With this posting, Linus Torvalds has officially sent the Linux 2.6 kernel on its way. The previous major milestone was released back in the days when open source barely registered as a competitive threat on Redmond's radar (three years ago, in January 2001 to be precise)

Important parts of the 2.6 kernel have been substantially rewritten, and while users will notice little difference, the new capabilities should lead to improvements in user land. There's a fine summary here, but two additions that catch the eye are support for file system meta data (extended attributes) and Windows' logical disks.

Of more interest to business users, 2.6 boasts better scalability - NUMA and fine grained threading - and better device support. There's also greatly expanded support for embedded devices, so ports to low power, limited function hardware no longer need to be forks from the main kernel tree. "The beaver is out of detox", cites Torvalds, although this can only be WC Fields, we suspect. ®