KernelTrap - -rc8

2.6.27-rc8, "This One Should Be The Last One"

Jeremy — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:55:51 +0000

"So yet another week, another -rc," began Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc8 Linux kernel. He continued, "this one should be the last one: we're certainly not running out of regressions, but at the same time, at some point I just have to pick some point, and on the whole the regressions don't look _too_ scary. And -rc8 obviously does fix more of them." Linus went on to note that most of the changes since -rc7 are small, "and there aren't even a whole lot of them."

Jiri Kosina cautioned that there is still an unknown bug affecting the e1000e driver currently in the 2.6.27 kernel, "rendering the cards unusable for most of the i-am-not-a-hacker users (and remember, even Dave Airlie bricked his laptop completely to death, when trying to restore eeprom contents)" When asked how to duplicate the bug, Jiri noted that the inability to reliably reproduce the bug added to the difficulty in debugging the problem, "apparently it is some kind of race, as it usually takes multiple cycles to trigger".

2.6.26-rc8, "A Pretty Small Set Of Changes"

Jeremy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:16:46 +0000

"It hasn't been a week, I know, and this is a pretty small set of changes since -rc7, but I'm going to be mostly incommunicado for the next week or so, so I just released what will hopefully be the last -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc8 kernel. He added, "or maybe not. It depends on how good you all are while I'm not looking." Regarding the latest release candidate, Linus explained:

"Most of the bulk of the changes here are to Xen and to KVM in particular, which shows up as a rather unusual dirstat: 65% is in arch/x86 (counting the asm-x86 changes too). The rest is mostly random stuff, the appended ShortLog gives a reasonable idea. Several bugzilla entries are hopefully now closed."

2.6.25-rc8, "No Cute April 1st Shenanigans"

Jeremy — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:26:06 +0000

"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."

2.6.24-rc8, "A Final Shakedown"

Jeremy — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:05:52 +0000

"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."