing the 2.6.25-rc4 kernel. He offered a dirstat summary, noting, "the dirstat shows that (as usual) most of the changes are in drivers and arch (~51% and ~17% respectively), with about half the driver updates being in network drivers." Linus continued:

"In particular, the block layer changes should hopefully have sorted themselves out, and CD burning etc hopefully works for people again. Same goes for the the scheduler regressions, and a number of annoying boot-time problems. [...] It's really a fair amount of small changes spread all over, with most of the changes being quite small (604 commits, most of them small, with the BNX2X network driver and the new fsldma driver the only ones that got some bigger changes)."

"Ok, it's out there, ready for your enjoyment," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.25-rc3 kernel. He summarized the changes:

"As usual, most of the updates are in architecture and drivers, with the dirstat showing about 37% in arch (and that's with rename detection: there's some file movement in arch/xtensa that would bring it up to 43% if you looked at it as a traditional diff) and almost 50% in drivers. Much of the include file stuff is also architecture-related updates. The driver updates are mostly fairly spread out, but some of it comes from a couple of new drivers: the mvsas SCSI driver, a new adt7473 driver, and a couple of new watchdog drivers."

Linus continued, "if you ignore the architecture-specific stuff and drivers, the rest is mostly in networking, some Documentation updates, and a few filesystem updates (mainly efs and xfs). Anyway, the upshot of it all? Quite frankly, it's all over the place. The changes in -rc3 are bigger than -rc2, probably mostly because we had some more time (-rc2 was a couple of days early because of the long weekend in the US), but hopefully also because people have started to find regressions." Among the bug fixes, he highlighted, "we had a nasty SLUB corruption issue in -rc2 that is fixed (not that very many people probably saw it), and we've hopfully fixed a number of regressions in networking and suspend/resume."

"Ok, this kernel is a winner," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, playfully announcing the 2.6.25-rc2 kernel which gained the name "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". He continued:

"Just to show how _much_ of a winner it is, it's been awarded a coveted 'weasel' series name, which should tell you just how good it's going to be. It's a name revered in Linux kernel history, and as such this brings back the good old days where if you find a bug, you're almost certainly simply mistaken, and you probably just did something wrong. But hey, you can try to prove me wrong. I dare you."

Linus went on to describe some of the changes using 'git dirstat', "in particular, it shows that almost exactly half of the updates are to drivers, with network drivers alone being a third of the whole patch. And of the remaining half, about half was architecture updates, notably to SH." He then noted, "I'm optimistic that this release cycle won't be anywhere near the pain of what 24 was, which is why I'm just going to go off for the long weekend and stay at the beach."

"Ok, it's a bloody large -rc (as was 24-rc1, for that matter), probably because the 2.6.24 release cycle dragged out, so people had a lot of things pending," noted Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc1 kernel. He added, "the full diff is something like 11MB and 1.4M lines of diffs, with the bulk of the stuff being in architecture updates and drivers." Linus continued:

"Just to have some fun, I did trivial statistics, and of the 1.4M lines of diffs, about 38% - 530k lines - were in architecture files (400k+ lines of diffs in arch/, 100k+ lines of diffs in include/asm-*), and another big chunk is in drivers (including sound) at about 44% - 610k lines - of changes. The rest comes in much smaller, but still noticeable is networking (8% - 110k lines), with filesystems at 4%, and documentation at about 2%. The remaining crumbles being spread out mostly over block layer, crypto, kernel core, and security layer updates (ie SElinux and smack)."

Linus highlighted a few of the changes, including, "the Intel graphics driver is starting to do suspend/resume natively (ie even without X support), which is a welcome sign of the times and may help some people; lots of cleanups from the x86 merge (making more and more use of common files), but also the big page attribute stuff is in and caused a fair amount of churn, and while most of the issues should have been very obvious and all got fixed, this is definitely one of those things that we want a lot of very wide testing of to make sure nothing regressed; fair number of changes to things like the legacy IDE drivers too, and a totally new driver for the very common PCIE version of the Intel e1000 network card etc; and I've probably totally forgotten about tons of other stuff I should have mentioned, but the point is that not only do we have lots of new core, we do have a fair amout of changes to basic stuff that can actually affect perfectly bog-standard hardware setups. So give it all a good testing."

"I do hate doing -rc's for so long, but I hate releasing when not feeling it's simmered enough even more. And the changes since -rc7 are bigger than the changes between -rc6 and -rc7 were (partly probably because people were still on vacation between -rc6 and -rc7, so we had something of a small trickle come in afterwards)," Linus Torvalds began, explaining why he posted another release candidate rather than the official 2.6.24 kernel. He continued, "that said, the changes here really aren't that big, and the shortlog is fairly boring. So I'm pretty sure this is the last -rc, and the final 2.6.24 will probably be out next weekend or so. But in the meantime, let's give this a final shakedown, and see if we can fix any last regressions still." Linus went on to summarize the changes:

"Drivers, networking, some arch updates, and ACPI. A fair number of really small commits. I honestly can't really improve on the appended shortlog - there isn't any over-arching theme, except for 'lots of small boring fixes'. Which is as it should be, of course."

"It's been two weeks since rc6, but let's face it, with xmas and new years (and birthdays) in between, there hasn't actually been a lot of working days, and the incremental patch from -rc6 is about half the size of the one from rc5->rc6," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the release of the 2.6.24-rc7 Linux kernel. He then quipped, "and I'll be charitable and claim it's because it's all stabilizing, and not because we've all been in a drunken stupor over the holidays." Linus quickly summarized the changes:

"The shortlog (appended below) is short and fairly informative. It's all really just a lot of rather small changes. The diffstat shows a lot of one- and two-liners, with just a few drivers (and the Cell platform) getting a bit more attention, and the SLUB support of /proc/slabinfo showing up as a blip."

"It's been a week, and I promised to be a good boy and try to follow my release rules, so here is the next -rc," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.24-rc5 kernel. He noted:

"Things _have_ slowed down, although I'd obviously be lying if I said we've got all the regressions handled and under control. They are being worked on, and the list is shrinking, but at a guess, we're definitely not going to have a final 2.6.24 out before xmas unless santa puts some more elves to work on those regressions. So any elves out there - please keep working."

Linus added that there were no major changes in the latest release candidate, stating that because of this it wasn't worth posting a diffstat, "it only highlights a textually big PA-RISC revert, and the powerpc defconfig updates. And the Blackfin SPI driver. The rest is largely random noise in various subsystems (drivers/net, xfs filesystem, and arch updates are some of the areas that show more changes)."

"We should have one week between -rc releases, but I was gone for a week over thanksgiving (as were some other kernel developers), so this one is a bit late. It's been almost the rule rather than the exception, but I promise I'll be better..." began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel. He noted, "there aren't a lot of exciting changes here, but there's still a _lot_ more churn than I really hoped for at the -rc4 stage. Blackfin, MIPS and Power do stand out in the diffstats, but ARM and x86 got some updates too." Linus continued:

"And we had some ACPI churn (processor throttling etc), along with various driver updates: ATA, IDE, infiniband, SCSI, USB and network drivers.. And on the filesystem side, cifs, NFS, ocfs2 and proc. Ugh. Too much. [...] That said, none of the changes are really _exciting_ or really scary. And we should have fixed a number of regressions, although more certainly remain."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the third release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel summarizing, "hmmm.. Lots of small fixes, some cleanups, and a few things like the cris updates that aren't really either, but which won't affect any normal user, and will hopefully make it easier to sync up in the future. Network driver fixes, some IDE and infiniband updates, some late cpufreq updates, and a hwmon update." He continued:

"On the architecture side, in addition to the afore-mentioned cris updates, there are some sh, arm, powerpc and mips updates, and also one final x86 unification cleanup (and I really mean it - the rest can wait until after 2.6.24, but with this one the x86 configuration really is fairly merged, and both i386 and x86_64 are really just special cases of the 'x86' architecture in the configurator)."

"Yeah, don't remind me - it's late," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the second 2.6.24 release candidate, "there was nothing in particular holding this thing up, I just basically just forgot to cut a -rc2 release last week." He went on to list some of the changes:

"There's not a lot of hugely exciting stuff here. Some arch updates: MIPS, arm, blackfin, x86, sparc[64], sh, s390.. Also various driver updates: libata, IDE, networking, DVB.. And some more fallout from the scatter-gather changes. Some scheduler cleanups, and also fixing the CPU usage statistics that got scrogged at some point."

Linus noted that while there were no major changes, the shortlog was still too large to post to the list. He suggested using the command git shortlog v2.6.24-rc1 to see all changes since the last release candidate, "but quite frankly, it's no Leo Tolstoy. If you have trouble falling asleep, you might try to print it out and take it to bed with you: it's not going to be more than just a couple of pages ('use 2nup and save a tree'), but I dare you to actually get to the end. Snooze city."

"This may count as one of the biggest -rc releases ever. It's humongous. Usually the compressed -rc1 diffs are in the 3-5MB range, with occasional smaller ones, and the occasional ones that top 6M, but this one is *eleven* megs," Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He summarized some of the changes, "in short, we just had an unusually large amount of not just x86 merges, but also tons of new drivers (wireless networking stands out, but is by no means the only thing - we've got dvb, regular wired network, mmc etc all joining in), and a fair amount or architecture stuff, filesystems, networking etc too." He added:

"In other words, I don't even know where to start. The big noticeable thing is the x86 merge, and I think we all fervently hope that it won't cause any issues. So far it's been pretty smooth sailing. Knock wood. Less smooth has the scatter-gather changes to the block layer been, but they are hopefully all in reasonable shape by now too. And the VM changes? I honestly hope nobody even notices. Same goes for some of the VFS layer changes that affected basically every filesystem (although in mostly very straightforward ways)."