This report over at crn, says kernel 2.6.0 is expected to be released in mid december. 2.6.0 Test 10 was released eirler this week and 11 is due soon. they expect the production versions mid december, which will be just in time for christmas.

The 2.6 kernel features major scalability improvements, faster performance, enhanced support for embedded systems and, to a lesser extent, supplies desktop systems with better USB and FireWire support, Morton said.
Linux kernel 2.6, for example, will allow companies to run the Linux distribution on multiprocessing systems with up to 64 CPUs. The new kernel will run considerably better on 64-bit Intel and Advanced Micro Devices systems due to its support for 64 Gbytes of memory.
The current Linux 2.4 kernel generally supports four-way and eight-way systems and only 8 Gbytes of memory, Morton said. While embedded system makers and desktop Linux vendors can exploit some of the enhancements, vendors of enterprise Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Conectiva and TurboLinux will see a nice bump up in performance and speed.
The greatest improvement is in scalability,” Morton said. “It scales up and runs faster on big machines.”</p> Im going to get a copy of 2.6.0 Test 10 for testing when i get home and try play with that for a while.