The core of all Linux distributions, the Linux kernel version 2.6.25 RC1 and 2.6.24.2 was released. The 2.6.25 RC1 is a development release, and it is much larger than its predecessors.

The development edition, 2.6.25 RC1, is almost 11MB large, and has 1.4 millions lines of diffs. Most of the changes are located in the architecture updates and drivers. By Linus Torvalds' statistics, about 38% of the updates are in architecture files, and about 44% in drivers. Only 8% of the changes went into networking, while filesystems and documentation received 4% and 2% respectively. The rest went into cryptography, security layer updates and kernel core.

The files are being moved and some reorganization is taking place. Some of the highlights of the new 2.6.25 RC1 kernel are:

￭ The intel graphics driver is starting to do suspend/resume natively, without any interference from X. There are some more suspend/resume changes in device access ordering, and several ACPI updates.
￭ Lots of cleanups from the x86 merge (making more and more use of common files), but also the big page attribute stuff is in and caused a fair amount of churn, and while most of the issues should have been very obvious and all got fixed.
￭ Change pci_raw_ops to pci_raw_read/write
￭ via-velocity: section fix
￭ isdn: fix section mismatch warnings from hisax_cs_setup_card
￭ A number of changes to the legacy IDE drivers and a completely new driver for the PCIE version of the Intel e1000 network card and much more.

Here are the changes for the 2.6.24.2 kernel:

￭ splice: fix user pointer access in get_iovec_page_array()
￭ splice: missing user pointer access verification added the proper access_ok() calls to copy_from_user_mmap_sem() which ensures the copying of the struct iovecs from userspace to the kernel.

Download the Linux kernel 2.6.24.2 right now from Softpedia!
Download the Linux kernel 2.6.25 RC1 right now from Softpedia!