The purpose of this page is tracking and explaining the features added in every release, just like the [http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/DragonFly_Status Dragonfly people did].

It'd be nice if kernel hackers would spend some minutes adding their stuff here. The one place where you can find a comparable changelog are the fabulous LWN kernel articles: http://lwn.net/Kernel/, or the [http://lwn.net/Articles/driver-porting/ driver porting guide] - but there's no reason why the kernel community shouldn't embrace and extend those efforts

TODO:

• Import [http://kernelnewbies.org/status/latest.html Kernelnewbies status] list (2.5.57 - 2.6.0-test9 done)

• Import relevant data from [http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.txt davej's post halloween document]

• Keep track of what gets changed

2.6.14:

2.6.13:

• x86 now uses the generic PCI bus setup code for assigning unassigned resources

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/104343/ inotify]

• Support for the Xtensa architecture: [http://www.tensilica.com/products/xtensa_architecture.htm 32-bit architecture] used in embedded devices

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/108595/ kexec and kdump]: Kexec allows users to load a new kernel from another running kernel. By preserving the memory contents in a crash scenario, kexec allows to implement kdump. Kdump is able to get a memory dump of the previous kernel, and be used as a debugging tool.

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/135472/ Execute-in-place support]: Traditionally, programs are loaded from disk to memory to be executed. However, the current wave of embedded devices store programs in a ROM/flash chip. XIP allows the kernel executing programs directly from that ROM, without being copied to RAM (saving RAM space), and bypassing the page cache/io scheduler layers (since they're not needed).

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/145973/ build-time configurable clock interrupt frequency]:

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/143474/ Improved CFQ IO scheduler]

• Voluntary preemption patches
• Removal of the devfs configuration option

2.6.12:

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/140164/ API changes]

• New driver for the "trusted computing" (TPM) crap^Wchip

• [http://www.superh.com/products/shyway.htm SuperHyway bus support]

• Multilevel security implementation for SELinux

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/124703/ device mapper multipath support]

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/121845/ Address space randomization]

• Restore the Philips webcam driver
• I/O barrier support for serial ATA drives

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/134460/ "resource limits"]

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/127936/ cpusets]

• Remove IPV6 "experimental" status

2.6.11:

2.6.10:

2.6.9:

2.6.8:

2.6.7:

2.6.6:

2.6.5:

2.6.4:

2.6.3:

2.6.2:

2.6.1:

2.6.0:

2.6.0-test9:

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/44243/ libata driver architecture]

2.6.0-test6:

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=104344596912094&w=2 32-bit dev_t]

2.6.0-test3:

• [http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/index.html SELinux]

2.6.0-test1:

• [http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/ Linux Virtual Server layer]

2.5.75:

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&m=104529418208788&w=2 Anticipatory Scheduler]

2.5.74:

2.5.73:

2.5.72:

2.5.71:

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=104981044405395&w=2 Switch the IDE I/O layers to taskfile]

2.5.70:

• [http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget USB gadget support]

2.5.69:

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/29555/ New interrupt handling API]

2.5.68:

2.5.67:

2.5.66:

2.5.65:

• [http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=603 Desktop Interactivity Improvements]

2.5.64:

2.5.63:

• [http://high-res-timers.sourceforge.net/ POSIX timers]

2.5.62:

2.5.61:

2.5.60:

• New modversions implementation
• 64-bit jiffies

2.5.59:

• [http://home.arcor.de/efocht/sched/ NUMA aware scheduler extensions]

2.5.68:

2.5.57:

• [http://www.zipworld.com.au/~akpm/linux/schedlat.html Remove long-held locks for low scheduling latency]

2.5.56:

2.5.55:

2.5.54:

• [http://secure.netroedge.com/~lm78/ Add lm-sensors drivers for hardware health monitoring]

• Support for AGP 3.0

2.5.53:

• "sysenter" support

2.5.52:

2.5.51:

• [http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/ Rewrite of the console layer]

• Compatibility syscall layer

2.5.50:

2.5.49:

2.5.48:

• [http://lists.insecure.org/lists/linux-kernel/2002/Oct/6214.html In-kernel module loader]

2.5.47:

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.1/0429.html Zerocopy NFS]

2.5.46:

• [http://www.xmailserver.org/linux-patches/nio-improve.html Better I/O performance with epoll]

• Per-cpu hot & cold page lists

• [http://lists.insecure.org/lists/linux-kernel/2002/Oct/7027.html MMU-less processor support (ucLinux)]

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=101095500820185&w=2 Replace initrd by initramfs]

• Extended Attributes and ACLs for ext2/ext3

2.5.45:

• [http://www.xs4all.nl/~zippel/lc/ New Linux configuration system: kconfig]

• [http://samba.org/~jamesm/crypto/ CryptoAPI]

• [ftp://ftp.linux-ipv6.org/pub/usagi/patch/ipsec/ IPSEC]

• [http://www.linuxtv.org/dvb/ Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) layer]

• [http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm Device mapper for Logical Volume Manager (LVM2)]

2.5.44:

• New sysfs filesystem (formerly known as driverfs)
• Plug'N Play Layer Rewrite

• [http://lwn.net/Articles/9042/ x86 BIOS Enhanced Disk Device (EDD) polling]

2.5.43:

• [http://www.psc.edu/general/filesys/afs/ Andrew File System (AFS) support]

• [http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/ OProfile, a low-overhead profiler]

• [http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking Read-Copy Update (RCU) Mutual Exclusion]

• [http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/ Add support for NFS v4]

2.5.42:

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=103298446916066&w=2 ext2/ext3 large directory support: HTree index]

• [http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html Add new CIFS (Common Internet File System)]

• [http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/ Remove the 2TB block device limit]

• Improved i2o (Intelligent Input/Ouput) layer

2.5.41:

2.5.40:

• [http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa Parallelizing page replacement]

• [http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa NUMA topology support

• [http://www.brodo.de/cpufreq/ Add support for CPU clock/voltage scaling]

2.5.39:

• New IO scheduler ("deadline")

2.5.38:

2.5.37:

• [http://users.pandora.be/bart.de.schuymer/ebtables/ Ethernet bridge tables support]

• Remove the global tasklist

2.5.36:

• Hugepage support

• [http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ XFS filesystem from SGI]

2.5.35:

• Serial ATA support

• [http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/index.html Add User-Mode Linux (UML)]

2.5.34:

• POSIX threading support for signals

• [http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa discontigmem support (ia32)]

2.5.33:

• TCP segmentation offload

• [http://www.sf.net/projects/lksctp SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)]

2.5.32:

• [http://people.redhat.com/drepper/nptl-design.pdf Improved POSIX threading support]

• [http://freshmeat.net/projects/linux-aio/ Asynchronous IO (aio) support]

• Porting all input devices over to input API
• New MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) driver

2.5.31:

• Support insane number of processes
• Disk description cleanups

2.5.30:

2.5.29:

• Strict address space accounting

• [http://lsm.immunix.org/ Add Linux Security Module (LSM)]

• [http://people.redhat.com/mingo/tls-patches/ Thread-Local Storage (TLS) support]

2.5.28:

• Remove the "Big IRQ lock"
• Serial driver restructure

2.5.27:

• [http://surriel.com/patches/ New VM with reverse mappings]

2.5.26:

• Direct pagecache <-> BIO disk I/O

2.5.25:

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0207.0/0741.html Faster internal kernel clock frequency]

2.5.24:

2.5.23:

• [http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rusty/patches/Hotcpu/ Hotplug CPU support]

• [http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/patches/wip More complete IEEE 802.2 stack]

2.5.22:

2.5.21:

2.5.20:

2.5.19:

2.5.18:

• [http://falcon.sch.bme.hu/~seasons/linux/swsusp.html Software suspend (to disk & RAM)]

2.5.17:

• Move ISDN4Linux to CAPI based interface

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=101586205801483&w=2 New quota system supporting plugins]

2.5.16:

2.5.15:

2.5.14:

• Bluetooth support (no longer experimental!)

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.1/1250.html Support for IDE TCQ (Tagged Command Queueing)]

2.5.13:

2.5.12:

• Rewrite of the buffer layer

2.5.11:

• Rewrite of the framebuffer layer

• [http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.3/0129.html Fast walk dcache]

• [http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ Replace old NTFS driver with NTFS TNG driver]

2.5.10:

2.5.9:

• Smarter IRQ balancing

2.5.8:

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.1/0215.html Radix-tree pagecache]

• [http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/cpu-affinity Syscall interface for CPU task affinity]

2.5.7:

• [http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpi/ ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface)]

• [ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/NAPI/ NAPI network interrupt mitigation]

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.0/0884.html Futexes (Fast Lightweight Userspace Semaphores]

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.0/0335.html Video for Linux (V4L) redesign]

• [http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html New driver API for Wireless Extensions]

2.5.6:

• [http://www.hojdpunkten.ac.se/054/samba/ http://www.hojdpunkten.ac.se/054/samba/]

• [http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-01/0438.html HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) update]

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.2/0920.html per_cpu infrastructure]

• [http://www-124.ibm.com/jfs/ Add JFS (Journaling FileSystem from IBM)]

2.5.5:

• [http://linuxppc64.org/ New architecture: PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64)]

• [http://www.x86-64.org/ New architecture: AMD 64-bit (x86-64)]

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.2/0297.html Pagetables in highmem support]

• [http://www.alsa-project.org/ Add ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture]

2.5.4:

• [http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/pthreads/ Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading]

• [ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/preempt-kernel/ Add preempt kernel option]

2.5.3:

• [http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mochel/doc/ New driver model & unified device tree]

• [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0109.3/1341.html PnP BIOS driver]

• [http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=7686796&list=35 Generic Extended Attribute support]

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=101077476005939&w=2 Support reiserfs external journal]

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=101121711408999&w=2 IDE layer update]

2.5.2:

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=100992347220716&w=2 New kernel device structure (kdev_t)]

• [http://people.redhat.com/mingo/O(1)-scheduler/ O(1) scheduler for improved scalability]

• [http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=98307457705210&w=2 Filesystem per-process namespaces, late-boot cleanups]

• [http://www.linux-usb.org/usb2.html Initial support for USB 2.0]

2.5.1:

• Rewrite of the block IO (bio) layer