Linux 2.6.27-rc1 Kernel Released

With the merge window for the Linux 2.6.27 kernel now being over, Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate for this next kernel update. In the 2.6.27-rc1 release announcement, Torvalds notes the many patches that were merged and how that totals up to be 12MB worth of changes (50% more changes than what was found in 2.6.26-rc1). Most of these changes, of course, are made up of driver and file-system updates.

Some of the specific changes include dropping the old ppc architecture in favor of the new "PowerPC" architecture, Xen can handle saving and restoring virtual machines, an f-trace lightweight tracing framework has been merged, MMiOTrace has been merged, enclosure management support for SATA, and numerous other changes. The merging of MMiOTrace is something that the Nouveau developers have been after for a few releases. MMiOTrace allows users to reverse-engineer binary drivers by tracing memory-mapped I/O accesses to the hardware.