14 DAY TRIAL // A few hours ago, on September 2, 2013, Linus Torvalds happily announced the immediate availability for download of the final release of Linux kernel 3.11.
Linux kernel 3.11 introduces lots of new features and improvements, such as support for a new O_TMPFILE open(2) flag, experimental dynamic power management for all AMD Radeon GPUs since r600, experimental support for the Lustre distributed filesystem, preliminary support for SELinux Labeled NFS and NFS 4.2, , detailed tracking of which pages a program writes, KVM/Xen and ARM huge page support for ARM64, as well as new drivers and lots of bug fixes.
"As some people noticed, I got distracted ("Ooh, look, a squirrel..") and never wrote an announcement for -rc7. My bad. But it wasn't actually all that interesting a release apart from the date, and it had a silly compile error in ohci-pci if you hadn't enabled CONFIG_PM_RUNTIME, so we'll just forget -rc7 ever happened, ok?"
"Instead, go and get the real 3.11 release, which is out there, all shiny and ready to be compiled and loved," Linus Torvalds stated in the official release announcement.
Highlights of Linux kernel 3.11:
• Added new O_TMPFILE open(2) flag to reduce temporary file vulnerabilities; • Initial support for AMD Radeon dynamic power management; • Initial support for the Lustre filesystem client; • Initial support for SELinux Labeled NFS and NFS 4.2; • Detailed tracking of which pages a task writes; • ARM huge page support for ARM64; • Xen and KVM support for ARM64; • Improvements for SYSV IPC message queue scalability; • Low latency network polling; • Introducing Zswap: a compressed swap cache.
But that's not all, as Linux kernel 3.11 also incorporates lots of other small fixes, improvements and patches to the memory management, block layer, networking, crypto, virtualization, security, tracing/perf, and file systems (EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, F2FS, GFS2, CIFS, HPFS, FAT, NILFS2) areas.
For a complete list of all the newly added drivers, as well as newly supported devices and overall improvements, do not hesitate to take a look at the Linux kernel 3.11 DriverArch page and at the official changelog.
"Since rc7 (ok, I lied, it happened) there's been just small fixes. Most of them came in from the networking tree, but there's some all over: some random filesystem fixes, a couple of sound fixes, a /proc/timer_list fix, things like that."
"Nothing really stands out (unless you happened to use the new soft-dirty code, that had a buglet that could really hurt), but let's hope we don't have some silly configuration that doesn't even compile this time around," was stated at the end of the official announcement.
Download Linux kernel 3.11 source package right now from Softpedia.