Alan Cox [interview [1]] has begun releasing regular -ac patchsets [forum [2]] for the 2.6 kernel [forum [3]]. The earlier 2.6.9-ac1 [story [4]] and -ac2 [story [5]] were quickly followed by the most recent 2.6.9-ac3.

In addition to focusing on his IDE efforts [story [6]], Alan has also begun collecting "clearly correct fixes to real problems", reminiscent of his earlier 2.4-ac patchset [forum [7]]. Read on for the full changelog.

From: Alan Cox [8] [email blocked]
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List [email blocked]
Subject: Linux 2.6.9-ac3
Date: 	Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:08:19 +0100

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.6/2.6.9/ [9]

2.6.9-ac3
o	Fix syncppp/async ppp problems with new hangup	(Paul Fulghum)
o	Fix broken parport_pc unload			(Andrea Arcangeli)
o	Security fix for smbfs leak/overrun		(Urban Widmark)
o	Stop i8xx_tco making some boxes reboot on load	(wim@iguana)
o	Fix cpia/module tools deadlock			(Peter Pregler)
o	Fix missing suid_dumpable export		(Alan Cox)

2.6.9-ac2
o	Fix invalid kernel version stupidity		(Adrian Bunk)
o	Compiler ICE workaround/fixup			(Linus Torvalds)
o	Fix network DoS bug in 2.6.9			(Herbert Xu)
	| Suggested by Sami Farin
o	Flash lights on panic as in 2.4			(Andi Kleen)

2.6.9-ac1

Security Fixes
o	Set VM_IO on areas that are temporarily		(Alan Cox)
	marked PageReserved (Serious bug)
o	Lock ide-proc against driver unload		(Alan Cox)
	(very low severity)

Bug Fixes
o	Working IDE locking				(Alan Cox)
	| And a great deal of review by Bartlomiej
o	Handle E7xxx boxes with USB legacy flaws	(Alan Cox)
	
Functionality
o	Allow booting with "irqpoll" or "irqfixup"	(Alan Cox)
	on systems with broken IRQ tables.
o	Support for setuid core dumping in some		(Alan Cox)
	environments (off by default)
o	Support for drives that don't report geometry
o	IT8212 support (raid and passthrough)		(Alan Cox)
o	Allow IDE to grab all unknown generic IDE	(Alan Cox)
	devices (boot with "all-generic-ide")
o	Restore PWC driver				(Luc Saillard)

Other
o	Small pending tty clean-up to moxa		(Alan Cox)
o	Put VIA Velocity (tm) adapters under gigabit	(VIA)

• Archive of above thread [Array]
• KernelTrap interview with Alan Cox [10]