Following two months after the release of the 2.6.9 Zonked Quokka Linux kernel [story], Linux creator Linus Torvalds released Woozy Numbat, the 2.6.10 kernel. He summarizes:

"Ok, with a lot of people taking an xmas break, here's something to play with over the holidays (not to mention an excuse for me to get into the Glögg for real ;)

"Mostly a lot of small fixes since 2.6.10-rc3, with the biggest thing being probably the CIFS update and the switch-over to the new DVB frontend driver world order. Some MMC and USB work too, and ARM updates as usual."

Further information can be found in the release announcements for 2.6.10-rc1 [story], 2.6.10-rc2 [story], and 2.6.10-rc3 [story], as well as in the complete changelog. The latest version of the kernel can be downloaded from your nearest kernel.org mirror. Read on for the list of changes since 2.6.10-rc3.

With the release of 2.6.9-mm1, Andrew Morton [interview] offered a quick status update on a number of patches in his -mm tree [forum] that are 2.6-mainline hopefuls. For example, regarding the much debated reiser4 filesystem [story], Andrew said that he is still "not sure, really. The namespace extensions were disabled, although all the code for that is still present. Linus's filesystem criterion used to be 'once lots of people are using it, preferably when vendors are shipping it'. That's a bit of a chicken and egg thing though. Needs more discussion". And as for Ingo Molnar [interview]'s preemption and low-latency fixups [forum] Andrew offered, "I haven't really thought about it and haven't looked at the patches yet. Hopefully 2.6.10 material."

Other projects specifically mentioned include the sysfs backing store, the ext3 reservations code, the ext3 resize code, kexec and crashdump [story], perfctr, cachefs, cpusets, and the md updates. Read on for Andrew's comments and the complete -mm1 changelog.