Linus Torvalds announced yesterday the availability of the brand new 2.6.26 Linux kernel. It comes with support for read-only bind mounts, x86 Page Attribute Tables (PAT), improved webcam support with the help of a driver for UVC devices, and many other improvements.

Linus Torvalds said about the new edition: "So it's been almost three months since 2.6.25 (87 days to be exact, I think), making this a longer-than-usual release cycle. Or maybe it just feels that way, and we're always getting close to three months these days."

Here are the most important features introduced in this release:

￭ Read-only bind mounts
￭ KVM ported to IA64, PPC and S390
￭ Improved webcam support
￭ Wireless mesh networking (802.11s) draft support
￭ x86 PAT support
￭ Per-process securebits
￭ KGDB
￭ Device whitelist on cgroups
￭ Memtest
￭ Export BDI attributes in sysfs
￭ /proc/pid/mountinfo
￭ Generic semaphores

Now, let's have a look at some of the new drivers introduced in this release:

Networking

￭ ssb: add a new Gigabit Ethernet driver to the ssb core

￭ New driver "sfc" for Solarstorm SFC4000 controller
￭ Add support the Korina (IDT RC32434) Ethernet MAC
￭ pasemi_mac: jumbo frame support, enable GSO by default, basic ethtool support
￭ ehea: Add DLPAR memory remove support
￭ Driver for IXP4xx built-in Ethernet ports

Graphics:

￭ radeon: Initial r500 support
￭ intel_agp: Add support for Intel 4 series chipsets
￭ i915: Add support for Intel series 4 chipsets
￭ pxafb: preliminary smart panel interface support
￭ Add support for Blackfin/Linux logo for framebuffer console

Sound:

￭ hda-codec - Allow multiple SPDIF devices, add SI HDMI codec support, add support of Zepto laptops, add model=mobile for AD1884A & co, add support for Toshiba Equium L30, etc.
￭ Davinci ASoC support
￭ Emagic Audiowerk 2 ALSA driver
￭ oxygen: add monitor controls
￭ pxa2xx-ac97: Support PXA3xx AC97

V4L/ DVB

￭ V4L2 soc_camera driver for PXA270
￭ Add support for the MT9M001 camera
￭ Add support for the MT9V022 camera
￭ Add support for the ISL6405 dual LNB supply chip
￭ Initial DVB-S support for MD8800 /CTX948
￭ cx23885: Add support for the Hauppauge HVR1400, add generic cx23417 hardware encoder support
￭ Add mxl5505s driver for MaxiLinear 5505 chipsets, basic digital support

SCSI

￭ zfcp: Add trace records for recovery thread and its queues
￭ qla2xxx: Add support for host supported speeds FC transport attribute
￭ scsi_debug: support large non-fake virtual disk
￭ m68k: new mac_esp scsi driver
￭ Add support for variable length extended commands
￭ Firmware: add iSCSI iBFT Support

These are just a few of the changes and improvements in the 2.6.26 Linux kernel. To see a full changelog with all the brand new things, modifications, drivers, etc. please click here.

You can download the 2.6.26 Linux kernel source right now from Softpedia.