Linux 3.11 officially named “Linux For Workgroups”

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the first candidate for the release of the Linux kernel 3.11 (3.11-rc1), which marked the closure of the merge window (windows on the reception of innovations) in the branch 3.11. The kernel release is tentatively due in September.

And yes, the most important thing is that the new kernel Linus was given the codename “Linux for Workgroups”, similar to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At the same time, Torvalds changed the logo (the last time it was in 2.6.29 ).

See the list of changes made to the kernel 3.11 under the cat, there are some interesting changes.

• Support for the Luster cluster file system client (distributed file system of mass parallelism, commonly used for large-scale cluster computing) is included;
• The LZ4 compression algorithm is supported (high speed of data packing and unpacking, while the compression ratio remains similar to the compression ratio of the LZO algorithm);
• For ARM architectures, an improved implementation of the Transparent Huge Page and hugetlbfs technologies will be used, which will increase the base size of addressable memory pages to 2 or 4 MB. As a result, the number of used TLB-blocks (Translation Lookaside Buffer) will be reduced and additional opportunities will appear for using allocated and at the same time unused memory;
• In F2FS (developed by Samsung, the file system for Flash drives, characterized by high performance), support for security labels has been added. Now it can be used with LSM modules (Linux Security Modules), which, in turn, allows the use of SELinux and SEAndroid forced access control tools;
• Xen and KVM now support virtualization for the ARM64 architecture;
• There was support for compressed caching of the Zswap swap partition (the idea of ​​Zswap is that memory pages are dynamically compressed when they are placed on a swap partition, reducing the load on the I / O subsystem);
• Added support for Intel Rapid Start Technology (IRST). This is a kind of hibernation that is provided by the firmware (there is an additional timeout when it expires, a system memory dump that fell asleep in Suspend-to-RAM mode is saved by the firmware on the SSD-drive, and the circuits are de-energized after switching on; when turned on, the firmware copies these data in RAM);
• Implemented the concept of energy efficient work queues inside the core. Now, the queues placed in this type of queue will not be tied to a specific CPU and will be able to run on any free processor cores without causing the sleeping kernels to wake up, but using those already awakened to perform other tasks of the core;
• Performance optimization patches for Ext4, XFS, Btrfs file systems are included;
• A whole series of patches to improve support for video cards from Radeon: Dynamic power and GPU frequency management tools have appeared; ASPM - active PCI-E bus management, in which bus power consumption can be lowered while it is idle; improved support for HD8000 and HD7000;
• Added support for hardware video decoding in MPEG2 and H.264 formats in the Nouveau DRM module using the VP2 (PureVideo HD) engine - it is in the NVIDIA GPU starting with NV84 (GeForce 8600) and ending with NV96 (GeForce 9400/9600/9700) and another in the GT 200;
• Changes to the Intel DRM Module: Improved support for the graphics subsystem based on the Intel Bay Trail platform created for the new Atom SoC. In addition, Intel Haswell support has been improved - among the innovations is the possibility of using FBC (Frame-Buffer Compression);
• Support for new processors: Freescale i.MX6 SoloLite, Freescale Vybrid VF610, Samsung EXYNOS5420, Rockchip RK2928 and RK3xxx processors, TI Nspire, STMicroelectronics STiH41x and STiH416;
• Added patches for the kernel, thanks to which support for Windows RT applications in Wine appeared.

Sources: Official Changelog , www.h-online.com , lkml.org , git.kernel.org