The nonprofit Linux Foundation has unveiled the Linux Weather Forecast, a Web site aimed at giving people a better sense of the status of specific Linux kernel projects. The Foundation created the forecast site by teaming up with Jonathan Corbet, a Linux kernel developer and writer, who's also executive editor of the LWN.net Linux and free software news site.

The forecast is already live and tracks work in the Linux developer community likely to be included in the operating system's kernel and in major distributions of the open-source software, or both. The forecast provides summaries on work in areas such as core Linux kernel development, virtualization and containers, file systems, security, networking, and support for hardware.

Current conditions: the current kernel release is 2.6.22 (released July 8, 2007). Significant features in this release include:

• Eventfd
• The SLUB allocator
• The long-awaited IVTV video driver which will greatly improve TV tuning capabilities under Linux.
• A completely reworked IEEE 1394 ("Firewire") stack
• The new mac80211 wireless stack
• Support for the Blackfin architecture
• Lots of new drivers

The 2.6.22.1 update, released on July 10, added one security fix to this kernel.

Short-term forecast: 2.6.23 will be released around October 2007. The current prepatch is 2.6.23-rc3, released on August 12. The merge window has closed and 2.6.23 is feature-complete. It will include:

• The Completely Fair Scheduler, without the group scheduling feature.
• Lguest
• Xen
• The first drivers for the mac80211 wireless networking stack
• The UIO user-space driver API
• The new fallocate() system call
• Many other new features and vast numbers of fixes.

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