"The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let's hope it's a good one," said Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.24 Linux kernel. He noted, "nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8". Source level changes can be viewed via the gitweb interface. A nice overview of all changes can be found at Kernel Newbies.

In a followup email, Linus added:

"Since I already had two kernel developers asking about the merge window and whether people (including me) traveling will impact it, the plan right now is to keep the impact pretty minimal. So yes, it will probably extend the window from the regular two weeks, but *hopefully* not by more than a few days."

Adrian Bunk posted a list of known regressions in the latest 2.6.20-rc4 Linux kernel compared to the previous 2.6.19 stable release [story]. In two emails, he listed six regressions that don't have fixes yet, and six regressions with fixes that haven't been merged yet.

In another email thread, Linux creator Linus Torvalds noted that his goal for 2.6.20 is to focus primarily on stability. He also noted that he intends to release the stable kernel at some point after linux.conf.au which is happening this year in Sydney, Australia between January 15th and 20th. He explains, "hopefully 'final -rc' before LCA, but I'll do the actual 2.6.20 release afterwards. I don't want to have a merge window during LCA, as I and many others will all be out anyway. So it's much better to have LCA happen during the end of the stabilization phase when there's hopefully not a lot going on. (Of course, often at the end of the stabilization phase there is all the 'ok, what about regression XyZ?' panic)"