Linux Kernel 2.6.24 RC2 Released

Linus Torvalds has announced last night the immediate availability of the second release candidate of Linux kernel 2.6.24 series: "Yeah, don't remind me - it's late. There was nothing in particular holding this thing up, I basically just forgot to cut a -rc2 release last week."

This release contains some arch updates for the following architectures:

￭ MIPS
￭ arm
￭ blackfin
￭ x86
￭ sparc[64]
￭ sh
￭ s390

There are some driver updates for libata, networking, IDE, DVB, scheduler cleanups and CPU usage statistics fixes.

Other changes include:

￭ x86: voyager: fix bogus conversion to per_cpu for boot_cpu_info
￭ mmc: sg fallout
￭ x86 gart: rename iommu.h to gart.h
￭ V4L/DVB (6390): Updates missing entries at CARDLIST.em28xx
￭ [MIPS] Alchemy: Nuke homebrew setup_irq(), it's broken and unnecessary.
￭ [IA64] fix typo in per_cpu_offset

"Nothing really earthshattering that I can recall or see. A lot of it is
small buglets and compiler warnings (and occasionally broken builds). The
shortlog is still slightly too large for the mailing list limit, so you need to generate it either from the full log (posted on the normal sites) or with "git shortlog v2.6.24-rc1.." but quite frankly, it's no Leo Tolstoy. If you have trouble falling asleep, you might try to print it out and take it to bed with you: it's
not going to be more than just a couple of pages ("use 2nup and save a tree"), but I dare you to actually get to the end." - stated Linus Torvalds in the release announcement.

For a full change-log with all the new features, drivers and improvements, please click here.

The Linux Kernel is the essential part of all Linux Distributions, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, simple communications, and basic file system management.

Linux is a clone of the Unix operating system, initially written from scratch by Linus Torvalds, assisted by a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims to achieve POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

You can download the full Linux kernel source archive now from Softpedia.

You can get the 2.6.24 RC2 patch from here.