Andrew Morton [interview] posted an overview of patches in -mm, discussing what is destined for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.18 Linux kernel. He noted, "there is an unusually large amount of difficult material here." Patch sets that were discussed include a cleanup of kernel headers, klibc, various subsystem cleanups, the ACX1xx wireless driver, swsup cleanups, per-task statistic metrics, a clocksource management infrastructure, smpnice, swap prefetching [story], priority-inheriting futexes, a revamp of /proc/pid, ecryptfs, utsname virtualization [story], readahead, reiser4 improvements, a statistics infrastructure, and lock validation code.

Following up on a couple of features discussed earlier on KernelTrap, both swap-prefetching and utsname virtualization were briefly discussed. In regards to swap-prefetching Andrew noted, "I remain skeptical, but I have a lot of RAM. Multiple people have sung its praises. I guess I'll re-review and tentatively plan on sending them along or 2.6.18. Opinions are sought." As for utsname virtualization, "this doesn't seem very pointful as a standalone thing. That's a general problem with infrastructural work for a very large new feature. So probably I'll continue to babysit these patches, unless someone can identify a decent reason why mainline needs this work. I don't want to carry an ever-growing stream of OS-virtualisation groundwork patches for ever and ever so if we're going to do this thing... faster, please."