With release v2.5.40 today of the Linux development kernel, Linus Torvalds reminded the Linux development community that there is a kernel development freeze on October 31'st. Linus added that he will be away the last week of the month, so the last day for new features really is October 20th, "unless you've got a really good and scary costume". In a cheery threat, he also pointed out that he's perfectly happy with the features already introduced in 2.5, so the closer to the deadline submissions come the less likely he will be compelled to merge them.

In the same email he addressed a comment to non-kernel developers:

"And if it wasn't clear to the non-2.5-development people out there, yes you _should_ also test this code out even before the freeze. The IDE layer shouldn't be all that scary any more, and while there are still silly things like trivially non-compiling setups etc, it's generally a good idea to try things out as widely as possible before it's getting too late to complain about things.."

From: Linus Torvalds
To: Kernel Mailing List
Subject: Linux v2.5.40 - and a feature freeze reminder
Date: 	Tue, 1 Oct 2002 00:32:47 -0700 (PDT)

Merges with all the regular suspects - Al's partitioning, Andrew on VM, 
USB, networking, sparc, net drivers. And Ingo has been working on fixing 
up the inevitable details in the thread signal stuff, as well as updating 
the smp-scalable timer code.

And ISDN, kbuild, ARM, uml...

And a small reminder that we're now officially in the last month of
features, and since I'm going to be away basically the last week of
October, so I actually personally consider Oct 20th to be the drop-date,
unless you've got a really good and scary costume.. So don't try to leave 
it to the last day.

[ And if that didn't worry you, the following should: I'm perfectly happy 
  with the kernel, and as such whatever features _you_ think are missing 
  might just not weigh too much with me if you then also make the mistake
  of trying to leave them for the last crunch. I might just take the last
  day off too ;]

And if it wasn't clear to the non-2.5-development people out there, yes
you _should_ also test this code out even before the freeze. The IDE layer
shouldn't be all that scary any more, and while there are still silly
things like trivially non-compiling setups etc, it's generally a good idea
to try things out as widely as possible before it's getting too late to
complain about things..

		Linus

----

Summary of changes from v2.5.39 to v2.5.40
============================================

Art Haas :
  o C99 designated initializers for bfs, minix, efs, openpromfs,
    ramfs, exportfs, devpts, romfs, proc, isofs, ufs, cramfs

Alex Williamson :
  o fs/partitions/sun.c: raid autodetect for sun disk labels

:
  o Error handler general clean up

Bart Schuymer :
  o net/bridge/br_input.c: Missing read_unlock

:
  o fix endless loop walking the MADT

Dave Jones :
  o trivial bits
  o Various trivial module related fixes
  o include fix

Rolf Fokkens :
  o sg.c and USER_HZ, kernel 2.5.37

Jeff Dike :
  o UML updates to allow it to build and run as 2.5.38
  o Cleaned up arch/um/Makefile and updated the ubd driver
  o Trivial fix to the ubd driver
  o One last fix to the ubd driver, allowing UML to boot
  o Bumped EXTRAVERSION for the 2.4 fixes and highmem support
  o Added highmem support to uml
  o Fixed highmem support for 2.5
  o Missed a change to fixmap.h in the highmem update
  o Updated to build with the 2.5.39 kbuild
  o One last fix to make the non-highmem build work
  o Added CONFIG_HIGHMEM to defconfig
  o Moved the linker script from vmlinux.lds.S, which will be empty, to
    uml.ld.S.
  o main.o needed to be added to the vmlinux dependencies so it would
    build

:
  o [ARM PATCH] 1238/1: Accelent PXA IDP config cleanups This patch
    brings support for the PXA-IDP up to 2.5.30, plus adds support in
    head.S for low level serial debugging support.

James Bottomley :
  o [SCSI 53c700] flag as able to do I/O from highmem

Jes Sorensen :
  o acenic net drvr bug fix: remove '=' typo in intr mask argument to
    writel()

Dominik Brodowski :
  o (1/5) CPUfreq core
  o (2/5) CPUfreq i386 core
  o (3/5) CPUfreq i386 drivers
  o (4/5) CPUfreq Documentation
  o (5/5) CPUfreq /proc/sys/cpu/ add-on patch
  o CPUfreq i386 drivers update
  o cpufreq bugfixes
  o cpufreq crashes on P4

Peter W