This post reflects my personal opinion and is in no way related to the company I work for. LWN tells us what is happening with the android kernel patches in upstream. The short version: They are gone

After the release of Linux 2.6.27, kernel developers are currently busily integrating patches for the next kernel version into the main development branch of Linux. This usually involves discarding some old code and adding new code though on balance, there are usually more new lines than old ones, making the kernel grow continually.

Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 2 was recently released for the brave and adventuresome to test. I did not do much of a testing, but ran the system in a virtual environment to see what it looks like. Aside from the kernel, there is really no major change, as far as I could tell, from the last stable release, which is Ubuntu 11.04.

Talking about the kernel, Ubuntu 11.10 should be shipping with Kernel 3.0.

Sun Microsystems will hold its first-ever kernel conference in Australia later this year. Perfect timing, says a company spokesperson, as more and more companies turn to Open Source to remain innovative in harder economic times.

Rusty Russell posted on LKML some patches to add documentation for his actual kernel work known as lguest. In one of his patches Rusty wrote:”Indeed, no code changes, and I feel strongly that it should go into 2.6.23 because it’s fun. And (as often complained) there’s not enough poetry in the kernel.”

In my quest to grok the most popular kernel for GNU, I am making some distinct, albeit slow, headway into the inner workings of Linux. Before completely delving into the source code, I wanted to have a last overall look on kernel configuration

Red Hat released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, providing memory allocation enhancements to the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. RHEL 5.5 also introduces new storage and WiFi drivers, and supports new AMD, IBM, and Intel processors, says the company.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about Canonical and it's contributions to upstream, mainly due to an off-the-cuff comment by GregKH on a google video, and mainly in relation to the Linux kernel. Greg's statement, while correct when compared to his data, was incorrect because of improper data collection.

Here's one from the file of random stuff you see when you put a new machine on the upstream kernel instead of the distro kernel. USB drivers for Linux will be GPL-only with the release of the upcoming kernel 2.6.25.. USB maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman writes: "Over two years ago, the Linux USB developers stated that they believed there was no way to create a USB kernel driver that was not under the GPL. This patch moves the USB apis to enforce that decision."