Last month saw the opening and subsequent closing of the 2.6.35 kernel’s merge window, the period of time during which all of the exciting new features that have been waiting in the wings (and in linux-next nightly kernels provided by Stephen Rothwell) are considered for merging into the official ‘mainline’ kernel source tree by Linus Torvalds…

Last month Linus Torvalds released the final 2.6.34 kernel, following a bumpy few weeks that saw a major virtual memory (the subsystem responsible for memory management in-kernel) glitch, the usual round of regressions, and a power outage that knocked vger.kernel.org

The past month saw steady progress toward the final 2.6.34 kernel release, including the announcement of initial Release Candidate kernels 2.6.34-rc1 through 2.6.34-rc4. The latter had an interesting virtual memory bug that added a week of delay (I will cover that in a future issue), and of course there was already an incompatible release of the nouveau graphics driver that was covered in last month’s column.

Last month saw the release of the final 2.6.33 Linux kernel, following several months of development (and some last-minute patches – including the network namespace bug this author discovered and wrote about the previous month).

Another month, another kernel release. Last month saw what is hopefully the final RC (release candidate) 2.6.33 kernel, and so it should have been released by the time you read this…

Last month saw the opening (and then closing) of the 2.6.33 merge window (the time during which Linus takes potentially ‘intrusive’ patches to the kernel, followed by a period of stabilisation) and with it a flood of patches intended for the 2.6.33 kernel release…

Last month many developers were scurrying to prepare for the 2.6.33 merge window. When they weren’t doing that, here are a few of the items that were under discussion, starting with the Big Kernel Lock…

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer, and head of the Linux Drivers Project. He is a Novell Fellow, and works on the SUSE distribution for that company. We talked to him about his work past, present and future on the Linux kernel…

Jon Masters is a Linux kernel hacker who has been working on Linux for almost 14 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor…