With all the work done on the 2.5 kernel branch these days, and with all the coverage this work is getting, it'd be easy to dismiss the development of the 2.4 as being boring, but to do so would not do justice to Marcelo and his contributors. The 2.4.20-rc3 prerelease that was just announced is just the latest milestone in the on-going effort to make the 2.4 kernel branch as stable as it possibly can be; while it only contains a small number of fixes, the complete list of changes that went in after 2.4.19 has grown to an impressive size, and it looks like the final 2.4.20 kernel will actually deserve being called 'stable', in the same sense that the current 2.2 and 2.0 versions can.

List:     linux-kernel
Subject:  Linux 2.4.20-rc3
From:     Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@conectiva.com.br>
Date:     2002-11-22 17:21:28

Hi,

Finally, here goes -rc3.

Summary of changes from v2.4.20-rc2 to v2.4.20-rc3
============================================

<akpm@digeo.com>:
  o Change mark_dirty_kiobuf() to use set_page_dirty() instead of SetPageDirty(). The 
latter fails to move onto mapping->dirty_pages(), which breaks filemap_fdatasync()  o 
Writeout directory blocks synchronously in case of sync mount

<hch@lst.de>:
  o update kbuild/makefiles.txt to match reality

<lee@compucrew.com>:
  o Fix typo in mk712 driver

<marcelo@freak.distro.conectiva>:
  o Changed EXTRAVERSION to -rc3
  o Fix typo in vmalloc leak fix
  o Fixup pci_alloc_consistent with 64bit DMA masks on i386

Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>:
  o Fix Intermezzo compilation

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
  o makefiles for 2.4.20-rc* to build amd76x_pm right

Dave Jones <davej@suse.de>:
  o Plug leak in get_vm_area()

David S. Miller <davem@nuts.ninka.net>:
  o [TG3]: Use spin_lock_irq{save,restore} on tx_lock

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>:
  o JFFS2 corruption/deadlock fix

Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>:
  o PCI transparent bridge detection fix

Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>:
  o Fix SCSI I/O performance problems introduced in early 2.4.20

Kai Germaschewski <kai@tp1.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>:
  o ISDN: Fix error path in isdn_ppp.c

Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>:
  o Only zero successfully handled blocks in prepare_write()

tmcreynolds@nvidia.com <TMcReynolds@nvidia.com>:
  o Add support for newer nForce chipset

Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>:
  o Fix NFS client problem

-
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