Download Linux Kernel 2.6.24

On the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Linus Torvalds has announced another new Linux 2.6 kernel. This time the kernel has arrived at version number 2.6.24 and contains the necessary improvements compared to the previous release. For example, the tickless feature is now also supported on x86-64, ppc, uml, and various types of arm and mips. In addition, a lot of work has been done on wireless network drivers, as the 2.6.22 kernel introduced a new stack that was used by only one driver. With 2.6.24, many drivers have transitioned to use this new stack which provides an improved configuration interface. Torvalds’ succinct announcement looks like this:

The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let’s hope it’s a good one.

Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the tree.

But most of it really is one-liners, and mostly not very exciting ones at that.

The appended shortlog is obviously just the changes from -rc8, if you want the full ChangeLog (all 5.8MB of it) from 2.6.23 it’s available in the usual places.

Linus[break]The members of Kernel Newbies have the complete list of changes thoroughly and clearly described on this page. As a very brief overview, they state the following:[/break]Short overview

Version 2.6.24 includes CPU “group scheduling”, memory fragmentation avoidance, tickless support for x86-64/ppc and other architectures, many new wireless drivers and a new wireless configuration interface, SPI/SDIO MMC support, USB authorization, per-device dirty memory thresholds, support for PID and network namespaces, support for static probe markers, read-only bind mounts, SELinux performance improvements, SATA link power management and port multiplier support, Large Receive Offload in network devices, memory hot-remove support, a new framework for controlling the idle processor power management, CIFS ACLs support, many new drivers and many other features and fixes.