I've posted a snapshot of the current -ck development against 2.6.8-rc1 website: http://kernel.kolivas.org rc1 patches: http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.7/2.6.8-rc1/ The staircase scheduler has been basically unchanged for a couple of weeks now with no bugs showing up (woohoo). I've resynced with the current versions of the vm hacks, added Ingo's voluntary preempt patch, added Zwane's low latency irq locks, the suse writeback latency patch, badram, lufs and the fixed version of William Lee Irwin III's preempt test. Bootsplash is currently on the backburner. To preempt test is a debugging tool for latency and not intended for regular usage. Enable it in the config and set the bootparam preempt_thresh=1 for checking for when there are parts of kernel code that are not preemptible for >1ms (set it to any desired number or dont set it to disable it). It outputs to the syslog something like this: 4ms non-preemptible critical section violated 1 ms preempt threshold starting at exit_mmap+0x1c/0x188 and ending at exit_mmap+0x118/0x188 [] dec_preempt_count+0x14f/0x151 [] exit_mmap+0x118/0x188 etc. I'm running this kernel currently without problems. The badram and lufs features are compile tested only. Full patches: from_2.6.7_to_staircase7.A schedrange.diff schedbatch2.3.diff schediso2.3.diff autotune_swappiness.diff autotune_inactivation.diff supermount-ng204.diff defaultcfq.diff config_hz.diff voluntary-preempt-2.6.7-bk20-H3 patch-i386-irq_enable_spinlocks2 patch-ool-spinlocks 9000_SuSE-117-writeback-lat.patch wli_preempttest2 wli_preempttest2.1 BadRAM-2.6.5.2.patch.bz2 lufs-0.9.7-2.6.0-test9.patch.bz2 ck5version.diff Cheers, Con