Download Linux Kernel 2.6.12

Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 2.6.12 a few days ago. This is the first stable release since they switched from BitKeeper to Git as their source code management tool. The full changelog is available on this place after being read and the announcement looks like this:

As some people may have noticed already, 2.6.12 is out there now.

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.

One of the least important changes is still worth pointing out: it was discussed earlier on the kernel mailing list in another thread, but maybe people didn’t notice it: the sign-off procedure was clarified to make it clear that the person signing off understands that the project – and thus the patch and the sign-off itself, of course – is public and will be archived.

This may sound silly and obvious – and it is – but it makes people more comfortable about the fact that we obviously save identifying information in the sign-off (that’s the whole point), and in general people also submit things like their own email addresses in CREDITS files etc, and so nobody should be expecting any of that to be kept confidential.

I don’t think anybody did, of course, but hey, this way it’s explicit.

Btw, in case anybody ends up wondering about what the actual patches are, if you’re a git user (or, more likely, not quite a user yet, but rather wondering what you can do with git), you can start off with doing

git-whatchanged -p v2.6.12-rc6..v2.6.12

and it will do exactly what you think it migth do – it shows every commit between -rc6 and the final 2.6.12 release as a patch (“-p”) with the associated commit message.

Linus