Linus Torvalds announced today the final and stable release of the Linux kernel, version 2.6.20:

"I tried rather hard to make 2.6.20 largely a 'stabilization release'. Unlike a lot of kernels lately, there aren't really any big fundamental changes to some core infrastructure area, and while we always have bugs, I really am hoping that we fixed many more than we introduced.

Have fun. And remember: the thousandth decimal is, of course, 9. There *will* be a test on this afterwards."

Highlights of this release include:

￭ Sony Playstation 3 support
￭ Virtualization support through KVM
￭ Paravirtualization support for i386
￭ Relocatable kernel support for x86
￭ Fault injection
￭ IO Accounting
￭ Relative atime support
￭ UDP-Lite support
￭ Generic HID layer
￭ Sleazy FPU optimization
￭ Use 'regparm' in x86-32
￭ round_jiffies() infrastructure
￭ New drivers

For a full change-log with all the new features and improvements, please visit this website.

The Linux Kernel is the essential part of all Linux Distributions, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, simple communications, and basic file system management.

Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, initially written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

You can download the Linux kernel now from Softpedia.