2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti [interview [1]] released [2] 2.4.31-pre1 noting, "it contains a very small number of changes, mostly an x86_64 update." The 2.4 kernel went into maintenance mode following the release of 2.4.28-pre4 last October [story [3]], currently receiving mainly bug and security fixes as announced back in December of 2003 [story [4]].

With this release, Marcelo also noted, "I'm planning on moving the v2.4 repository along with the full history information to a git repository soon." Linus began writing "git" on April 7'th [story [5]], a rapidly evolving userland filesystem upon which various SCM implementations are being built or adapted. The 2.6 kernel source is already managed in a git repository, with the first succesful git release being 2.6.12-rc3 on April 20'th [story [6]].

From: Marcelo Tosatti [7] [email blocked]
To:  linux-kernel
Subject: Linux 2.4.31-pre1
Date: 	Mon, 25 Apr 2005 11:21:16 -0300

Hi,

Here goes the first pre of v2.4.31. 

It contains a very small number of changes, mostly an x86_64 update.

Side note: I'm planning on moving the v2.4 repository along with the full 
history information to a git repository soon. 


Summary of changes from v2.4.30 to v2.4.31-pre1
============================================

Adrian Bunk:
  o MAINTAINERS: remove obsolete ACP/MWAVE MODEM entry

Andi Kleen:
  o x86_64: Handle MM going away in context switch
  o x86_64: Backport 2.6 MTRR algorithms
  o x86_64: noexec=off never worked correctly for the kernel direct mappings
  o x86_64: Fix idle=poll
  o x86_64: Fix reference counting bug in change_page_attr on i386/x86-64
  o x86_64: Resend lost APIC IRQs on Uniprocessor too
  o x86_64: Avoid a obnoxious warning during build
  o x86_64: Flush correctly when more than one page is getting flushed
  o x86_64: Reload init_mm on leaving lazy mm

Andrew Morton:
  o rwsem: Make rwsems use interrupt disabling spinlocks

Herbert Xu:
  o [NETLINK]: Fix sk_rmem_alloc assertion failure in af_netlink.c

Hugh Dickins:
  o madvise_willneed -EIO beyond EOF

Marcelo Tosatti:
  o Change VERSION to 2.4.31-pre1

Pete Zaitcev:
  o visor: Add Zire 31 device ID

• Archive of above thread [8]
• KernelTrap interview with Marcelo Tosatti [9]