Linux Kernel 3.7 Has Been Officially Released

After eight Release Candidate versions, Linus Torvalds proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 11, the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux 3.7 kernel.

Linux kernel 3.7 brings numerous breathtaking features, among which we can mention support for 64-bit ARM, support for multi-platform ARM, Btrfs support for disabling copy-on-write on a per-file basis, stable support for NFS 4.1, support for parallel NFS, a new "perf trace" tool, a new tunneling protocol for transffering Layer 2 Ethernet packets over UDP, and much more.

"Whee. After an extra rc release, 3.7 is now out. After a few more trials at fixing things, in the end we ended up reverting the kswapd changes that caused problems."

"And with the extra rc, I had decided to risk doing the buffer.c cleanups that would otherwise have just been marked for stable during the next merge window, and had enough time to fix a few problems that people found there too," Linus Torvalds said in the official announcement.

Highlights of Linux Kernel 3.7:

· Support for multi-platform ARM;
· Support for 64-bit ARM;
· Cryptographically signed kernel modules;
· Btrfs filesystem updates;
· Added perf trace, an alternative to strace;
· Support for TCP Fast Open (server side);
· Experimental support for the SMB 2 protocol;
· Stable support for NFS version 4.1;
· Virtual extensible LAN tunneling protocol;
· Support for Intel "supervisor mode access prevention".

But that's not all, as Linux kernel 3.7 also comes with various other important improvements for the XFS, UDF, JFS and NFS filesystems, networking, virtualization, security, crypto, perf and block improvements, as well as numerous other small core changes and bug fixes.

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 3.7 DriverArch page.

Download Linux kernel 3.7 source packages right now from Softpedia.