"There it is," wrote Linus Torvalds last night at 17:17 PDT, as he informed the Linux Kernel Mailing List of the release of Linux 2.6.13.

"The most painful part is likely to be the fact that we made x86 use the generic PCI bus setup code for assigning unassigned resources," he continued. "That uncovered rather a lot of nasty small details, but should also mean that a lot of laptops in particular should be able to discover PCI devices behind bridges that the BIOS hasn't set up."

From: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List [email blocked]
Subject: Linux 2.6.13
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 17:17:29 -0700 (PDT)

There it is.

The most painful part of 2.6.13 is likely to be the fact that we made x86 use the generic PCI bus setup code for assigning unassigned resources. That uncovered rather a lot of nasty small details, but should also mean that a lot of laptops in particular should be able to discover PCI devices behind bridges that the BIOS hasn't set up.

We've hopefully fixed up all the problems that the longish -rc series showed, and it shouldn't be that painful, but if you have device problems, please make a report that at a minimum contains the unified diff of the output of "lspci -vvx" running on 2.6.12 vs 2.6.13. That might give us some clues.

The changes since -rc7 are pretty small, full shortlog and diffstat of that appended.

As to the new world order: I'm actually going to be away for most of next week, but in general we should now try to do all major merges within the first two weeks of the release. After that, we go into calm-down mode, and if you have work that didn't make the cut, you get to wait until 2.6.14. The plan is that this should bring in the time between releases, so that even stuff that misses the deadline won't have to wait _too_ long for the next one.

Linus

The latest kernel can be downloaded from any of the number of sites all over the world that are providing mirrors of the Linux Kernel Archives.