With Linus Torvalds officially releasing Linux 3.5 kernel on July 21,2012, here’s a quick look on what’s all new about this new kernel version. To name a few are: the Prime infrastructure support, a much improved support for hybrid graphics, an ext4 metadata checksum,Uprobes, CoDel queues management for bufferbloating, an extended security and much much more!
Graphics and support:
This version of Linux kernel along with a new version of X server promises us a much improved support on Hybrid graphics. The Prime framework, supported by the graphic drivers in the kernel, has a design with improved support for graphics hardware that can be added at the runtime . Also, the Radeon graphic driver will have a better performance than before. Improved support for audio transport via HDMI on Radeon GPU’s is another significant improvement made in Linux 3.5.
Monitoring Performance with Uprobes:
After years of hardship , the userprobe code has finally been successfully merged into the kernel. The user-space counterpart of kprobes- the Uprobes lets the kernel to insert breakpoints into the code for user-space at run-time (currently to be managed via the kernel’s perf event subsystem) and to collect debugging and performance information along the flow.
Secure computing- Extended:
The sandboxing mechanism of secure computing (aka Seccomp) added in the 2.6.12 version has now been extended. Seccomp now has a delimiting feature- the call filtering mechanism which enables programs to set up filters thus regulating which system calls that software started by this program can use. The CoDel and the ER: The Network system has CoDel (or the Controlled Delaying) and Fair Queue Codel AQM to avoid bufferbloat problems. Also , accerelating connection recovery when packets are lost, is an “Early Retransmit”( ER) feature added to the TCP stack by a Google developer.
For the Android, hopefully!
This kernel version incorporates the “autosleep and wakelocks” functionality, which is likely to answer the long troubling problem of convergence of Android and the Linux, and hopefully merging drivers from Android devices will be much easier!
Storage and Filesystems:
The kernel allows the reshaping of MD code in RAID 10 and the promising FireWire SBP-2 fabric module to export local storage devuces via FireWire. And about the filesystems, the release has improved the writeback handling of the the still experimental Btfrsto be more friendly to memory reclaim and prevent latency spikes. The modern filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS ensures the integrity of filesystems by using checksums. Ext4 can now add CRC32 checksums to its metadata to reveal corruption.
With a really few mentioned here, this version has proved several other improvements over the long deficits of Linux. That’s really promising and a way to go! Meanwhile, let’s stay tuned for more to come-Linux 3.6!