Zack's Kernel News

Status of the 2.2 Kernel

Back in August 2007, Xose Vazquez Perez asked about the status of the 2.2 kernel tree and noted that version 2.2.26 had been released way back on February 25, 2004. On the other hand, the latest release candidate for 2.2.27 was from January 12, 2005. Willy Tarreau replied that any new release of the 2.2 kernel tree might lead users to believe that it was usable. However, he pointed out that, by now, a lot of security fixes have not gone into that tree, and it is simply too far out of date to continue to maintain.

Xose accepted this explanation at the time, but recently he followed up, suggesting that the 2.2 kernel be removed from the front page of kernel.org. If it is so out of date that no one should use it or patch it, he argued, it clearly shouldn't be advertised on kernel.org. This seems to make some sense; however, at the time of this writing, the 2.2. kernel is still listed on kernel.org with the rest of the kernel trees.

Cute Way to Schedule Code Removal

Matthew Wilcox had a nifty idea to save Andrew Morton a little headache. The current list of kernel features that are scheduled for removal is kept in a single file called feature-removal-schedule.txt. As part of innocently going about their business, kernel hackers who want to schedule a feature for removal have naturally added their items to the bottom of that file. The problem is that everyone then submits their changes to that file as a patch, so all the patches conflict with each other because they are all attempting to add different text at the same place in the file. As a result, Andrew has apparently been resolving these conflicts by hand, which is annoying for him.

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