As expected, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.23 [1]-rc1 kernel two weeks after the release of 2.6.22 [2], ending the merge window, "and it has a *ton* of changes as usual for the merge window [3], way too much for me to be able to post even just the shortlog or diffstat on the mailing list". He noted, "I personally like how 'sendfile' is now totally gone internally, and the kernel now ends up doing all that with splice insted. Good riddance, although we'll obvously end up supporting the old user level interfaces for a long time." Linus went on to summarize the other changes:

"Lots of architecture updates (for just about all of them - x86[-64], arm, alpha, mips, ia64, powerpc, s390, sh, sparc, um..), lots of driver updates (again, all over - usb, net, dvb, ide, sata, scsi, isdn, infiniband, firewire, i2c, you name it).

"Filesystems, VM, networking, ACPI, it's all there. And virtualization all over the place (kvm, lguest, Xen).

"Notable new things might be the merge of the cfs scheduler, and the UIO driver infrastructure might interest some people."

From:	Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
To:	Linux Kernel Mailing List [email blocked]
Subject: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date:	Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:04:24 -0700 (PDT)


Ok, right on time, two weeks afetr 2.6.22, there's a 2.6.23-rc1 out there.

And it has a *ton* of changes as usual for the merge window, way too much 
for me to be able to post even just the shortlog or diffstat on the 
mailing list (but I had many people who wanted to full logs to stay 
around, so you'll continue to see those being uploaded to kernel.org).

Lots of architecture updates (for just about all of them - x86[-64], arm, 
alpha, mips, ia64, powerpc, s390, sh, sparc, um..), lots of driver updates 
(again, all over - usb, net, dvb, ide, sata, scsi, isdn, infiniband, 
firewire, i2c, you name it).

Filesystems, VM, networking, ACPI, it's all there. And virtualization all 
over the place (kvm, lguest, Xen).

Notable new things might be the merge of the cfs scheduler, and the UIO 
driver infrastructure might interest some people.

Oh, and I personally like how "sendfile" is now totally gone internally, 
and the kernel now ends up doing all that with splice insted. Good 
riddance, although we'll obvously end up supporting the old user level 
interfaces for a long time.

So give it all a good whacking, and report back about all the neat new 
features!

		Linus

• Archive of above thread [4]