Linus Torvalds announced last evening the immediate availability of the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. This new release contains new technologies, some updated drivers and miscellaneous fixes:

"It's been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that

turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. [..] So it's mostly one-liners, with some updates to drivers (net and usb) and to networking that are a bit larger (although a number of the driver updates are things like just new IDs etc)." said Linus Torvalds.

Let's have a look now at the most important technologies introduced in this release:

￭ Memory Resource Controller
￭ Real Time Group scheduling
￭ RCU Preemption support
￭ FIFO ticket spinlocks in x86
￭ Better process memory usage measurement
￭ timerfd() syscall
￭ SMACK, Simplified Mandatory Access Control
￭ Latencytop
￭ BRK and PIE executable randomization
￭ Controller area network (CAN) protocol support
￭ ACPI thermal regulation/WMI
￭ EXT4 update
￭ MN10300/AM33 architecture support

Among the new drivers introduced in this release we can mention:

Graphic drivers

￭ i915:

-Add suspend/resume support.
-Add support for E7221 chipset
-Add chipset ID for Intel Integrated Graphics Device.

￭ Add initial ATI r500 DRM support
￭ Suspend support for SiS AGP
￭ Add initial rs690 support to drm
￭ Add support for Sis 662/671
￭ fbdev: add BF52x EZkit Display driver
￭ Add S3c2412 support to S3c2410 fb driver

SCSI drivers

￭ Bidirectional command support
￭ lpfc: Added support for ASICs that report temperature
￭ megaraid_sas: add hibernation support
￭ AHS Support
￭ qla2xxx: Add Fibre Channel Event (FCE) tracing support
￭ aacraid: Add Voodoo Lite class of cards, add optional MSI support
￭ psi240i: Remove driver
￭ seagate: Remove driver
￭ mvsas: Add Marvell 6440 SAS/SATA driver, convert from rough draft to working driver
￭ qla4xxx: add async scan support
￭ ses: add new Enclosure ULD
￭ enclosure: add support for enclosure services
￭ mca_53c9x: remove driver
￭ remove m68k NCR53C9x based drivers
￭ dec_esp: Remove driver
￭ NCR53C9x: remove driver

Sound drivers

￭ Scheduled OSS driver removal
￭ HDA: Add Asus VX1 support, add support for RV610/RV630 HDMI audio; STAC92HD71 codec mixer; add support of HP Thin Client T5735; add support for RV6xx HDMI audio; initial support of the Mitac 8252D (based on ALC883); add ALC889/ALC267/ALC269 support; add support for VIA VT1708B HD audio codec; added more 92HD71 codecs; added STAC92HD73 support; add IEC958 digital out support for Lenovo Thinkpads T61/X61; device ID for Macbook sound card., 92HD71BXX Mono Mute Support., 92HD7XXX power management support; add the support of Dell OEM laptops with ALC268., new model for conexant 5045 codec to support benq r55e; add model for Acer Aspire 5315; add Conexant 5051 codec support; add model for Acer Aspire 5310., add model for HP DV9553EG laptop; ALSA HD Audio patch for Intel ICH10 DeviceID's; add Dell T3400 support; add support for Intel SCH; add missing model for HD-audio Cx5045 codec, add support for Samsung Q1 Ultra Vista edition.
￭ ice1724: Add support of Onkyo SE-90PCI and SE-200PCI.
￭ soc: ln2440sbc ac97 support.
￭ Remove sequencer instrument layer.
￭ Xilinx ML403 AC97 Controller Reference device driver.
￭ ASoC TLV320AIC3X codec driver.
￭ usb-caiaq: add support for Kore controller 2.
￭ sis7019: Support the SiS 7019 Audio Accelerator.
￭ USB audio suspend support.
￭ Add Asus Xonar driver.
￭ Add CMI8788 driver.
￭ ASoC TLV support, S3c2412 IIS driver
￭ soc: Preliminary ac97 drivers for Toshiba e800 PDAs.
￭ Add ASoC drivers for the Freescale MPC8610 SoC.
￭ ICE1724: Added support for Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 Hifi & HD2, Hercules Fortissimo IV.

Hwmon drivers

￭ Add support for Texas Instruments/Burr-Brown ADS7828
￭ Add support for Winbond W83L786NG/NR
￭ lm87: Add support for the Analog Devices ADM1024
￭ w83781d: Drop W83627HF support
￭ coretemp: Add Penryn CPU to coretemp
￭ New driver for Analog Devices ADT7473 sensor chip

Network drivers

￭ Add driver for enc28j60 ethernet chip
￭ b43legacy: LED triggers support, RF-kill support
￭ e1000e: alternate MAC address support
￭ Add support for the RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controller
￭ E1000: Secondary unicast address support
￭ Add bnx2x driver for BCM57710
￭ cxgb3 - Add EEH support
￭ pasemi_mac: Software-based LRO support, add support for changing mac address, add support for setting MTU
￭ zd1211rw: port to mac80211
￭ b43: Changes to enable BCM4311 rev 02 with wireless core revision 13
￭ libertas: implement suspend and resume, add ethtool support for wake-on-lan configuration
￭ ixgb: enable sun hardware support for broadcom phy
￭ iwlwifi: proper monitor support
￭ sky2: support for Yukon Supreme
￭ BNX2: Support multiple MSIX IRQs
￭ ucc_geth: add support for netpoll
￭ IPoIB: Add send gather support
￭ IB/core: Add IP checksum offload support
￭ DM9000: Add initial ethtool support
￭ ehea: add kdump support
￭ ipwireless: driver for PC Card 3G/UMTS modem
￭ bas_gigaset: suspend support
￭ usb_gigaset: suspend support

USB drivers

￭ Add support for 4348:5523 Winchiphead USB->RS 232 adapter
￭ Sierra - Add support for Aircard 881U
￭ Adding YC Cable USB Serial device to pl2303
￭ sierra driver - add devices, add support for Onda H600/Zte MF330 datacard to USB Driver for Sierra Wireless
￭ ftdi-sio: Patch to add vendor/device id for ATK_16IC CCD
￭ pl2303: add support for RATOC REX-USB60F
￭ Variant of the Dell Wireless 5520 driver
￭ add iuu_phoenix driver
￭ m66592-udc: Add support for SH7722 USBF
￭ Add Printer Gadget Driver
￭ Export suspend statistics
￭ Add support for SuperH OHCI
￭ usb: ohci-sm501 driver
￭ Add support for Motorola ROKR Z6 cellphone in mass storage mode

SATA/IDE drivers

￭ Palmchip BK3710 IDE driver
￭ pata_ninja32: Cardbus ATA initial support
￭ pata_legacy: Merge winbond support
￭ libata: implement drain buffers
￭ cmd64x: Remove /proc/ide/cmd64x
￭ cdrom: Add support for Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM
￭ Add support for the RB500 PATA Compactflash
￭ ahci: Add Marvell 6121 SATA support
￭ sata_mv: Enable NCQ, support SoC controllers
￭ pata_sl82c105: dual channel support
￭ sata_svw: Add support for HT1100 SATA controller

I2C drivers

￭ i2c-i801: Implement I2C block read support
￭ i2c-viapro: Add support for the VT8237S
￭ tsl2550: Add power management added
￭ Add support for the PCF8575 chip
￭ The scheduled I2C RTC driver removal
￭ Some overdue driver removal

MTD drivers

￭ Remove Photron PNC-2000 map driver
￭ NAND

-Add Blackfin BF52x support in bf5xx_nand driver
-pasemi_nand driver
-Marvell Orion device bus NAND controller
-Freescale enhanced Local Bus Controller FCM NAND support

￭ NOR

-Add support for the SST 39VF1601 flash chip

V4L/DVB

￭ Add tuner-xc2028 driver
￭ v4l2: Add support for bus-based I2C drivers
￭ Add support for MT9V111 on sn9c102
￭ Add support for the DViCO FusionHDTV Dual Digital 4
￭ Add support for the DViCO FusionHDTV NANO2 w/ZL10353 and firmware
￭ Add support for MT352-based DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T NANO devices
￭ ivtv: Add AVerMedia EZMaker PCI Deluxe support
￭ cs5345: New i2c driver
￭ Add support for the Xceive xc5000 silicon tuner
￭ Add support for the Hauppauge HVR1500Q
￭ cx23885: Add support for Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1500., enable EZ-QAM mode for Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800
￭ tda18271: Add support for NXP TDA18271HD/C2
￭ Add Beholder TV 401/405/407/409/505/507/609/M6 support
￭ cx25840: Add basic CX23885 AVCore support., add basic video support for the HVR1800
￭ V4L: Add support for Syntek DC1125 webcams
￭ New card supported (partially): Pinnacle 800i
￭ zr364xx: add support for Creative DiVi CAM 516
￭ Support for Twinhan Hybrid DTV-DVB 3056 PCI
￭ saa7134: add support for the Medion / Creatix CTX948 card
￭ Adds support for Genius TVGo A11MCE

ACPI drivers

￭ thinkpad-acpi: add X61t HKEY events
￭ Create /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts
￭ Enable MWAIT for C1 idle
￭ cpuidle: Add a poll_idle method, create processor.latency_factor tunable, default processor.latency_factor=2
￭ asus_acpi: add support for F3sa
￭ sony-laptop: add Type4 model
￭ intel_menlo: introduce new platform specific driver

For a full change-log with all the new features, drivers and improvements, please click here.

The Linux Kernel is the essential part of all Linux Distributions, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, simple communications, and basic file system management.

Linux is a clone of the Unix operating system, initially written from scratch by Linus Torvalds, assisted by a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims to achieve POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

You can download the full Linux kernel source archive now from Softpedia.