Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 2.6.26 yesterday on the Linux kernel mailing list. This release, which has been under development for about 3 months, comes after 9 release candidates.

Major changes in this release are support for read-only bind mounts, KVM on additional architectures, wireless mesh networking (802.11s), x86 page attribute tables, improved webcam support, and per-process securebits. Another major new feature in this release is the integrated kernel debugger (KDB), which was included despite objections by Torvalds who has vetoed similar additions in the past because he believes that the absence of a debugger encourages more careful development.

According to the Linux Foundation's kernel Weather Forecast some of the features that are going to be the focus of development now that 2.6.26 is released are the new Ext4 filesystem and preemptible spinlocks.

The full changelog and patch (7.3 MB compressed) are available from kernel.org. For additional details, see the release announcement on LKML and the Linux Weather Forecast web site. For an overview of the new features, check out the coverage on KernelTrap and at the Kernel Newbies web site.

Further reading

