Linux Kernel 3.5 Has Been Officially Released

After yet another seven Release Candidate versions, Linus Torvalds proudly announced yesterday, July 21st, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.5.

Linux kernel 3.5 brings various interesting features (check out the highlights below and the quote from Linus Torvalds’ announcement) among which we can mention support for metadata checksums in the EXT4 filesystem, support for restoring and checkpointing TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, Btrfs I/O failure statistics, and much more.

“There's a number of MIPS commits (for some reason MIPS has had a horrible track record with the -rc time schedule, I suspect I should just stop pulling late in the game), but most of the rest is pretty small.”

“A couple of dm/md fixes, some gma500 work, make kgdb 'dmesg' command work again, some networking fixes, some xfs and cifs noise, yadda yadda. About 50% of the patch is actually the SPEAr clock name renaming that is just some search-and-replace,” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.

Highlights of Linux Kernel 3.5:

· EXT4 metadata checksums;
· Uprobes: userspace probes;
· Seccomp-based system call filtering;
· Bufferbloat fighting: CoDel queue management;
· TCP connection repair;
· TCP Early Retransmit;
· Android-style opportunistic suspend;
· Btrfs: I/O failure statistics, latency improvements;
· SCSI over FireWire and USB.

Linux kernel 3.5 also comes with many improvements in various areas, such as memory management fixes, networking, virtualization, security, perf/tracing, block, improvements to Btrfs, Tmpfs, XFS, CIFS, JFFS2, exofs, Cifs filesystems, as well as various core changes.

For a complete list of all the newly added drivers, newly supported devices, and other improvements, do not hesitate to view the official changelog and the Linux kernel 3.5 DriverArch page.

Download Linux kernel 3.5 source packages right now from Softpedia.