Linux 2.4 Kernel Is Done

Development on the Linux 2.4 kernel is now officially over with no more maintenance releases being expected.

Back in September of 2010 I wrote about the plans for the Linux 2.4 kernel to go end-of-life and now it's finally reached that state. Willy Tarreau confirmed this morning in a mailing list message that there will be no further 2.4.x point releases.

Hi all,

15 months ago I announced that if no more critical fix was to be merged by one year, 2.4 would be EOLed after a year (around december 2011). The break-in of last year made things a bit difficult for some users but nothing really important for 2.4 users was merged since, so the EOL had no reason to be delayed.

However since the break-in, I was surprized to see that some users have asked where to find the 2.4 git tree to pick some fixes from it. After discussing with several of them, it appears that they're not really interested in releases, rather just in having a place where fixes are
centralized and that the git tree is perfect for this. So I revived the git tree in my account and will probably push a patch there once in a while if people ask for this, but with no guarantees.

Anyway I don't intend to waste any more space on kernel.org with tar.gz files nor patches that too few people use.

The repository is now available here :

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/wtarreau/linux-2.4.git

If anyone has any question, feel free to ask.

Willy

Meanwhile, upstream Linux kernel development is approaching the Linux 3.4 kernel.