Debian developer Ben Hutchings has announced that Debian 7.0 (Wheezy), due for release in around a year's time, will use a version of the Linux kernel 3.2 that was released in early January. Debian 7.0 is due to be moved from the unstable to the testing repository shortly. Hutchings also noted that the development team was open to backporting selected new features from later kernel versions into the Debian 3.2. kernel to improve the latter's hardware support.

According to current plans, Debian developers are not intending to build any multi-architecture specific kernel versions, and OpenVZ and VServer specific versions will be dropped unless someone steps in to rescue them. There will, at least for the AMD64 architecture, be a kernel offering enhanced real-time characteristics based on kernel extensions from the RT tree.

In conjunction with Ubuntu developers, who are deploying the 3.2 kernel in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the Debian development team intends to maintain Linux version 3.2 as a long-term kernel. Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman recently elevated Linux kernel 3.0 to long-term kernel status, meaning that it will continue to be patched for a two year period. The developers behind the RT patch are also planning to maintain the patch for Linux 3.0 for a similar period. RT patches for Linux 3.2 are still at the experimental stage.

(djwm)