公元兩千年過去了，Linux 2.4 核心已注定難產，無法在上一個世紀誕生。對此 Linux 之父 Linus Torvalds 表示他已經努力過了，他能給大家最好的新年賀禮，只有 Linux 2.4.0 搶鮮版。
這個搶鮮版正式的版本名稱是 2.4.0-prerelease，Linus 希望大家盡量測試這個版本，而且他保證，絕不會再有更多的附加版本，像是 "prerelease1"、prerelease2"... 以下是個這版本的變革紀錄：
prerelease:
- Alan Cox: more synchronizations
- Manfred Spraul: ptrace/suid-exec race fix
- pre7:
- x86 LDT handling fixes: revert some cleanups (the LDT really
doesn't act like a TLB context)
- Richard Henderson: alpha update (working memmove() from Ivan
Kokshaysky etc)
- Manfred: winbond-840.c net driver update (fix oops on module unload etc)
- Alan Cox: more synchronizations (with some fixes from Andrew Morton)
- pre6:
- Marc Joosen: BIOS int15/e820 memory query: don't assume %edx
unchanged by the BIOS. Fixes at least some IBM ThinkPads.
- Alan Cox: synchronize
- Marcelo Tosatti & me: properly sync dirty pages
- Andreas Dilger: proper ext2 compat flag checking
- pre5:
- NIIBE Yutaka: SuperH update
- Geert Uytterhoeven: m68k update
- David Miller: TCP RTO calc fix, UDP multicast fix etc
- Duncan Laurie: ServerWorks PIRQ routing definition.
- mm PageDirty cleanups, added sanity checks, and don't lose the bit.
- pre4:
- Christoph Rohland: shmfs cleanup
- Nicolas Pitre: don't forget loop.c flags
- Geert Uytterhoeven: new-style m68k Makefiles
- Neil Brown: knfsd cleanups, raid5 re-org
- Andrea Arkangeli: update to LVM-0.9
- LC Chang: sis900 driver doc update
- David Miller: netfilter oops fix
- Andrew Grover: acpi update
- pre3:
- Christian Jullien: smc9194: proper dev_kfree_skb_irq
- Cort Dougan: new-style PowerPC Makefiles
- Andrew Morton, Petr Vandrovec: fix run_task_queue
- Christoph Rohland: shmfs for shared memory handling
- pre2:
- Kai Germaschewski: ISDN update (including Makefiles)
- Jens Axboe: cdrom updates
- Petr Vandrovec; Matrox G450 support
- Bill Nottingham: fix FAT32 filesystems on 64-bit platforms
- David Miller: sparc (and other) Makefile fixup
- Andrea Arkangeli: alpha SMP TLB context fix (and cleanups)
- Niels Kristian Bech Jensen: checkconfig, USB warnings
- Andrew Grover: large ACPI update
- pre1:
- me: drop support for old-style Makefiles entirely. Big.
- me: check b_end_io at the IO submission path
- me: fix "ptep_mkdirty()" (so that swapoff() works correctly)
- fix fault case in copy_from_user() with a constant size, where
((size & 3) == 3)
摘自：http://linuxfab.cx