Linux: 2.6.16.y Lives On

The Linux kernel development model changed a couple of years ago at the 2004 Kernel Summit [story]. At that time it was decided that as a team Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton [interview] were doing a great job together maintaining the 2.6 kernel, using Andrew's -mm kernel [story] as a staging area with new features being allowed into the mainline kernel and ultimate stabilization left up to Linux distributions. In March of 2005, Greg KH and Chris Wright began maintaining a -stable patchset [story], accepting small, focused patches fixing real bugs or security issues. The -stable patchsets have been maintained since for the latest kernel and the previously released kernel.

In December of 2005, Adrian Bunk announced his intention to maintain the 2.6.16 kernel indefinitely, maintaining it much the same as the 2.4 kernel is maintained for as long as it is used and patches are contributed. Greg KH recently announced that Adrian is now taking over the 2.6.16-stable branch, "he will still be following the same -stable rules that are documented in the Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt file, but just doing this for the 2.6.16 kernel tree for a much longer time than the current stable team is willing to do (we have moved on to the 2.6.17 kernel now.)" He went on to caution, "and I'd like to offer my best wishes to Adrian for doing this work. Personally I don't think it can be done for all that long of an amount of time, and I will be very happy to see him prove me wrong :)"