Heise Open Source provides an extensive breakdown of the innovations present in the latest release of the Linux kernel, announced by Linus Torvalds. This version adds the first version of Ext4 as a stable filesystem, the much-anticipated GPU memory manager which will be the foundation of a renewed graphic stack, support for Ultra Wide Band (Wireless USB, UWB-IP), memory management scalability and performance improvements, a boot tracer, disk shock protection, the phonet network protocol, support of SSD discard requests, transparent proxy support, high-resolution poll()/select()... full Changelog here
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Member since:2006-09-19
Member since:2005-07-06
I guess you are right. Unlike Linux developers, of course, who are obviously not stuck with Linux.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2008-08-09
On the other hand you can always be happy that Microsoft integrated a GPU memory manager in the NT kernel two years ago (the much complained-about new graphics Vista driver model was to support GPU memory management and GPU thread scheduling in a generic way in the kernel). So they do miss the release often quite clearly, but at least when it comes to graphics technology they have been good about being early in the last 10 years. Overall the graphics/DirectX team has clearly come a long way since the early days.
Still, it is good to see the Linux kernel guys taking a more clear stance on the graphics aspects of things, with more and more general-purpose graphics hardware the handling of it clearly has a place in the core kernel rather than as the current odd mix of kernel/modules/x11 responsibilities.
Edited 2008-12-25 12:49 UTC
Member since:
2006-11-19
it's been a while since I last followed kernel developments, but these new features (especially the graphics stuff) looks very impressive, even more, considering this is an "incremental" update.
while windows is (due to software selection) my primary desktop, I wish Microsoft had learned from "release often, release early", "adding features to already released products" mentalities.