14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds announced yesterday the availability of the brand new 2.6.26 Linux kernel. It comes with support for read-only bind mounts, x86 Page Attribute Tables (PAT), improved webcam support with the help of a driver for UVC devices, and many other improvements.
Linus Torvalds said about the new edition: "So it's been almost three months since 2.6.25 (87 days to be exact, I think), making this a longer-than-usual release cycle. Or maybe it just feels that way, and we're always getting close to three months these days."
Here are the most important features introduced in this release:
￭ Read-only bind mounts ￭ KVM ported to IA64, PPC and S390 ￭ Improved webcam support ￭ Wireless mesh networking (802.11s) draft support ￭ x86 PAT support ￭ Per-process securebits ￭ KGDB ￭ Device whitelist on cgroups ￭ Memtest ￭ Export BDI attributes in sysfs ￭ /proc/pid/mountinfo ￭ Generic semaphores
Now, let's have a look at some of the new drivers introduced in this release:
Networking
￭ ssb: add a new Gigabit Ethernet driver to the ssb core
￭ New driver "sfc" for Solarstorm SFC4000 controller ￭ Add support the Korina (IDT RC32434) Ethernet MAC ￭ pasemi_mac: jumbo frame support, enable GSO by default, basic ethtool support ￭ ehea: Add DLPAR memory remove support ￭ Driver for IXP4xx built-in Ethernet ports
Graphics:
￭ radeon: Initial r500 support ￭ intel_agp: Add support for Intel 4 series chipsets ￭ i915: Add support for Intel series 4 chipsets ￭ pxafb: preliminary smart panel interface support ￭ Add support for Blackfin/Linux logo for framebuffer console
Sound:
￭ hda-codec - Allow multiple SPDIF devices, add SI HDMI codec support, add support of Zepto laptops, add model=mobile for AD1884A & co, add support for Toshiba Equium L30, etc. ￭ Davinci ASoC support ￭ Emagic Audiowerk 2 ALSA driver ￭ oxygen: add monitor controls ￭ pxa2xx-ac97: Support PXA3xx AC97
V4L/ DVB
￭ V4L2 soc_camera driver for PXA270 ￭ Add support for the MT9M001 camera ￭ Add support for the MT9V022 camera ￭ Add support for the ISL6405 dual LNB supply chip ￭ Initial DVB-S support for MD8800 /CTX948 ￭ cx23885: Add support for the Hauppauge HVR1400, add generic cx23417 hardware encoder support ￭ Add mxl5505s driver for MaxiLinear 5505 chipsets, basic digital support
SCSI
￭ zfcp: Add trace records for recovery thread and its queues ￭ qla2xxx: Add support for host supported speeds FC transport attribute ￭ scsi_debug: support large non-fake virtual disk ￭ m68k: new mac_esp scsi driver ￭ Add support for variable length extended commands ￭ Firmware: add iSCSI iBFT Support
These are just a few of the changes and improvements in the 2.6.26 Linux kernel. To see a full changelog with all the brand new things, modifications, drivers, etc. please click here.
You can download the 2.6.26 Linux kernel source right now from Softpedia.