Actually, it was on the 25th of december. Linus Torvalds plays Santa clause and released a gift for all Linux users. It's the New Kernel.Ext4 :
The most important thing in this relase is EXT4 the new Filesystem of Linux which will be :
- Compatible with the old EXT3 : you can have and ext4 partition as if you have a ext3 one.
- Larger filesystem : The capacity of this FS was extended to be able to support 1 Exbibyte and files of 16 TiB ( about 16 000 Gigabytes). The number of possible used directories was extended to 64000.
- Journal Checksums : The Journal (a file containing the changes of a hard disk) will be using a new technique which will improve the reliability of the disk by cheking the occurence of anyy error during the processing of saving data.
Graphic performances :
The release of the new GEM (Graphics Execution Mananger). This piece of software will take care of the graphic chipset ressources and how to exploit them for different multimedia applications. This GEM will improve the graphic performance of you graphic card.
Some improvments were made to KVM. It's the part of the kernel that take care about virtualisation for some architectures like intel-V and AMD-V. It will allow the machine the possibility to seperate several systems without restarting and the possibility to use some pieces of software that don't exist on the HOST system.
Drivers:
Many improved drivers specially for USB and Wirless devices. The tree of these drivers was considered as stable.
As a conclusion, the new Linux has many new features. Will they be adopted by the different distributions ?
References :
Site du zero news article.
Kernel.org changelog
