Published at LXer:

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the second release candidate 2.6.20-rc2 kernel, "it's a couple of days delayed, because we've been trying to figure out what is up with the rtorrent hash failures since 2.6.18.3. I don't think we've made any progress, but we've cleaned up a number of suspects in the meantime." He noted that he had been aiming to make the 2.6.20 kernel a quick, stable release, "I was really hoping to make 2.6.20 an easy release, and held back on merging some stuff during the merge window for that reason. And now we're battling something that was introduced much earlier.." He also noted that the bug in question isn't likely to affect many people, "but it's still a worrisome problem, and we've had 'top people' looking at it. And they'll continue, but xmas is coming." The bug is discussed inthis thread on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.Regarding changes in the current release candidate, Linus summarized that in addition to general stabilization, "this mainly does some driver updates (usb, sound, dri, pci hotplug) and ACPI updates (much of the latter syntactic cleanups). And arm and powerpc updates." A nice summary of what's gone into the upcoming 2.6.20 kernel can be found in theKernelNewbies Wiki which has a list including asynchronous SCSI scanning, multithreaded USB probing, HID Layer split: allows things other than USB to use the HID layer (Bluetooth), and I/O Accounting.

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