14 DAY TRIAL // It's here and it is the hottest Linux kernel ever! Why? Because it includes CPU "group scheduling", tickless support for x86-64/PPC and other architectures, memory fragmentation avoidance, new wireless drivers and a new wireless configuration interface, SPI/SDIO MMC support, USB authorization, per-device dirty memory thresholds, support for PID and network namespaces, support for static probe markers, read-only bind mounts, SELinux performance improvements, CIFS ACLs support, SATA link power management and port multiplier support, Large Receive Offload in network devices, memory hot-remove support, a new framework for controlling the idle processor power management, many new drivers and many other features, improvements and bugfixes.
"The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let's hope it's a good one. Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the tree," said Linus Torvalds.
Let's have a look now at the most important technologies introduced in this release:
￭ CFS improvements ￭ Tickless support for x86-64, PPC, UML, ARM, MIPS ￭ New wireless drivers and configuration interface ￭ Anti-fragmentation patches ￭ SPI/SDIO support in the MMC layer ￭ USB authorization ￭ Per-device dirty memory thresholds ￭ PID and network namespaces ￭ Large Receive Offload (LRO) support for TCP traffic ￭ Task Control Groups ￭ Linux Kernel Markers ￭ Read-only bind mounts ￭ x86-32/64 Arch reunification
Among the new drivers introduced in this release we can mention:
Bluetooth drivers
￭ Added generic driver for Bluetooth SDIO and USB devices ￭ Added UART driver for Texas Instruments' BRF63xx chips
Sound drivers
￭ Added driver for the AT73C213 DAC using Atmel SSC ￭ Added ASoC CS4270 codec device driver ￭ Added driver for Gallant SC-6000 card and clones: Audio Excel DSP 16 and Zoltrix AV302
Hwmon drivers
￭ Added driver for FSC chips ￭ Added driver for Fintek F71882FG and F71883FG Super-I/O chips ￭ Added driver for Analog Devices ADT7470 chips ￭ Added driver for Fintek F75375S/SP and F75373 chips ￭ IBM power meter driver ￭ Added driver for the SMSC SCH3112, SCH3114, and SCH3116 Super-I/O chips ￭ New driver to read FB-DIMM temperature sensors on systems with the Intel 5000 series chipsets ￭ Added Davinci I2C controller support
Network drivers
￭ Added ixgbe driver for Intel(R) 82598 PCI-Express 10GbE adapters (v4) ￭ Added new E1000E pci-express e1000 driver (currently for ICH9 devices only) ￭ Added Sun Neptune ethernet driver ￭ Added fast ethernet controller driver for mpc52xx ￭ Added driver for IP1000A GBit cards ￭ Added Tehuti network driver ￭ Added AR7 ethernet driver ￭ Added device tree-aware EMAC driver ￭ Virtual ethernet device driver ￭ Added IrDA driver for Kingsun Dazzle IrDA USB ￭ Added IrDA driver for Kingsun KS-959 IrDA USB
USB drivers
￭ Added atmel_usba_udc driver ￭ Added driver for CH341 USB-serial adaptor ￭ Eagle IV chipset support
SATA/IDE drivers
￭ Added driver for bf548 on chip ATAPI controller ￭ Added AVR32 PATA driver ￭ Added platform IDE driver, used mostly for Memory Mapped IDE devices, like Compact Flashes running in True IDE mode ￭ Added driver pata_cs5536 ATA driver for Geode companion chip ￭ Added driver for Freescale 3.0Gbps SATA Controllers
I2C drivers
￭ Added Davinci I2C controller support
Graphics drivers
￭ Added the uvesafb driver; uvesafb is an enhanced version of vesafb. It uses a userspace helper (v86d) to execute calls to the x86 Video BIOS functions. The driver is not limited to any specific arch and whether it works on a given arch or not depends on that arch being supported by the userspace daemon. ￭ Added a framebuffer driver for Blackfin BF54x framebuffer device driver
MTD drivers
￭ Added map driver for NOR flash on the Intel Vermilion Range chipset ￭ Added blackfin on-chip NAND Flash Controller driver ￭ Added NAND Driver for Olympus MAUSB-10 and Fujifilm DPC-R1 card readers
V4L/DVB
￭ Added ivtv-fb framebuffer driver for cx23415 devices ￭ Added a driver for Toshiba TCM825x VGA camera sensor ￭ Added driver for the internal MPX of the Panasonic VP27s tuner ￭ Added driver for the silicon baseband tuner MT2266 from Microtune ￭ Added driver for the silicon baseband tuner MT2131 from Microtune tuner ￭ Added driver for the Samsung S5h1409 demodulator, also known as the Conexant CX24227 demodulator ￭ Added driver for the silicon baseband tuner DIBB0070 from DIBcom ￭ Added CX23885/CX23887 PCIe bridge driver
For a full change-log with all the new features, drivers and improvements, please click here.
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 Unix operating system, initially written from scratch by Linus Torvalds, assisted by a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims to achieve POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.
You can download the full Linux kernel source archive now from Softpedia.