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Jun. 13, 2009
For starters, the 2.6.29 Linux kernel was released on March 23 of this year. The kernel's development
cycle integrated almost 11,970 changes and from almost 1,200 Linux developers from all over the world.
Some of the main features in 2.6.29 kernel are:
Kernel-based mode setting for graphics adapters, mostly for Intel hardware in particular. The
addition of this code represents a multi-year effort to rationalize the handling of 3D graphics hardware
and to provide a better quality graphical experience to Linux users.
The development version of the BTRFS filesystem. BTRFS is widely expected to become the default Linux
filesystem in the future, but it remains in a developmental stage currently and should not be used on
production servers.
The squashfs filesystem. Squashfs is a compressed, read-only filesystem used in embedded systems and in
live CD distributions. It has long been packaged by distributors, but has only now made it into the mainline.
The filesystem freeze feature allows changes to a filesystem to be temporarily suspended so that, for
example, a backup can be performed.
The Linux networking subsystem now has native WiMAX support.
As usual, dozens of new drivers have been merged inside the kernel.
Of course, there's a lot more in the kernel, but above are the main key features.
A preview on the newer 2.6.30 Linux kernel
The 2.6.30 Linux kernel release will probably happen sometime in the next few days. The merge window for
this development cycle closed with the 2.6.30-RC1 release on April 8. The current development release is
2.6.30-RC8, announced on June 2nd.
Some of the more interesting changes in the 2.6.30 kernel include:
The kernel developers decided to make a modified version of the relatime mount option as the the default.
The change will greatly reduce disk read/write requests and improve battery life in laptops and netbooks,
at the cost of changing longstanding Unix-like behavior in the file system.
The ext3 filesystem has seen a number of performance improvements, and now operates in the data-writeback
mode by default, though some Linux distributors may well change that default.
Support for integrity management in the kernel has been merged. This code makes use of the trusted
platform module (TPM) built into many systems to ensure that the system's files (including its executable
software) have not been corrupted, maliciously or otherwise. A great improvement, in and all by itself.
The "Tomoyo" Linux security module has been merged, providing a new type of path name-based mandatory
file access control that is viewed by many as a great new security feature.
The reliable datagram sockets protocol is now supported in the networking layer.
Low-level support for object storage devices has been merged, along with the exofs filesystem which
operates on top of such devices.
The NILFS log-structured filesystem has been merged as well.
FS-Cache, a local caching layer for network filesystems, is now part of the mainline kernel, after about 4
years of development.
The new 2.6.30 Linux kernel has gained support for AMD/ATI R6xx and R7xx graphics chipsets. Currently
only two-dimensional graphics are supported. But 3D support will come later.
The 2.6.30 kernel development cycle saw the addition of close to 11,640 individual changes from well over
1,100 Linux developers from about 200 different companies.
Overall, the new 2.6.30 kernel has about 624,000 more lines of code than the 2.6.29.
Source: Linux News Today.
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