14 DAY TRIAL // Linus ok'ed the release of version 2.6.16 of the Linux kernel. Among the new features are OCFS2 (the second oracle cluster filesystem) and support for the Cell processor.
The OCFS2 was contributed by Oracle and is supposed to ease management of Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) setups.
IBM's Cell processor, over-hyped as Sony's choice for the Play Station 3 can now be used with Linux. Each Cell chip contains one PowerPC processor core and eight specialized vector processors (SPEs - synergistic processor elements), each with 256Kb of L1 cache and can communicate with memory at up to 25GB/s, and with the PPC core or with one another via a 200GB/s bus. "A single SPE is more powerful than the Power processor for 32-bit integer and floating-point calculation," said Franz-Josef Pfreundt, division director of Fraunhofer Institute's competence center for high-performance computing.
The kernel also contains a number of fixes and updates, all of which can be found in the change-log.