This week's poll deals with that question. Previous polls have shown most PowerPC users who frequently upgrade their kernel prefer 2.4 from bitkeeper tree, over stock Linux 2.2.19. I'm sure some of you still use the stock kernel, and some of you upgrade it multiple times a day. ;)

While it was up to now not recommended to use the kernel.org sources for a 2.4.x PowerPC Linux Kernel as those sources were uncomplete and buggy, this seems to have changed with the release of the 2.4.7 kernel sources.

The sources compile and boot fine on most PowerPC systems.

Take a look at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ and try it for yourself ...

The Linux kernel has turned 10 today. The kernel, coded originally by Linus Torvalds and now maintained by hundreds of developers around the World, is so to say the core of what we know as GNU/Linux nowadays.

A special page has been dedicated to this event at

Linux fans all around the World are doing party now (or will), there are plenty of organized events this Saturday.
Let's say it's a good pretext to get lots of beer :P Cheers to all the Linux folks out there...

The 2.4.11 Linux kernel appearently had some serious bug when trying to create files through a dangling symlink. This could notably cause larger problems with some links like /dev/mouse on SuSE based systems.

The bug was caused through a fix for a symlink DoS attack. It has been solved now and the fixed kernel has been renumbered to 2.4.12

You can get it at It is reported to compile and run fine on PPC.

While users of "other" operating systems usually know little and care little about how their OS works under the hood, this is in many cases different for Linux users.

Some of you may have followed the heavy debate about the Kernel Virtual Memory manager. A has now been posted on byte.com. Definately worth reading.

The 2.4.15 series of the Linux kernel could well be the last in the official 2.4.x series before a 2.5.x tree is opened.
Kernel 2.4.15-pre2 introduced official support for the ext3 file system, promising successor of ext2.
2.4.15-pre3 brings above all driver merges, the complete changelog for the 2.4.15 series can be found .

Linux kernel 2.4.15-pre4 is out and a 2.5 tree seems to be coming closer and closer.

Seen on PPC Lists:
Hi,

Okay, with lots of help from Ani and Ben and starting with Ani's most recent radeon code which worked for LCDs and with a lot of testing on my Apple Flat Panel 17 connected to a Radeon Mac Edition card on the dvi port with a dviAtor adapter, I now have the DFP support for radeon frame buffer working well including parsing of the EDID block from OF.

Kernel 2.4.15-pre7 is out. Complete changelog can be found .

It looks like the tree has begun. You should be able to find it at your local . Keep in mind that 2.5 appears to have been branched from 2.4.15, so 2.5.0 is the same as 2.4.15. You can find the 2.4.15 changelog .

The iMacLinux Kernel Guide has been completely re-written from scratch. It takes on the same style and format of the original iMacLinux Kernel guide that I wrote back in 1999. The guide explains how to build the kernel, taking you through each step and explaining what commands you need as you go along. You can find the guide here. The guide is iMac specific, but it should be enough to get you started on other hardware as well. Now that the guide is available, the editors of the other sections (iBook, PowerMac etc), will make new hardware specific versions available.

There is a serious bug in 2.4.15 (possibly in the latest benh kernel tree), that causes filesystem corruption on shutdown (umount). You can find a patch .

has about Linux 2.4.16-pre1 being out and how it fixes serious inode problem we mentioned earlier today. It also has PPC fixes, so it SHOULD compile under PPC again.

After John Buswell has posted his iMacLinux Kernel Guide yesterday, I adapted it to the iBook. You will see that there are very very few changes, as John did a great job on his guide :)

Linux 2.4.16 has been released. You can find the changelog , and you can download it from . It should be on most later today.

There are 2 new pre versions of the actual stable and development kernel, 2.4.17-pre2 and 2.5.1-pre5 Like expected (and like it should be), the 2.4 kernel got a lot of fixes and new features have been added to the 2.5 kernel. You can find the changelogs within.

Yaboot 1.3.6 has been released, the primary changes are to fix compatibility problems with IBM CHRP hardware introduced in 1.3.4, as well as some improved documentation. Detailed changelog and download available at

Changelog within...

Changelog within.

Changelog within.

Kernel 2.4.17-pre6 and 2.5.1-pre7 are available. Changelogs within. Like always, they can be downloaded at

- Greg KH: USB updates
- Jens Axboe: more bio updates
- Christoph Rohland: fix up proper shmat semantics

Download at

Changelog within.

More info inside...

- Jeff Garzik: separate out handling of older tulip chips
- Jens Axboe: more bio stuff
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS 1.1.21 update

Seeing an RC version of a kernel is something completely new, yet I believe it's a good idea. The plan is to have updates, driver additions and bug fixes done all along the -pre versions, while the -rc versions will freeze the kernel features and only bug fixes will be allowed in.

Changelog for this very first release candidate within.

title says it all
kernel 2.5.1 is out
get it a http://www.kernel.org

Note by Olivier Reisch: The 2.5.x kernel tree is under heavy development, only experienced users should try it to help the kernel developers find bugs and missing stuff. "Normal" users should stick to the stable 2.4.x tree.

The second release candidate to kernel 2.4.17 is available. This could become the final 2.4.17 kernel. Bugfixes within.

2.4.17 is finally out, changelog within.
Major PPC changes are planed to be merged into 2.4.18, so stay tuned :)

Several PPC merges are going into 2.4.18

Changelog within.

Changelog within. Available, as always, at .

Linux 2.4.18-pre3 is available and with it, the larger PPC merge with 2.4.18 has been accomplished. The official sources are now almost up to par with the official stable PPC tree. Thus, it should compile fine on most PPC machines and include the latest features.

Among the parts not merged yet is support for AGP on PPC machines as well as support for DRI. If you want to try improved 3D acceleration with DRI, I suggest giving a try. Full changelogs to the kernel.org sources within.

Alan Cox is one of the Linux kernel developers, second only to Linus himself. KernelTrap spoke with Alan Cox, and you can find the interview .

Linux 2.5.2 has been released. You can find the changelog , and you can download the kernel from your favourite ftp mirror.

Changelog within.

pre5 wasn't out for long as pre6 came to fix some problems... pre5/6 has some more gcc3 fixes and pmac driver fixes.

Changelog within.

Today ResExcellence noted Linux/PPC kernel developer Benjamin Herrenschmidt and discusses Apple, Linux, Open Source, and more.

I updated the kernel configs of our precompiled kernels for the iMac and the iBook to reflect the latest kernel option changes. I also removed CUDA support in the iBook kernels and added full AppleTalk support to the benh kernels. The new configs will be used at the next build cycle at .

Due to popular request, the config files we use for the precompiled kernels are also available now.

Changelogs within. 2.4.18 is approaching rc stage, pre8 includes some PPC updates and the new netfilter targets should install fine now as well.

Sources at - Changelogs within.

LinuxWorld has an resuming the situation about the "A Modest Proposal: We need a Patch Penguin" thread by Rob Landley on the Kernel mailing list. The problem to Landley's eyes was that "Linus doesn't scale, and his current way of coping is to silently drop the vast majority of patches submitted to him onto the floor." Because of this, Landley argued, the 2.4 kernel very nearly forked, maintainers were burning out, and needed fixes were not getting into the kernel.

This lead to a heated discussion, and for all those that do not follow the kernel mailing list, this should be an interesting read.

Changelogs within.

With kernel 2.5.5-pre1, a few PPC patches have been added to the tree, but above all, ALSA drivers have finally been merged into the kernel. This will give us an easy alternative for sound output on PPC based machines. In several cases ALSA works better than DMASound, so eventually, the latter one may become obsolete.

Be aware though that the 2.5 series still should not be used on PPC machines, you could seriously damage your installation. Also, for the moment, the DMASound driver included with the 2.4 kernels still works best on most PPC machines.

Changelogs within.

DENX Software Engineering has released an extended version of the RTAI real-time extension to the Linux kernel which now runs on a wide range of PowerPC systems, including Motorola MPC7xx, MPC8xx, MPC82xx and IBM 4xx CPUs.

Read on...

This release fixes some problems with compiling the kernel on PPC machines. Changelogs within.

Changelogs within.

Since kernel version 2.4.18-rc2-benh the kernel lost is monopoly to control the pmac backlight device. It is possible now that is sends keycodes instead and let a user space programm do the work. As a result user space daemons like or can take all the hotkeys in charge and PBButtons no longer needs a special kernel patch to reach its full power.

Kernel 2.4.18-rc4 has been declared 2.4.18 final. Also 2.4.19-pre1 has been released. Changelogs for the latter within. Sources for both at

warns:
However there is one small bug that slipped into this release. On non-x86 architectures such as PowerPC statically linked programs will not run correctly. This was fixed in 2.4.18-rc4 but the fix was not included in 2.4.18-final by accident. Simply apply this to fix it. Note if you are applying the SGI XFS patches you don't need this patch since they have already included the fix in their tree.

Changelogs within.

We have updated the respective install instructions for our precompiled kernels to make them work fine on Debian. By default, the precompiled kernels render the keyboard useless in Debian, so we included instructions on how to easily fix that.

This kernel version included a new IDE code, hopefully improving stability and speed of IDE drives. Full changelogs within.

Anton Blanchard reported Saturday that he managed to get the Linux to compile in 7.52 seconds on a 32 way logical partition, 1.1GHz Power4 with 60GB ram. You can read more about it at Linux Weekly News.

A new pre version of the stable 2.4 kernel tree has been announced. The 2.4 maintainer has switched to BitKeeper now as well and an immediate result are a lot more detailed . Sources can be found at , as usual.

Changelogs are available . You can download it as always from .

Full changelogs are available and the sources can be downloaded from , as usual.

Several PPC updates. Sources are available from , changelogs can be found .

Changelogs can be found . Sources at

The latest pre release of the 2.4 stable Linux kernel fixes some critical PPC bugs, adds updated drivers and fixes sound on the 867 MHz G4 tower. Changelogs can be found and sources are at

On the linuxppc-dev mailing list today Brad Boyer a new release of his HFS+ kernel module based on 2.4.18-pre7. The project can be found .

Changelogs can be found , sources at , as usual.

The pre7 release of the latest 2.4.x kernel version is out now. The changes include several bug fixes for PPC based machines. Changelogs and download links are available .

1.3.7 has been .

Yaboot also now has mailing lists and an IRC channel #yaboot on irc.freenode.net. Mailing lists are as follows:

• Announcements regarding yaboot (read-only)
• User related questions/discussion regarding yaboot
• Technical and development discussion regarding yaboot

Yaboot 1.3.8-rc3 adds support for Apple's new Windtunnel and Xserve PowerMacs. Testing on all supported machines is requested to ensure no new bugs or regressions have occured, in addition to testing on the new models.

1.3.8 has been . This release adds support for the new PowerMac Windtunnel and Xserve models.