"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 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."

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as "a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:

"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

Linus Torvalds announced the sixth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, a final release expected within the next few weeks. He noted:

"So last week was a bust, with a lot of core people away for the kernel summit, and with -rc5 having two rather nasty (and silly) one-liner problems that bit a number of people - a missing NULL pointer check in TCP, and a missing list terminator in ata_piix.

"So the fixes for those things were both pretty trivial, and they've been in the -git trees for the last few days, but I just pushed out an -rc6 that also merges up some other updates that did come in during the week."

The -rc6 source level changes can be browsed via the gitweb interface.