Kernel 2.6.12 Released

Mad Merlin writes "Linux kernel 2.6.12 has been released! Kerneltrap has a brief summary on it. The changelog is only partial however: 'The full ChangeLog ended up missing, because I only have the history from 2.6.12-rc2 in my git archives, but if you want to, you can puzzle it together by taking the 2.6.12 changelog and merging it with the -rc1 and -rc2 logs in the testing directory. The file that says ChangeLog-2.6.12 only contains the stuff from -rc2 onward.' As always you can find the changelog and the source at kernel.org"

Comments

Some explaination in the changelog...

[Whyte]

commit 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2
Author: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sat Apr 16 15:20:36 2005 -0700

Linux-2.6.12-rc2

Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.

Let it rip!

2.6.13

[jd]

There was a discussion on LWN about what was going to happen in the 2.6.13 and 2.6.14 timeframe. Apparently, there is speculation Linus may merge in a lot of the more stable stuff from Andrew Morton's -mm patchset. If the updated RAID drivers are in that patchset, there is a good chance they will be in 2.6.13 or 2.6.14.

In the meantime, there are a lot of valuable, interesting and worthwhile projects that aren't in ANY of the patchsets at this point in time. I e-mailed a few of the maintainers about that, and it appears that they're aware of the problem but want general users to pressure the patch maintainers to publish patches on the kernel mailing list AND that said patches should conform to the kernel programming style.

So, again, if you want updated drivers for RAID, or additional features you know damn well exist and are out there, lobby the maintainers until they publish the stuff in a way the core kernel maintainers like.

There is simply far too much good stuff out there that is not being seen and not being used. It has got to the point where I will be reviving my own FOLK patch series, to start documenting the patches that live out on the fringes of kernelspace. If we want a better Linux, all we have to do is ask in a way that will be heard.