Linux Weather Forecast

The agenda for the 2008 kernel summit has been posted. The summit is an annual, invitation-only event which is typically attended by 70-80 developers. It is a rare opportunity to bring part of the kernel community together for focused discussions on topics which affect the kernel as a whole.

On July 28, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.27-rc1 prepatch and closed the merge window for 2.6.27. That means we now know what will be in this kernel, which will probably be released sometime in October. Recent cycles have featured a lot of internal cleanup and relatively few new features, but 2.6.27 will reverse that trend somewhat. Linux users will see a lot of new things here.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.26 kernel on July 13 - somewhat later than most people had expected. At a full three months, this development cycle took longer than some others; that is especially surprising given that the number of patches merged and new features added is somewhat less than we have seen in recent development cycles. Still, at over 10,000 changesets, this is not a small release.

I fell a little behind on the weather forecast pages, sorry for that. I plead that I was vacationing with the in-laws and would have gotten into serious trouble had I gone too near a keyboard. Anyway, things are caught up now.

The 2.6.25 kernel has been released at last by Linus Torvalds. The plan had been to get it out a week or so ago, but a couple of stubborn problems prevented that. A marathon debugging session by Ingo Molnar turned up the last show-stopper on April 15, and the final kernel came out shortly thereafter.

When I predicted that the release would be “around tax day in the US” I came pretty close. Maybe I should do this sort of stuff for a living.

The weather forecast pages are quite kernel centric - that’s the area I know best. There is a user-space page, though, featuring a few important components. Many of those have been revised in recent times:

The 2.6.25-rc1 prepatch was released on February 10. The -rc1 release, of course, indicates the closing of the merge window and the beginning of the stabilization period for this cycle. So I’ve updated all of the weather forecast pages to reflect what went in and what didn’t, and generally updated it (often by extending potential merge dates into the future - I never promised I actually knew what I was talking about…)