14 DAY TRIAL // Linux kernel 3.19 has been officially announced by none other than its father, Linus Torvalds, on February 8, 2015. It is a great release that brings some very interesting features. Because we didn’t have access to a complete list of its features at the moment of writing the news article about its availability, we have decided to drop another one that highlights Linux 3.19 kernel’s prominent features.
Without further ado, Linux 3.19 kernel’s top 10 features include Btrfs scrubbing support, Btrfs fast device replacement in RAID 5 and 6, ARM Coresight support, NFS (Network File System) 4.2 preallocation and hole punching support, HSA driver for AMD Radeon graphics cards, Device Tree overlays, support for Altera Nios II CPUs, updated Android binder, routing and switching offloading, as well as Intel Memory Protection Extensions support.
It includes numerous other small improvements that make a big difference
The above enumeration includes the prominent features of Linux 3.19 kernel, among which numerous other small improvements that make a big difference, such as updated drivers, updated file systems, memory management fixes, lots of networking changes, virtualization enhancements, security patches, tracing and perf fixes, cryptography enhancements, and support for several architectures.
The first distribution of Linux to include Linux kernel 3.19 is Exton|OS build 150211 (MATE), an open-source distribution of GNU/Linux based on the Ubuntu 14.10 and MATE 1.8.1. While the forthcoming Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) distribution will be powered by Linux kernel 3.19, other Linux kernel-based operating systems, such as Arch Linux, have the Linux 3.19 kernel packages in their repositories.
As usual, the latest version of the Linux kernel can be found on our website, on the corresponding Linux section, if you plan on compiling it yourself. On the other hand, if you have zero knowledge of Linux kernel compiling, you can wait for your distribution vendor to update the kernel packages to version 3.19.