From LWN.

Linus has announced the 2.6.17 kernel. Some of the highlights from the 2.6.17 development cycle include:

• SPARC “Niagara” architecture support
• an H.323 netfilter connection tracking helper
• lightweight robust futexes
• on-the-fly RAID5 array resizing
• user-space software suspend
• splice(), vmsplice(), tee(), and sync_file_range() system calls (Interesting system calls!)

After several months, the 2.6.18 stable kernel is out at Sep 20, 2006. You can read LWN 2.6 kernel API changes page for information on internal programming interface changes, or the long-format changelog for thousands of patches’ worth of detail.

Besides, Andrew Morton has posted his patch queue with numerous comments about merge plans into the mainline kernel. Among his comments he noted that he would not yet be merging the Reiser4 filesystem:

reiser4. I was planning on merging this, but the batch_write/writev problemight wreck things, and I don’t think the patches arising from my recent partial review have come through yet. So it’s looking more like 2.6.20.

The upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (short for RHEL5) will use 2.6.18 or 2.6.19. You can read the “Kernel Notes” section in RHEL 5 Beta 1 Announcement.

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