"New year, new kernel: Linux 2.4.36 is finally ready and has been checked long enough to be released. Quite a bunch of bugs, build errors and security issues have been fixed since 2.4.35, but all of those fixes were merged into 2.4.35-stable," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau stated, announcing the latest 2.4 stable Linux kernel. He noted, "I should say that I'm quite satisfied of this dual-branch release model which proves to be very successful at separating quick fixes from changes which require more thorough testing." Willy went on to add:

"Concerning future versions, I have nothing pending in the queue anymore. I will then go on with 2.4.36.X when bug fixes come in, and only open 2.4.37 when I get something which I do not consider suitable for 2.4.36.X."

The previous 2.4.35 stable kernel was released in July of 2007. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

"I've just released Linux 2.4.36-pre1," announced 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau. He described a new feature found in the first pre-release:

"In private discussions, Solar Designer proposed to restrict the ability to map the NULL address to CAP_RAW_IO capable processes only. The idea behind this was to prevent 'normal' users from trying to exploit NULL dereferences in the kernel which have not been discovered yet. This is purely a preventive measure."

Willy added that a similar feature exists in the 2.6 kernel, "Chris Wright noted that 2.6 already has a somewhat similar feature brought by Eric Paris, which introduces a sysctl by which the admin can set the lower mappable address." He also noted that the feature can be disabled, "Alan Cox indicated that it was desirable to be able to dynamically disable the feature because some (very) rare programs map the NULL pointer to speed up their walk through linked lists by avoiding NULL pointer checks." Finally he asked for testers, "please report any breakage you would detect when enabling it. We're pretty confident that almost every applications will not see any difference since no normal application maps NULL. But it would be interesting to identify the "special" ones."