Mar 15, 2011 09:18 GMT  ·  By

We are proud to announce that today, March 15th, the immediate release of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 2.6.38.

Among the new features included in Linux kernel 2.6.38 we can mention support for automatic process grouping, Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots, VFS scalability, support for Transparent Huge Page (without the use of hugetblfs), B.A.T.M.A.N. Mesh protocol support,AMD Fusion APUs support, new drivers, lots of bug fixes.

"As to the "big picture", ie all the changes since 2.6.37, my personal favorite remains the VFS name lookup changes. They did end up causing some breakage, and Al has made it clear that he wants more cleanups, but on the whole I think it was surprisingly smooth. I think we had more problems with random other components (nasty memory corruption in networking etc) than with the rather fundamental path lookup change." - said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.

Highlights of Linux Kernel 2.6.38:

· Automatic process grouping (also known as "the patch that does wonders"); · VFS scalability; · Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots; · Transparent Huge Pages; · B.A.T.M.A.N. Mesh protocol · Support for AMD Fusion APU; · Dirty memory limits in the memory controller; · Asynchronous page faults; · User-space interface for Crypto API; · New AMD Bulldozer virtualization extensions; · Added boot-time XZ compression support; · New jhash implementation; · Added hole punching support to fallocate(); · Added /proc/consoles; · Added a script for automatic kernel testing; · Enhanced cpu-cgroup performance; · Removed CLONE_STOPPED flag; · Added sysctl_sched_shares_window for the shares window; · kswapd tweaking; · XFS, CIFS, EXT2, EXT3, SQUASHFS and NILFS2 improvements.

These are just a few of the new features available in the Linux kernel 2.6.38. For a complete list of all the newly supported devices, newly added drivers, etc., please visit the official DriversArch page.

You can download Linux kernel 2.6.38 sources right now from Softpedia.