Linux Kernel 3.8 "Presidents' Day Release" Edition Announced by Linus Torvalds

On February 18, Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the final version of Linux Kernel 3.8

Linus Torvalds has announced that the final version of the new Linux Kernel, 3.8, is now ready for download and he even hinted that he waited a couple of days to launch it in order to make it a "Presidents' Day Release."

"The release got delayed a couple of days because I was waiting for confirmation of a small patch, but hey, we could also say that it was all intentional, and that this is the special Presidents' Day Release. It sounds more planned that way, no?” stated Torvalds in the official announcement.

He also said that this final push for the stable version hasn't brought anything major into play, besides some architecture patches and a few commits.

“There are noticeably fewer commits, and they are also all quite small. The few commits with more than just a couple of lines tend to be due to a couple of reverts, and two architecture patches where some identifiers got renamed (tile), or some defines got moved from the uapi file to a private header (x86),” explained Torvalds.

Highlights of Linux kernel 3.8:

• Only set gso_type to SKB_GSO_TCPV4 as RSC does not support IPv6;
• Yota / Megafon M100-1 4g modem drivers have been added;
• An unused variable in copy_thread() has been removed;
• Remove redundant NULL check before unregister_and_remove_pcpu();
• Interrupts are now re-enabled when alloc_pid() fails because init has exited;
• mdio register has to fail if the phy is not found;
• Avoid overflow when programming clock comparator;
• Don't assume %ds is usable in xen_iret for 32-bit PVOPS;
• A workaround has been implemented to circumvent the boot failure on HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server systems.

More details about the updates and the new features in the kernel can be found in the changelog.

Download Linux kernel 3.8 right now from Softpedia.