Abdel Benamrouche announced that he has updated the original 0.01 Linux kernel to compile with GCC-4.x, allowing it to run on emulators such as QEMU and Bochs. After applying his series of small patches, Abdel explains that the 0.01 kernel can be built on a system running the 2.6 Linux kernel. He added that he's successfully ported bash-3.2, portions of coreutils-6.9, dietlibc-0.31 (instead of glibc), bin86-0.16.17, make-3.81, ncurses-2.0.7, and vim-7.1 all to run on his modified 0.01 kernel.

"The http://www.kerneloops.org website collects kernel oops and warning reports from various mailing lists and bugzillas," noted Arjan van de Ven, announcing the new website. He included a summary of the top 10 oopses collected in the past 7 days noting, "this is the first such report that I'm posting; Please let me know if this is useful or not."

Feedback was positive. Andrew Morton commented, "well that would have been fun to write." Steven Richter expressed some concern about the tool counting the same bug report duplicate times when found in different places. Arjan aggreed, "this is true however it's .. a hard issue. It's really hard to distinguish a duplicate report from two reports of the same bug." Another concern was in separating oops generated by 2.6.X-rcY kernels from 2.6.X-rcY-mmZ kernels. Arjan noted, "finding what exact kernel version an oops is from is... surprisingly hard. And to be honest, bugs against -mm are still very interesting, since they'll be the next mainline after all".

"It's been a week, and I promised to be a good boy and try to follow my release rules, so here is the next -rc," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.24-rc5 kernel. He noted:

"Things _have_ slowed down, although I'd obviously be lying if I said we've got all the regressions handled and under control. They are being worked on, and the list is shrinking, but at a guess, we're definitely not going to have a final 2.6.24 out before xmas unless santa puts some more elves to work on those regressions. So any elves out there - please keep working."

Linus added that there were no major changes in the latest release candidate, stating that because of this it wasn't worth posting a diffstat, "it only highlights a textually big PA-RISC revert, and the powerpc defconfig updates. And the Blackfin SPI driver. The rest is largely random noise in various subsystems (drivers/net, xfs filesystem, and arch updates are some of the areas that show more changes)."

"We should have one week between -rc releases, but I was gone for a week over thanksgiving (as were some other kernel developers), so this one is a bit late. It's been almost the rule rather than the exception, but I promise I'll be better..." began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel. He noted, "there aren't a lot of exciting changes here, but there's still a _lot_ more churn than I really hoped for at the -rc4 stage. Blackfin, MIPS and Power do stand out in the diffstats, but ARM and x86 got some updates too." Linus continued:

"And we had some ACPI churn (processor throttling etc), along with various driver updates: ATA, IDE, infiniband, SCSI, USB and network drivers.. And on the filesystem side, cifs, NFS, ocfs2 and proc. Ugh. Too much. [...] That said, none of the changes are really _exciting_ or really scary. And we should have fixed a number of regressions, although more certainly remain."

Ingo Molnar announced that version 24 of his Completely Fair Scheduler patch is now available backported to the 2.6.24-rc3, 2.6.23.8, 2.6.22.13, and 2.6.21.7 kernels. He noted that there have been significant changes since the last backport, "36 files changed, 2359 insertions(+), 1082 deletions(-). That's 187 individual commits from 32 authors." Ingo noted, "99% of these changes are already upstream in Linus's git tree and they will be released as part of v2.6.24. (there are 4 pending commits that are in the small 2.6.24-rc3-v24 patch.)" He also highlighted some of the more significant improvements:

"Improved interactivity via Peter Ziljstra's 'virtual slices' feature. As load increases, the scheduler shortens the virtual timeslices that tasks get, so that applications observe the same constant latency for getting on the CPU. (This goes on until the slices reach a minimum granularity value).

"CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED is now available across all backported kernels and the per user weights are configurable via /sys/kernel/uids/. Group scheduling got refined all around."

"This lovely dark 4am is as good an occasion as any to offer to you the 5th issue of the msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows," began Johannes Schindelin on the git mailing list. He noted that the project was finally concentrating on getting git to work on Windows, having finally gotten the installer working. The Git on MSys project home page notes,

"Unfortunately, Git on Windows is only officially supported using Cygwin. However, there is a fork (hopefully to be merged with 'official' git real soon now) which enables you to compile git using MinGW/MSys. It is a little bit tricky to get ahold of everything needed (MSys, iconv, Tcl/Tk, gcc, make, zlib, regex, etc.), so this project tries to provide a single .zip (actually, a 7-Zip packed installer) which you can unpack, and by double-clicking on msys.bat everything is set. You can start right away to hack on your favourite Source Code Management tool."

"Ok, I've been slacking on the -stable front for a bit here, and didn't realize how far behind I've gotten. Everyone has been sending patches in, which is great, but now we are facing a HUGE 114 patch release," began Greg Kroah-Hartman. He continued:

"As there's no real way that everyone can review all of these patches, I've decided to split them up into 6 different categories, and will be sending patches out in these categories for review. If people can just glance over the ones in the areas they care about, I would really appreciate it."

The stable review resulted in six stable 2.6.23.y releases. The first, 2.6.23.2, contained bug fixes for the core kernel code. 2.6.23.3 contained bug fixes for architecture specific issues. 2.6.23.4 contained bug fixes for the core networking and wireless code. 2.6.23.5 contained bug fixes for networking drivers. 2.6.23.6 contained bug fixes for non-networking drivers. 2.6.23.7 contained file system bug fixes. These releases were followed by 2.6.23.8 containing a couple security fixes.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the third release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel summarizing, "hmmm.. Lots of small fixes, some cleanups, and a few things like the cris updates that aren't really either, but which won't affect any normal user, and will hopefully make it easier to sync up in the future. Network driver fixes, some IDE and infiniband updates, some late cpufreq updates, and a hwmon update." He continued:

"On the architecture side, in addition to the afore-mentioned cris updates, there are some sh, arm, powerpc and mips updates, and also one final x86 unification cleanup (and I really mean it - the rest can wait until after 2.6.24, but with this one the x86 configuration really is fairly merged, and both i386 and x86_64 are really just special cases of the 'x86' architecture in the configurator)."