Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.9:
So the last week was much quieter than the preceding ones, which makes me suspect that one reason -rc7 was bigger than I liked was that people were gaming the system and had timed some of their pull requests for just before the release, explaining why -rc7 was big enough that I didn’t actually want to do a final release last week. Please don’t do that.
Anyway. Whatever the reason, this week has been very quiet, which makes me much more comfortable doing the final 3.9 release, so I guess the last -rc8 ended up working. Because not only aren’t there very many commits here, even the ones that made it really are tiny and not pretty obscure and not very interesting.
Also, this obviously means that the merge window is open. I won’t be merging anything today, but if you start sending me your pull requests (Konrad already sent in his Xen pull request for the 3.10 merge window a week ago), tomorrow the flood gates start opening..
Linux 3.8 brought file systems enhancement for Btrfs, XFS and ext-4, introduce F2FS file system, memory management improvement, and the removal for i386 support.
Linux 3.9 brings the following key changes (Sources H-Online and Phoronix):
- File-system improvements:
- Btrfs has experimental RAID5/6 support and fsync performance improvements.
- EXT-4 bug fixes for corruption issue, and JBD2 journaling layer issue which affected performance.
- Various improvements for F2FS file-system.
- Added ability to use SSDs as hard-disk cache.
- Update the latest LZO compression implementation within the kernel. Decompression and compression performance has been massively improved and x86 and ARM targets.
- Improved power management, including “lightweight suspend” (aka “suspend freeze”) mode.
- Improved ARM SoC support
- Added Nvidia Tegra 4 support including support for Dalmore and Pluto development boards.
- Added Nvidia Tegra 3 Beaver Board support
- Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support for ARMv7 (Cortex A15 required)
- Mainlining of Google’s Goldfish virtual CPU.
- Initial ARC Linux support. See commit.
- Added support for Imagination Meta ATP (Meta 1) and HTP (Meta 2)
- Graphics drivers updates – Nouveau, the open-source reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, is faster for some Linux OpenGL games. There’s also some Intel OpenGL performance changes.
- Support for Intel 7000 Wi-Fi components supporting 802.11ac.
- CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL kernel configuration option has been removed
More details about Linux 3.9 will be available on Kernelnewbies.org (which is currently down).
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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