"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface. Willy added:

"I'm very conscious that 2.4 has mostly left desktop PCs and notebooks, but it's still commonly found on servers, route reflectors or firewalls. For this reason, I'm open to merge the small updates required to maintain such systems running (eg: PCI IDs and such), but I will generally refuse all patches which add support for new desktop or notebook-specific hardware, unless the people present very convincing arguments. Those people generally would better upgrade their systems to 2.6."

The 2.4 stable kernel tree has been maintained by Willy Tarreau for a year, since July of 2006 [story]. When recently asked if the tree had been abandoned, Willy replied, "no it's not abandoned at all! The difficulty with 2.4 is to get user feedback on patches. While in 2.6, there are hundreds or thousands of testers for every release, in 2.4, I have to wait longer after every release in order to start collecting problem reports, or confirmation of fixes. People using it in production generally cannot reboot a machine in the evening just to try a patch. Also, subsystem maintainers have less time to spend on it and are themselves slowed down by the slow feedback process."

As to the upcoming 2.4.35 kernel, Willy noted, "I still have a few patches to merge, and I expect to be able to work on them next week-end, then release -rc1, which I expect to be the only -rc before -final (which will probably not be true as in every -rc)."