After eight Release Candidate versions, Linus Torvalds proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 11, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.7.
Linux kernel 3.7 brings various interesting features (check out the highlights below and the quote from Linus Torvalds’ announcement), among which we can mention support for 64-bit ARM, improved support for Intel and Radeon graphics cards, enhancements to the EXT4 and Btrfs filesystems, IPv6 Netfilter improvements, and much more.
“Whee. After an extra rc release, 3.7 is now out. After a few more trials at fixing things, in the end we ended up reverting the kswapd changes that caused problems.”
“And with the extra rc, I had decided to risk doing the buffer.c cleanups that would otherwise have just been marked for stable during the next merge window, and had enough time to fix a few problems that people found there too.” said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.
Highlights of Linux Kernel 3.7:
· Support for 64-bit ARM;
· Better power management for Radeon GPUs;
· Better support for Intel graphics;
· Improved Nouveau DRM video driver;
· EXT4 improvements;
· Btrfs hole-punching;
· Improved support for Intel AES-NI;
· Support for Xen EFI video mode;
· IPv6 Netfilter enhancements;
· ARM Xen virtualization support for Cortex-A15;
· Nintendo Wii Balance Board driver support;
· Audio Run-Time Power Management;
· Support for Oracle SPARC-T4.
Linux kernel 3.5 also comes with many improvements in various areas, such as memory management fixes, networking, virtualization, security, perf/tracing, block, improvements to Btrfs, Tmpfs, XFS, CIFS, JFFS2, exofs, Cifs filesystems, as well as various core changes.
For a complete list of all the newly added drivers, newly supported devices, and other improvements, do not hesitate to view the official changelog and the Linux kernel 3.7 DriverArch page.
Download Linux kernel 3.7 source packages right now from Softpedia.
News Source softpedia.com
