With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code.

Once upon a time, the way to get a patch into the mainline kernel was to email it to Linus Torvalds. A hopeful developer would then wait for Linus to release a new kernel tree to see whether the patch had been included or not. In the latter case, the more persistent developers would resend the patch. Often, developers had to be persistent indeed if they wanted their code to be merged.

David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in the latest DRM patches for inclusion into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. The Direct Rendering Manager improvements in this next kernel release will be particularly interesting.

Linus Torvalds has merged the kernel code for the GeForce-compatible nouveau open source graphics driver as a staging driver into the Linux main development tree – from which kernel version 2.6.33 will emerge in around two and a half months.

The Linux Staging tree (or just "staging" from now on) is used to hold stand-alone drivers and filesystems that are not ready to be merged into the main portion of the Linux kernel tree at this point in time for various technical reasons.

The Linux 2.6.34 kernel was released only three days ago, but David Airlie has emailed Linus Torvalds and the Linux Kernel Mailing List with the first DRM pull request for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel.

With the Linux 2.6.32 kernel merge window opening up this month, open-source developers around the world have been busy working on their code that they wish to push into this next major kernel update.

Last week when releasing the Linux 2.6.35-rc2 kernel, Linus was upset with the number of late merges and other commits that were receiving pull requests in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel development cycle when the work should instead be now about bug and regression fixes.

David Airlie, the Linux kernel DRM maintainer and the Red Hat employee responsible for a good portion of the open-source ATI Linux driver work, has announced changes in how he will be handling his DRM kernel branches and the addition of some new branches for ATI customers wishing to experiment with the latest Radeon driver code.