14 DAY TRIAL // Today, January 19, Linus Torvalds has proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 3.13, which brings major improvements, numerous new and updated drivers, as well as a dozen of new features.
Linux kernel 3.13 includes nftables, the successor of iptables, power management for AMD Radeon graphics cards, which is now enabled by default, automatic GPU switching for AMD Radeon video cards, support for the AMD Radeon R9 290X Hawaii GPU, and a scalable block layer specifically designed for high-performance SSDs.
Among other features, we can mention improved NUMA performance, power capping framework designed for the Intel RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) mechanism, improved page table access scalability in hugepage workloads, as well as support for the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture.
In addition, Linux kernel 3.13 includes improved SquashFS performance, support for NFC payments, support for the high-availability Seamless Redundancy protocol, and TCP Fast Open is now enabled by default.
Of course, these are only the major changes brought by Linux kernel 3.13, which also integrates numerous other small, yet important improvements, as well as new drivers that support new hardware components, which can be seen in the designated Linux kernel 3.13 DriverArch web page.
"The release got delayed by a week due to travels, but I suspect that's just as well. We had a few fixes come in, and while it wasn't a lot, I think we're better off for it. At least I hope so - I'll be very disappointed if any of them cause more problems than they fix."
"Anyway, the patch from rc8 is fairly small, with mainly some small Arch updates (arm, mips, powerpc, s390, sparc, x86 all had some minor changes, some of them due to a networking fix for the bpf jit). And drivers (mainly gpu and networking). And some generic networking fixes. The appended shortlog gives more details," Linus Torvalds said in the official release announcement.
Download Linux kernel 3.13 right now from Softpedia.