Andrew Morton [interview] released 2.6.0-test9-mm3 saying, "Various new fixes; generally uncritical ones." He did point out a couple areas needing additional testing, "Significant changes to the AIO and direct-io code. This needs beating on; hopefully we're now close to a solution to the fairly complex problems in there. Several ext2 and ext3 allocator fixes. These need serious testing on big SMP."

Andrew, the 2.6 kernel maintainer, also points out that any code aimed for 2.6.0 inclusion should be first tested in -mm3. Read on for the full changelog.

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer released 2.4.23-rc1-pac1, synchronizing his tree with 2.4.23-rc1 [story], fixing the compilation of the VIA DRI driver, and merging the recently released Forcedeth driver for nvnet ethernet chips.

Nick Piggin [interview] released version 18 of his scheduler patch today saying, "Nothing exciting for desktop users. High end performance is now starting to get better. Has an (unimportant) accounting fix that shouldn't really be here, but doesn't look like it will get in before 2.6.0." He goes on to add, "Volanomark looks much better than mainline."

Hello i have problems with my USB 2.0 HDD on 2.6.0-tes9 kernel. I have a Q-tec device with maxtor 80 GB disk and two partitions on it.
When i mount partitions on it there are no any error messages, but after some time i can't read any information from mounted patitions. And error messages are similar to that:


Nov 7 22:24:46 andza kernel: sdb: assuming drive cache: write through

Nov 7 22:24:46 andza kernel: sdb1 sdb2

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.23-rc1 with the following comments:

Hi,

Here goes -rc1.

It contains network driver fixes (b44, tg3, 8139cp), several x86-64
bugfixes, amongst others.

Please help testing!

Read on for the complete changelog.

Hi,
i am trying to compile a patched 2.4.23-pre9 kernel for my nx9005 laptop.
unfortunately i get this error when doing 'make bzImage':


make CFLAGS="-D__KERNEL__ -I/root/kernels/linux-2.4.22/include -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=athlon " -C arch/i386/kernel
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/kernels/linux-2.4.22/arch/i386/kernel'

I'll keep this short:
Kernel 2.6.0-test9 blocks suddenly in one odd situation:
- when running LDAP !!!!!!!
This happened to me 3 times today and I begin to think it's something related to the ide driver.
The only error I could see was something about interrupts.
I don't have the output because at the moment I was only furious on my LDAP panicing the kernel :)
I tried to reproduce this but no results yet. I'll keep trying although.

Paul Jackson from SGI recently posted a patch to the Linux kernel mailing list explaining, "It's needed to build NR_CPUS > 256."

SGI has already delivered a custom Altix single system image supercomputer to NASA Ames Research Center with 256 processors running Linux, and their 64 processor Linux systems are generally available.

This latest patch seems to indicate that SGI is testing or getting ready to test Linux 2.6 on a machine with more than 256 processors. This would be a great testament to the scalability of the new kernel.

Andrew Morton [interview] released 2.6.0-test9-mm2 noting, "Various random fixes. Maybe about half of these are 2.6.0-worthy." Regarding recently reported issues with I/O [story], Andrew noted that -mm2 includes "some improvements to the anticipatory IO scheduler and more readahead tweaks should help some of those database benchmarks." He concludes, "The anticipatory scheduler is still a bit behind the deadline scheduler in these random seeky loads - it most likely always will be."

Also included in this release is forcedeth, "A new driver for the ethernet interface of the NVIDIA nForce chipset, licensed under GPL." Find more information about Andrew's -mm tree here. Read on for the full changelog of -test9-mm2.

Martin J. Bligh has released 2.6.0-test9-mjb1 saying, "Mostly a merge forwards." Two new features are included: Con Kolivas' [interview] autoswap patch [story], and an ext2 race fix from Andrew Morton [interview].

Read on for the full changelog.

Dave Jones [interview] has posted an updated version of his quite interesting "post-halloween document", otherwise known as "2.6, what to expect". He says, " I couldn't resist the irony of posting a post-halloween document just before halloween. Quite a few changes since last posting here, and with each posting I tend to get a lot of useful feedback for the next round of changes." Dave acknowledges that the document tends to be somewhat x86-centric, "but most features documented here affect all platforms anyway." For those unfamiliar with the post-halloween document, it describes itself as:

"This document explains some of the new functionality to be found in the 2.6 Linux kernel, some pitfalls you may encounter, and also points out some new features which could really use testing."

Read on for the full text of v0.46.

High-end server owners will be especially interested in Martin J. Bligh's -mjb patchset against the 2.6.0 kernel. Martin says:

"The patchset contains mainly scalability and NUMA stuff, and anything else that stops things from irritating me. It's meant to be pretty stable, not so much a testing ground for new stuff. I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone willing to test on any platform, however large or small."

Read on for the full changelog.

Update (Oct 31, 2003): Martin has release -test9-mjb1 [story].

Nick Piggin [interview] released v17a of his scheduler changes saying, "More balancing fixes. I also incorporated some of Andrew Theurer's ideas. I'm generally getting good numbers now, but using fairly synthetic benchmarks."

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.23-pre9 with the following comments:

"Here goes -pre9. Only bugfixes will be accepted till 2.4.24-pre now.

-pre9 backouts out a few ACPI problematic changes. It also includes a USB
update, JFS update, sis900/starfire/tg3 bugfixes, etc.

Detailed changelog below.

Please help with testing!"

Read on for the complete changelog.

Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.23-pre9 noting that he's only accepting bugfixes now, moving toward the 2.4.23-rc stage. He describes the latest changes, "pre9 backouts out a few ACPI problematic changes. It also includes a USB update, JFS update, sis900/starfire/tg3 bugfixes, etc."

Read on for the full changelog.