"The patches most people hopefully care about tend to be small details," noted Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc6 kernel. He continued, "and so more regressions should hopefully be closed now, some by just reverting the commits that caused breakage. I don't think anything special merits explicit comment, but you can get a flavor for things by scanning the appended shortlog." Earlier in the announcement email, Linus did note some specifics about which drivers caused the bulk of the patch:

"Same old deal - except it's been almost two weeks since -rc5. That said, the diff is actually about the same size, so I guess that means things are calming down. Most of the diff (bulk-wise) is updates to the new gspca (standard USB webcam) driver, although some of it is also removal of the dead miropcm20* driver."

"I'd like to say that the diffs are shrinking and things are calming down, but I'd be lying," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc6 kernel. He noted, "another week, another -rc, and another 350 commits. Yes, the diff is smaller than the one from rc4 to rc5 (despite having more commits), so we're on the right trajectory, but I was hoping for less churn at this stage." Linus continued:

"As usual, most of the changes are to drivers (with arch updates a strong second). The DVB updates are the biggest chunk of that, but on the whole it's quite spread out. As mentioned, the diffs are smaller and there are more commits, and yes, most of the commits are really rather small and trivial fixes.

"Give it a try, we should have a few less regressions once more,"

"I lost a day-and-a-half this week due to a disk that decided to get read errors due to an unfortunate power outage, and had to spend too much time regenerating my normal setup," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc6 kernel, "but I don't think I lost any emails, and things seemed to have calmed down a bit, so here's to hoping that -rc6 is starting to look better." He then summarized the changes:

"The dirstat shows the usual pattern of most changes being in drivers and architecture updates, although this time it's a bit skewed by the parisc and powerpc updates (hopefully closing the parisc compile regression among other things), which means that arch is about half, and drivers are just under a third of the patch (it seems to be usually the other way around)."

"It's been two weeks since rc6, but let's face it, with xmas and new years (and birthdays) in between, there hasn't actually been a lot of working days, and the incremental patch from -rc6 is about half the size of the one from rc5->rc6," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the release of the 2.6.24-rc7 Linux kernel. He then quipped, "and I'll be charitable and claim it's because it's all stabilizing, and not because we've all been in a drunken stupor over the holidays." Linus quickly summarized the changes:

"The shortlog (appended below) is short and fairly informative. It's all really just a lot of rather small changes. The diffstat shows a lot of one- and two-liners, with just a few drivers (and the Cell platform) getting a bit more attention, and the SLUB support of /proc/slabinfo showing up as a blip."

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as "a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:

"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

Linus Torvalds announced the sixth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, a final release expected within the next few weeks. He noted:

"So last week was a bust, with a lot of core people away for the kernel summit, and with -rc5 having two rather nasty (and silly) one-liner problems that bit a number of people - a missing NULL pointer check in TCP, and a missing list terminator in ata_piix.

"So the fixes for those things were both pretty trivial, and they've been in the -git trees for the last few days, but I just pushed out an -rc6 that also merges up some other updates that did come in during the week."

The -rc6 source level changes can be browsed via the gitweb interface.