Linus updates us on the 2.2 production tree, and introduces the
2.3 development tree of the Linux kernel:
Linus writes:
As some people have already noticed, I yesterday released 2.2.8,
and in the same breath made a 2.3.x release tree (where 2.3.0 is
exactly the same as 2.2.8 except the numbers have changed – making
it easier to synchronize the two in the beginning).
Most of 2.2.8 by far is just architecture updates: arm, ppc and
m68k stand out as having been pretty much synchronized to their
respective devel trees, but there are some fixes to alpha and x86
too.
The one major fix in 2.2.8 is the SMP fix for disable_irq(),
courtesy of Andrea Arcangeli (I disagreed in details and did it
differently in the end, but all the heavy lifting was done by
Andrea). This is the thing that caused silenth deaths for some
people with certain network adapters (3c509 and 8390-based cards in
particular: the latter covers ne2000 clones which are fairly
common).
There are lots of smaller things (driver updates, filesystem
cleanups and some networking fixes), but the SMP irq thing is the
one to kill for if you happened to have any of the affected
cards.
As to 2.3.x, we’re beginning with a long overdue waitqueue
cleanup, which means that a lot of small details need to get fixed
in a variety of files. A working pre-patch of this is to be found
as pre-patch-2.3.1-3, but not all drivers have been fixed – and
help is appreciated (even drivers that _have_ been fixed have not
necessarily actually been tested due to lack of hardware).
Linus