Jonathan Corbet is an active kernel contributor, co-founder and president of Linux development community news site LWN.net, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. His renowned Kernel Report has been presented to audiences worldwide, and this year in Melbourne will mark his fourth appearance at Linux.conf.au. Here, Corbet offers Computerworld readers a sneak peek at the major themes behind this year's Kernel Report.

How has the kernel development process gone over the past year - What were the major happenings?

The process is running quite smoothly, with four major kernel releases (2.6.20 through .23) being made, and 2.6.24 being brought close to release. I anticipate it will come out just before linux.conf.au begins.

Major events over the last year include the incorporation of several virtualization implementations (KVM, Lguest, Xen), the dynamic tick patches, a completely new wireless networking stack, the CFS process scheduler, and much, much more.

Is the patch flow rate continuing at a high rate?

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