"Another week, another -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc7 Linux kernel, "and as usual, it's mainly drivers and arch updates - over 90% of changes are in one or the other." He continued:

"A big part of it (about two thirds of the driver update, in fact) is a late-dropping AGP/DRM update that adds support for some new Intel and ATI graphics cards. And a big part of the arch update is the inevitable def_config updates, of course. I'm not all that happy about the timing of the support for the new cards, but at the same time I also hate delaying new drivers. Obviously the hope is that it can't cause any regressions, since the added code is almost entirely for stuff that simply wasn't supported at all before."

Linus concluded, "if you ignore the driver and arch updates, the rest is pretty minor. About half is in networking, and half of the remaining is filesystems updates (mainly ocfs2). And random smatterings elsewhere, like some scheduler updates."

"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!"

"Ahoy me laddies (and beauties)," Linux creator Linus Torvalds began, announcing the seventh release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, "time for the traditional 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' kernel release!" He noted, "now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series." Full source changes can be viewed via the gitweb interface. Linus also offered a brief summary of the changes:

"I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well.

"Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386."