Andrew Morton [interview] has released 2.6.0-test5-mm4 with the following comments, "A series of patches from Al Viro which introduce 32-bit dev_t support. Various new fixes".

One piece of excitement found in the -mm4 changelog is that the Con Kolivas [interview] interactivity patches [forum], rolled together under the name "sched-interactivity.patch", have been merged into the mainline 2.6-test development kernel, and will be found in 2.6.0-test6. Read on for the full 2.6.0-test5-mm4 changelog.

Marcelo Tosatti has released the 2.4.23-pre5 kernel with the following comments:

"Here goes -pre5. It contains a bunch of important ACPI fixes, adds a very important missing hunk from -aa VM merge, amongst others."

Read on for the full changelog.

So,

Does anyone else on the planet burn CDs in 2.6.0-test5 with cdrecord and ATAPI access? I cant seem to compile the cdrecord betas and alphas against 2.6. i am really looking forward to using ATAPI over scsi emulation, and help to be had?

-mix

[root@BettyBoop libscg]# make
==> MAKING "all" ON SUBCOMPONENT ".../libscg.mk"
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/cdrtools-2.01/libscg'

Alan Cox [interview] released 2.4.22-ac4 with the following comments:

"Trying to squash various little bugs. Again IDE changes, handle with care. Hopefully the ALi hang is now fixed."

Read on for the complete changelog.

Andrew Morton [interview] released 2.6.0-test5-mm3, describing the changes vaguely as, "Lots of random things."

Read on for the full changelog.

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer has released 2.4.23-pre4-pac2, synchronizing with 2.4.22-ac3 [story], updating the APCI code, and updating the device mapper.

The full changelog follows.

Is there a comparision between Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.1 about these topics: VM, VFS, scheduler, SMP and threading?

Con Kolivas [interview] released O20.2int commenting, "Not sure why I made this incorrect change in the first place, but it would hardly be noticable except in latency tests. This patch reverts it." He quickly followed with the release of O20.3int, explaining, "Yep I really hate doing this, sorry. This is what I was supposed to do in
O20.2int."

Read on to see both of the patches, which apply to 2.6.0-test5-mm2 or an O20.1int patched kernel.

Alan Cox [interview] released 2.4.22-ac3 with the comment, "This one should be treated gently initially."

Read on for the full changelog.

Benhard Rosenkraenzer has released 2.4.23-pre4-pac1, with a number of changes.

Read on for the full changelog.

Andrew Morton released 2.6.0-test5-mm2. Changes include documentation for the Anticipatory I/O scheduler and power management updates.

The recently-released 2.6.0-test5-mm2 kernel [forum] includes a patch that add the missing Documentation/as-iosched.txt file. Currently the new file contains a note about trying out the deadline scheduler (especially when using TCQ disks or when high disk performance is required), how to select the I/O scheduler at boot time, and an explanation of the various tunables for the scheduler.

Read on for the full contents of as-iosched.txt, current as of 2.6.0-test5-mm2.

Con Kolivas [interview] has released an updated interactivity patch for the 2.4.22 kernel [forum]. With the release of 2.4.22-ck2, Con has added XFS and GRSec to his patchset. Con further describes:

"The O1int interactivity backport is more substantial now bringing it in line with O20.1int with only the nanosecond resolution missing from the 2.6 work. CK vm hacks and swap prefetch were dropped and AA Vm addons were merged as part of the default - lack of time prevented me maintaining ck vm properly."

Read on for his full announcement email.

Marcelo Tosatti has released 2.4.23-pre4 "which contains networking updates, IA64 updates, PPC updates, USB updates, [a] bunch of knfsd fixes, [and] others." Perhaps more exciting for most stable 2.4 kernel [forum] users are the VM updates that are also in this release. Marcelo explains:

"And finally [I've merged the] most important parts of [the] -aa VM. Those changes are fixing some OOM deadlocks, [giving] better per-zone balancing and better reclaiming. The OOM killer has been removed."

These recent VM changes, including the removal of the OOM killer, were discussed earlier [story]. Marcelo points out that while performance feels much better, there is a need for many people to help out by downloading 2.4.23-pre4 and testing the recent improvements.

In late August, Alan Cox [interview] announced that he was soon to be taking a year off from kernel development to study for an MBA [story]. Concerned about the fate of Alan's -ac patchset, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer followed up by releasing the '-pac' patchset, or "ported -ac" [story].

Bero (Bernhard) has continued to release updated -pac patsets, and Alan recently took notice, commenting, "Cool stuff." Though to date Alan has continued to release his -ac patches [forum], he goes on to say, "For 23-pre-ac .. its all yours Bero."

Bero's recently released 2.4.23-pre3-pac2 syncronizes with Alan's latest 2.4.22-ac2 [story], fixes an oops with acpi=off, and includes an updated NTFS. Read on for the full discussion.